Video: John Oliver with some important updates on Monkeypox

Did you think our leaders had learned anything from the catastrophe that has been the COVID-19 pandemic? Of course not, or at least nothing good. It appears that we are entering another pandemic, this one even more preventable than the last. What’s worse, it sure seems like the Christian fascists of the United States did learn a lesson or two from the AIDS crisis of the late 20th century – disease is a great tool in their effort to wipe out all LGBTQ+ people. Bigots have always used it for their genocidal projects, and this seems to be no exception

Watch the video, be on the lookout for misinformation, and look after each other.

England continues its headlong rush into authoritarianism

Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to five times a day using smartwatches installed with facial recognition technology under plans from the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice.

In May, the government awarded a contract to the British technology company Buddi Limited to deliver “non-fitted devices” to monitor “specific cohorts” as part of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service. The scheme is due to be introduced from the autumn across the UK, at an initial cost of £6m.

Yes, Gentle Readers, that is exactly what it sounds like. The United Kingdom will be forcing migrants to wear surveillance computers, and scan their faces on demand, wherever they are. This means that these people will have no right to privacy, and likely no right to even know what kinds of data their mandatory surveillance equipment will be collecting.

The Home Office says the smartwatch scheme will be for foreign-national offenders who have been convicted of a criminal offence, rather than other groups, such as asylum seekers.

However, it is expected that those obliged to wear the smartwatches will be subject to similar conditions to those fitted with GPS ankle tags, with references in the DPIA to curfews and inclusion and exclusion zones.

In a National Audit Office report in June, the government said it “regards electronic monitoring as a cost-effective alternative to custody, which contributes to its goals to protect the public and reduce reoffending”.

Campaigners say 24-hour surveillance of asylum seekers breaches human rights, and may have a detrimental impact on migrants’ health and wellbeing.

Ya think?

When I was in Cuba, there were a couple points where it was made clear to our small group of U.S.ians that the government was keeping an eye on us. They seemed to know our itinerary before we did some days, and would be expecting us at checkpoints. That was not a comfortable experience, but it didn’t feel like I was always being watched. When I was in Tanzania, I was taken completely by surprise when I found myself exhausted by just constantly being seen. I stood out, which meant there was always someone paying attention to what I was doing. Even on a mountainside, far away from anyone else, I could hear a kid on the adjacent mountain spot me and yell, “Mzungu!”. It was strangely draining, and I expect is something that people who aren’t white men have to deal with a whole lot more.

So I can only imagine the strain that would come from wearing a modern surveillance device, with a camera, everywhere you go. Not only that, but in addition to the government, a private, for-profit corporation will also be watching, and if you ever take off that device, you will be punished.

Lucie Audibert, a lawyer and legal officer for Privacy International, said: “Facial recognition is known to be an imperfect and dangerous technology that tends to discriminate against people of colour and marginalised communities. These ‘innovations’ in policing and surveillance are often driven by private companies, who profit from governments’ race towards total surveillance and control of populations.

“Through their opaque technologies and algorithms, they facilitate government discrimination and human rights abuses without any accountability. No other country in Europe has deployed this dehumanising and invasive technology against migrants.”

Dr Monish Bhatia, a lecturer in criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, said: “Electronic monitoring is an intrusive technology of control. Some individuals develop symptoms of anxiety, depression, suicide ideation and overall deterioration of mental health.

“The Home Office is still not clear how long individuals will remain on monitoring. They have not provided any evidence to show why electronic monitoring is necessary or demonstrated that tags make individuals comply with immigration rules better. What we need is humane, non-degrading, community-based solutions.”

That would be nice.

Instead, we get invasive surveillance, and the threat that, regardless of where you might be from, if the U.K. government decides to be rid of you, they’ll just ship you to Rwanda:

The two final candidates in the race to become the UK’s new prime minister, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have both vowed to expand the government’s controversial Rwanda immigration policy.

Former finance minister Rishi Sunak announced his plans to tackle illegal immigration in a nearly 5-minute video posted on Twitter Sunday, during which he said that the UK had lost control of its borders.

