#Justice4Saraya – Set Her Free, and Hold the Police Accountable (Petition)

Trigger Warning: The following discusses the violent arrest of an 11-year old neurodivergent biracial girl by police after she suffered an episode of psychosis because a neglectful, possibly bigoted doctor abruptly took her off her antidepressants cold-turkey for some unknown (again, probably bigoted) reason. Please be aware.

I want to thank friend and fellow blogger Iris Vander Pluym for initially writing about this and alerting myself and the rest of FTB to it.

Iris wrote in depth about this, so I won’t. Please read her post. What I will say is this… please sign the petition. Saraya Rees. She should not be in prison. She should be on antidepressants, and she should be home. She is not a criminal. She is a little girl who doesn’t deserve this.

Here is the petition:

https://www.change.org/p/justice4saraya-a-call-for-help-is-not-a-crime

Sign it, share it, and, if you can afford to, donate. Please.

Crip Dyke Reporting from Portland

A lot of “news media” is “reporting” on what’s going on in Portland, but it’s also a lot of pro-police propaganda bullshit (yes, even from MSNBC… because they aren’t “left wing”, people). The best way to get an understanding of what’s actually going on is to seek out teh reports from protesters on the ground, actually experiencing this shit in real time.

And so, I present to you, Crip Dyke. The following is a link to her blog where I search for “Portland”. Sadly, it’s not quite in posting order (most recent first), but you really should be reading everything…

Pervert Justice: Portland

And here’s the most recent post about what’s going on…

To be honest, the violence the federal police are instigating in Portland leads neatly into what my next post will be. That will be up in the morning. In the meantime, go read Crip Dyke’s posts on what’s going.

Thank you.

Hello! I’m Still Here… I Swear…

As has become rather customary on my blog, I’ve been very silent… at least until I uploaded that blog on horseradish a few days ago. You’d think, what with all this extra time on my hands, that I’d be blogging up a storm. And it’s not like there’s no shortage of topics to talk about. There’s COVID-19. There’s the fact that cops haven’t stopped murdering black people in cold blood in our streets (FTR… justice for George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Fuck the police. ACAB). More trans men and woman are dying this year. Trump is still president, and an absurdly high number of Leftists still think he’s better than a Democrat, despite four years of evidence that he’s the worst thing to happen to this country since at least Bush Jr, and is absolutely the worst president of my (now 33-year) lifetime.

I genuinely didn’t think things could get worse than 2016. Holy shit was I wrong.

So. Fucking. Wrong.

And yet, despite all this, I stay silent. I’m not here talking about the pandemic, or the protests, or Trump.

Why is that?

Because I just don’t want to.

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It’s Time for the Atlanta Braves to Change

Hi! I’ve been sitting on this post for a bit. To be honest, I mostly finished writing it way back on October 14, 2019. This was not long after Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS division title game that the Braves lost to the Cardinals 13 to 1… and the Cardinals got 10 of those points at the top of the first fucking inning! 

Holy shit I’m still mad about that.

Huh.

Anyways… you may be wondering if I’m writing anything about the Pandemic. The answer is no, I’m not. I don’t know what to write about. I’m still not interested in writing about the Lying Cheeto Muffin, ranting about conspiracy theorists and ignorant assholes seems counter-productive and a waste of time, and all the rest of it is just me shouting UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE NOW! RIGHT NOW! THIS FUCKING SECOND! $1200 ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH FUCKING MONEY! IT SHOULD BE $2400 A FUCKING MONTH FOR… EVER. UNIVERSAL HOUSING! WATER SHOULD BE FREE! DOWN WITH CAPITALISM! SEIZE THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION! UNIONIZE! RESIST!

SOCIALISM FOREVER!

So yeah… that’s really all I have to say about COVID-19.

And yes, I know it’s April 1st. “April Fool’s Day” is a thing that needs to die. I refuse to participate and I’d appreciate it if y’all left me out of it.

I don’t have that much interest in sports. Gridiron (US-American “Football”… in which feet are not used except in one instance), Basketball, Hockey, Golf, etc just hold no interest for me. I get them… I can follow them… I’m just bored by them, and don’t like playing them, either. There is one exception, however, and that’s Baseball. But even there, that exception is quite limited.

I grew up in Atlanta, GA. My family has always been a Baseball family, and the Atlanta Braves (along with the New York Yankees, but to a slightly lesser extent) has always been the family team. I even have a Braves batting jersey (I won it). I have always been a fan. And of course, as a fan, this past decade has been immensely infuriating. We couldn’t give Bobby Cox, Chipper Jones, or even, most recently, Brian McCann, a goddamn Pennant… let alone a World Series win. Our most recent loss to the Cardinals (13 to 1… and the Cardinals got 10 of those runs in the top of the first fucking inning) was so absolutely devastating that I didn’t even watch the post-season. I stopped caring.

