In our latest, Mariame Kaba @prisonculture.bsky.social & Andrea Ritchie @dreanyc123.bsky.social on how to understand the spectacular violence of Trump’s ICE surges as an extension of the violence of everyday policing, and why to abolish ICE we must abolish the police
www.patreon.com/posts/152641...
“The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
They should invent a way out that isn't through
Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs
Life is short, friends. Spend as much of it as you can loving people.
went to this community organizing thing a bit ago and ended up on a variety of signal chats and like. wow. how does one keep up with all this while being employed? i’m glad there are folks who can do all that, but man. i burn all my energy just getting through the day. there is nothing left.
Don't go searching for OP, leave them alone. I just think that what they uplift is important and explains why many people simply cannot engage in activism and organizing regularly. And the truth is that it's hard to figure out actual ways around this because organizing in fact a labor.
The military obsession with AI is in large part about being able to command something to kill, with instant compliance, no rebuttal nor compunction
What the genocide in Gaza reinforced is that there are no "civilians" when it comes to Israel and the United States. The rest of the world learned the same lesson and the consequences are going to be felt across the world.
When there are no consequences for the last bad thing, you'll get a next worse thing.
It’s funny because people will swear the racial revanchists of our current moment are blazing exciting new and dangerous trails of thought, and they’re very much regurgitating the philosophy of the embittered former slaveowners.
I can't even speak about Nurul Amin Shah Alam. All I have to say is that the people constantly distinguishing between ICE, CBP and the REGULAR COPS are fools. That's it.
Until this country reckons with police and policing, nothing will improve.
I don't know if we will win. But it's worth trying cuz we deserve better.
And I agree with Angela Y. Davis, who said, "We can never predict the outcome of our work. As Stuart Hall said, 'There are never any guarantees.' At the same time, you have to act as if it were possible to change the world."
The utterance of "A.I.'s inevitability" is one of the most stark pure performatives I've seen in my time working in higher ed. Every time it is uttered, it is clearly not reporting a fact about the world but instead actively trying to create the reality it narrates. We can and must refuse.
I'm asking that we all raise our political expectations. We deserve good things.
Screenshot showing that in 2025, immigration policing and detention cost the U.S. $54.3 billion
If you want to know where the U.S.'s priorities lie, funding for immigration policing & detention skyrocketed by $20 billion in less than 10 years.
Meanwhile, funding for vital community resources–like public libraries–didn't even keep up with inflation.
www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/mone...
RWG: “What we can see over and over again are how the forces of organized violence appear and aggrandize to manage those who are not content with having been abandoned”
There are no quick fixes for fascism - our charge is to confront and uproot the criminalization that underlies and drives it within and beyond borders.
“If I am peaceful in this discomfort, is not peace,/ is getting used to harm.”
Dionne Brand
Land to Light On
You cannot fight evil effectively if you don't understand how it's manufactured, or how a road that may have felt normal to you delivered us to so much evil.
I'm not trying to diminish anyone's shock. We are all conditioned to ignore systemic violence that is occurring all around us. When something punctures the veil, and we react, that's an essential jumping off point. I do want to challenge folks to understand the broader context, bc that's necessary.
I am so happy to see so many people directing their energy against these fucking fascists! It's good! It's also very true that strikes take WORK, can last a long time, need resources and infrastructure to succeed. I spent two YEARS covering a strike in Alabama that still hasn't been resolved.
insisting on calling every mass day of protest or one-day boycott a "general strike" is not the move. it's good to see people rallying around the cause, it matters, but if you want to be part of a large-scale labor action that shuts down the gears of capital, start by unionizing your workplace!!!
People are asking a lot “how is this happening?” It’s happening the way abolitionists have warned you for decades it’s happening — you can’t dehumanize whole groups of people, pay for their brutalization & not expect for more bounty hunters to come.
It's impossible to express how it feels to repeatedly live through the exact same cycles over and over and over again. The reformers just consistently fucking everyone over.
At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.
The pain and the outrage is correct and just and I'm glad everyone can see and understand it here, and this is also already what BLM was, if you argued for training, police reform or body cams instead of abolition this is what you sounded like, this is why people were so mad at you
they're executing moms and nurses in the street. they're using preschoolers as bait. they're stealing people's dads and grandmas and children. they're tear gassing babies. they're staking out schools. there is no remedy but abolition. any proposal that doesn't start there is an act of violence.
Kady Grass, a lesbian teenager in Illinois, was severely beaten after trying to use the bathroom in a McDonald's.
www.cbsnews.com/amp/chicago/...