“Every year thousands and thousands of people come into the UK illegally. Often, we don’t know who they are, where they’re from, and why they’re here. These are not bad people. But it makes a mockery of our system and in the current chaotic free world there is simply no way for a serious country to run itself,” Sunak said in the video.

The measures he proposes include a cap set annually by the UK parliament on “number of refugees we accept each year via safe and legal routes, amendable in the face of emergencies,” according to the plan published on Sunak’s campaign website.

He also put forward a measure making “aid, trade, and visas conditional on a country’s willingness to cooperate on returns” of migrants who have illegally entered the UK.

Make no mistake – closed borders are the same as a wall. They are used to keep some people in, and other people out, and the United States is far from the only country planning to respond to climate change with escalating authoritarianism, and decreasing regard for human life, let alone the right to anything like dignity, privacy, or freedom of movement. As in the U.S., it seems like there is no real limit to how far they will go to keep people “in their place”.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

The Renegade Cut takes a look at the enforcement of patriarchy

This is the second video in The Renegade Cut‘s series on the enforcement of hierarchies. If you haven’t seen the introduction, I’ve linked it below. This video looks at what patriarchy is, what it is not, and how it’s enforced. It also delves into the history of the subject, and some of how it intersects with other vectors of oppression. Leon has set a high bar with his past work, and in my opinion this video is no exception.

 

Here’s the series introduction:

Video: Let’s talk about the end of any pretense to democracy in the United States

If this court decides that this doctrine should be in effect, then your vote no longer matters. That is not an overstatement.
-Beau of the Fifth Column

At this point, I don’t think anyone worth consideration will pretend that the United States was a free and democratic society before 1964 or so. The existence of explicit, legislative racial segregation makes the very suggestion absurd. I would also argue that we haven’t have democracy (even the representative sort) since then, both in terms of general participation in governance, and in terms of the government’s responsiveness to the wants and needs of the people. Intentional hold-overs from the Segregation era, like redlining and white supremacist policing, combine with gerrymandering and capitalism to keep power in the hands of the same people who’ve always held it in this society.

I think that some form of direct democracy is what we need. Representative democracy has shown itself to be far too vulnerable to the abuses of the upper class, and looking at history, I think that was by design. It was a way to protect the privilege and power of those at the top. It let some new people into the club and complicated the process of ruling, as did the adoption of capitalism, but that was a price worth paying for making sure the club retained its benefits.

That said, representative democracy – even the vicious parody of it that we’ve had in my lifetime – is better than what may soon be in store for the United States.

At issue is the “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT), which the Brennan Center for Justice describes as a “baseless” concept “making the rounds in conservative legal circles” that posits congressional elections can only be regulated by a state’s lawmakers, not its judiciary—or even its constitution.

Prominent purveyors of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen”—most notably, Ginni Thomas, a right-wing activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas—have invoked the dubious theory when pushing state lawmakers to help overturn President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“In Moore, North Carolina lawmakers argue they essentially get a ‘free pass’ to violate state constitutional protections against partisan gerrymandering when drawing districts which undeniably hurt voters,” said Riggs. “We will vigorously fight these claims and instead advocate on behalf of North Carolinians to prove what the ‘independent state legislature theory’ has been all along—a fringe, desperate, and anti-democratic attack by a gerrymandered legislature.”

Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at University of Kentucky, called Moore an “extremely dangerous case in that it could take away state constitutional limits on state legislatures when they enact restrictive voting rules.”

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a plaintiff in the Moore, said in a statement that “in a radical power grab, self-serving politicians want to defy our state’s highest court and impose illegal voting districts upon the people of North Carolina.”

“We must stop this dangerous attack on our freedom to vote,” he added.

I would say this looks like a return to the Segregation era – and it may well mean that in some states – but I think it’s likely to be both different, and worse in a number of ways. With climate catastrophe looming, and global ecosystems already collapsing, the stakes are getting higher every year. When I look at what’s happening, and at the multi-generational effort that has gone into making all this happen, I have to assume that they’re also thinking about how to prevent their power grab from being undone.

As always, I think Beau’s take on this is worth considering.