I did care just enough to rant about the game in a Facebook group I belong to, though, and someone made a comment basically saying that as long as the team and its fans continue to be racist against Native Americans, they (the person who wrote the comment) will continue to gloat over the Braves’ losses anywhere and everywhere it’s even barely appropriate.

As much as I love the Atlanta Braves… that person is entirely correct. It’s time to end the Atlanta Braves as we know them.

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The Revolution Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit

Okay look. I get it. It’s really easy to look at class and see that as the only “real” oppression in the world. When you’re a straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied man, it’s quite literally the only oppression you can possibly face. And it’s absolutely true that the only privileges we can truly see as individuals are the privileges we don’t have, which are, as a result, magnified in our minds.

To get selfish for a moment… I obviously know that white privilege is a thing, but I don’t see it because I’m white. I obviously know that male privilege is a thing, but I don’t see it because I’m a man. Same for cis privilege, and straight privilege. Technically I don’t suffer from class oppression because my family is middle class and I get to take advantage of that. But then again, I work in retail and make maybe $200 a week. So I can see class privilege to a point because my only protection from class oppression is my parents… I’m not going to say that I know exactly what said oppression looks like, because I’ve never been homeless, but I also have a roof over my head because my parents give me one without charging me a rent I can’t afford; which is why I try to give when I can to the homeless and fight so hard for a Universal Basic Income and Universal Housing… no one should have no money, and no one should be homeless. And it’s a lot easier to make that happen at the federal level than people think… you just have to get rid of the greedy capitalists in power, first…

So… maybe not so easy…

But I digress…

The point is that I get it. I get only fighting for class.

The thing is, though…

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Basic White People Are Racist… Part II

Mary Poppins rolling her eyes in disappointment

Mary Poppins rolling her eyes in disappointment

I honestly don’t know what to do with my fellow white people. We… I… we’re really just doing the most, aren’t we? Are we like… determined to be seen as literally the worst?

I’ve already done this once, back in March, but clearly we white people want to make this a series. I should have been paying more attention, honestly, because I know I missed a lot, and, in fact, I’m starting off with something that happened a little ways back in the past, in April, when Starbucks got caught out…

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#BlackLivesMatter Philando Castile’s Murderer Found Innocent

Also late to this (warning: that link includes the Facebook video of Philando’s death; it does not include the more recent dashcam as far as I can tell; I will not be sharing that)…

Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop last year, was found not guilty of second-degree manslaughter Friday.

He also was acquitted of two counts of intentional discharge of firearm that endangers safety.

Castile’s death garnered widespread attention — and sparked nationwide protests over the use of force by police — after his girlfriend broadcast the shooting’s aftermath on Facebook Live.

Not guilty? Fucking not guilty?

I just… I…

#BlackLivesMatter #SayHerName Charleena Lyles

Another one…

I’m late to this one, I know. I’m sorry.

Seattle police officers shot and killed a woman at her apartment Sunday morning in front of “several children” when the woman, who relatives said was pregnant, “confronted” them with a knife, according to a statement from authorities.

The Seattle Times reported that the 30-year-old woman had called police to report a possible burglary.

At a vigil Sunday night, family identified the woman as Charleena Lyles, according to the Times, and relatives said she had a history of mental health struggles. She was several months pregnant, her family said, and too “tiny” for officers to have felt threatened by her — even if she had a knife.

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Jeff Sessions is Racist

Of course we all knew that, but this is just more evidence…

In a recent op-ed in USA Today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reiterated that his Department of Justice will move away from federal oversight of local police departments plagued by abuses and officer-involved killings. In doing so, Sessions will undermine a key policy stemming from the beating of black motorist Rodney King in March 1991 by Los Angeles police officers. The subsequent LA riots, sparked by acquittals of the officers accused in King’s beating, began 25 years ago this Saturday.

After those riots ripped through LA, Congress went on to pass legislation granting federal oversight authority for police departments. Since then, the Justice Department has launched 70 investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies and has negotiated 40 reform agreements, half of which are court-enforced consent decrees. The Obama administration was particularly active with this policy, enforcing 14 consent decrees for troubled police agencies, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore. Sessions now threatens to undo that work, downplaying any systematic problems with American policing.

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Welp… The Border Wall is Going Ahead…

From the Atlantic…

Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, said on Tuesday that the administration will replace segments of chain-link fencing with a 20-foot-tall steel fence along the southern border, despite Congress refusal to fund the president’s border wall in its spending bill.

Trump, for his part, has claimed that the administration is “beginning to build the wall,” which was a central plank of his presidential campaign, saying that “we’re putting up a lot of new wall in certain areas.” Mulvaney elaborated Tuesday that there is funding to “replace cyclone fencing with 20-foot high steel wall.” He declined repeated questions from White House reporters about where along the border the fencing would go, or how many miles it would cover.

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