In some ways, this doesn’t change anything. We still need to organize. We still need to work to bring about real democracy, for the sake of our survival. This is another symptom of the systemic problems that we’ve been trying to solve all along. It’s also a new level of bad when it comes to the amount of work that needs doing, and the danger of doing that work. The biggest reason I write about this sort of thing is that I want to provide tools that can help persuade people of the need for action that goes far beyond the boundaries of what our liberal society told us was “acceptable.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

 

Abolish the police

Is that too much for you?

Do you honestly think cops do more good than harm? Based on what? We need first responders, but we don’t need cops any more than we need the ruling class the cops defend. So many of the crises of our time come from the failed experiment of putting our political power in the hands of “representatives”, in the hopes that they will use it wisely.

They haven’t.

Police are just the tip of the bloody iceberg, but they’re a horror show all by themselves. Police lie, constantly. Police murder family pets. Police steal more from Americans than burglars do. Police kill people every day, and for every one they kill, many more are traumatized, injured, maimed, or have their lives ruined by a bullshit arrest on their record, or by cops making them late for something important. Cops also have open contempt for the constitution, if you happen to care about that thing. They exist to uphold and defend the current power structure, and nothing more.

We spend obscene amounts of money on the police, and that doesn’t go towards keeping us safe. It goes towards keeping the ruling class in power, and keeping them safe from us, even as they drive us towards extinction. Start with defunding them, and redistributing that money to things that actually help the communities, and reduce the incentives for crimes that actually cause harm. As with so much else, we know how to make a better world – we just can’t actually do it while we’re governed by those who would lose their power in making that world.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Be on the lookout for people spreading the propaganda of a fascist terrorist

I don’t have a lot to say about the Chicago shooting. It’s yet another act of terrorism by a white American fascist. These will continue to happen until some time after the fascists feel certain that they have no open support from the general public or from the ruling class. My proposed course of action hasn’t changed. There is, however, one thing that I believe is important to highlight:

This seems like a pretty clear-cut attempt to add fuel to the fire of American transphobia. There’s already an effort underway to erase trans people from U.S. society, and to paint them as every kind of villain, evidence be damned. I’ve seen headlines focusing on the fact the shooter “wore women’s clothes”, but they all seem to be claiming that the clothes were an attempt to blend in.

I suppose it’s possible that there’s some truth to that, but given the nature of online fascist discourse, I think Erin Reed’s reading in the above tweet is more than reasonable. It’s also playing on a pretty common trope in media. Everyone is in danger from this fascist movement, but the amount of danger depends on what stage we’re at, and whether you’re seen as an ally to the victims of the moment. Fascists have always preferred targets with little to no political power, and trans people are pretty much always at the top of that list. Pointing out propaganda can help defuse it, and I think more people should be on the lookout for this sort of thing.

And right now the most important thing you can do, is figure out how to join and/or support anti-fascist activity. I’m all in favor of rehabilitating fascists, but that must come after they have no power to hurt anyone. The top priority has to be stopping them.

Lonerbox takes a look at the history of modern “western” beauty standards

My brain is not cooperating on the blog post I wanted to have up today, so instead I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my favorite Scottish youtuber.

I am far from the first person to address this, even on this network, but I think that this look at the history of “beauty” as a concept is actually pretty important in thinking about a number of important issues in society. It’s easy to feel like the way things are is basically how they’ve always been, but the reality is that we’re a complex and chaotic species. It’s a good case study in how people can twist themselves and the concept of “citing sources” into truly impressive knots to justify how angry it makes them that reality doesn’t conform to how they think it should work. It’s also a good overview of how we got to where we are in this regard.

Philosophy Tube: The Social Contract

So I foolishly took on too much today, and while I did get a lot of things done, a publication-ready blog post wasn’t one of them. Now it’s a little after midnight, I’m burned out, and my neighbor’s small white dog is barking under my window. I think it’s time to cut my losses, and balance things better tomorrow.

That said, I’d feel bad leaving it at that, so I’ll share the video I’m currently watching. So far it is both entertaining and informative, and I think it touches on some important issues. Philosophy tube is generally well worth your time.