Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

The history of policing and mental health show the pointless cruelty of forced “treatment” policy in NYC

I find it hard to trace a timeline of my views on mental health. I had a phase, in my teens, in which I viewed antidepressants and the like as bad, though I’m not sure I could have explained why. I also think there was a time when I just accepted “insane asylums” as just being a necessary part of life, and assumed the people running them and working at them were there to provide the best care they could. At this point, I consider that part of modern “mental health treatment” to be a part of the prison system, at least in the United States.

Some of the change comes from reading The Day the Voices Stopped, by Ken Steele, in college. I think there’s a degree to which, because we only ever experience the world from our own perspective, growing up requires gaining a real understanding of the fact that everyone else is a person, just like we are. In some ways, I feel our society discourages that form of personal development, and actively encourages us to see other people as not fully human, when they fall outside of “normal”. This absolutely includes the politics of race and gender, whether it was pathologizing Black people’s desire for freedom as “Drapetomania”, using the diagnosis of hysteria to medicalize and control women, or declaring queer people to be mentally ill. As well-meaning as I was, in hindsight there was a degree to which I saw people with some mental illnesses as being somehow broken, or less fully human. I don’t think I ever actually supported institutionalization – I had some awareness that there were problems there – but I don’t think I would have had a real answer for people who framed mentally ill people as a “burden on society”, or other such eugenical shit. I probably would have focused instead on a somewhat condescending view of having a duty to care for them. I also think that extended into other forms of disability, but again, I find it hard to remember exactly what I used to believe on this stuff.

Reading Steele’s autobiography changed my perspective, and made it impossible for me to ignore the horrors of mental institutions. I didn’t have an alternative in mind, but I no longer had any doubt that the way things had been done was bad. That was the point at which I began to understand the need to empower people with mental disability and/or illness to make decisions in their own lives. It feels bad to say that it took me that long, but I don’t think it occurred to me that someone with schizophrenia, for example, might have valid thoughts, opinions, and requirements for their own care and lives.

I’m far less sure at what point I came to understand how mass incarceration and white supremacy intersected with psychiatry, but I do remember the point at which I realized that it was so much a part of the fabric of reality in the United States that it barely got reported on. I was having a discussion-turned-argument with acquaintances who shall remain anonymous, and we were talking about racism in the U.S. criminal justice system. I brought up a case that I’d recently heard about, and the other person insisted that if it had really happened, they would have heard about it. After all, we live in a free country, right? People don’t just get locked up for not fitting a profile, and for stating plain facts about their own identities, right? Can you even imagine? It would be a national outrage if the cops just grabbed a “sane” person, locked them up, and drugged them against their will without even checking whether their claims were true.

Right?

Well, sort of. There was some coverage of it, because it really was a sensational story. In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but the fact that it can says very bad things about what sort of “freedom” people in the United States really have.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

All of this is worth talking about in its own right, but I also wanted it to set the scene a little. Our society dehumanizes people with mental illness, portraying them as anything from pitiable to demonic, so long as it’s not fully human. I think this is one of those prejudices that exists within all of us, at least a little, because of the society in which we live. It doesn’t help that the way the world is set up can make life extremely difficult for some neurotypes, making them into disorders or disabilities by context. This is very similar to how non-white races are often treated, and I think that establishing that connection, and giving the example of Kam Brock, is useful in going into this next story:

Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.

“If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation,” states a city document.

I don’t know how useful evil is, as a concept, but I’m finding it hard to think of a better description for this. Our society routinely and deliberately denies people access to their basic human needs, for money. An economic advisor who is respected in the U.S. government actually said that they should try to increase unemployment to curb “inflation” that seems to be mostly caused by outright greed. This is the context in which law enforcement and mental hospitals will be judging whether people who have been forced to live on the streets are mentally well enough to be allowed any say over their lives. “Evil” seems about right.

There are efforts to push back against this, but it often feels like the governing philosophy in the U.S., when it comes to those at the bottom, amounts to “the beatings will continue until morale improves”. The notion – put forward by Mayor Adams – that this is about helping people would be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. Being forcibly committed, drugged against your will,  and “treated” by people who will call you delusional for telling the truth, won’t make anyone’s health better, mental or otherwise. Part of me feels like that shouldn’t need to be said, but I know that I used to think it was at least somewhat OK.

I think it may even be that a majority of people still take the view that “sometimes it’s necessary”, but who decides what’s necessary? Why is mental illness – a category that we know has been, and continues to be politicized – something that can remove someone’s right to autonomy? If someone is a danger to others, then sure, the community can take steps to defend itself, but if they’re incapable of not being that way, then what’s the point of punishing them? And if they are capable of change, why the fuck would we think that incarceration and torture would help?

This new policy in NYC is horrific, and the more you know about the history and practices of the system carrying it out, the worse it looks. These are people. People who’ve been forced into about the worst situation it’s possible to be in, by a society that treats poverty as a moral failing. These are people who are routinely discussed as sub-human monsters. These are people who are routinely treated as sub-human, and this law is making that worse.

Yesterday, I talked about how each step on the path I want us to take involves making life better for humanity in the short term. This is an example of that. We’ve been taking the punitive/carceral approach to mental illness for centuries, and it has not worked. Likewise, relying on the grinding misery of poverty to get people to “do better” has never worked. A housing first policy, on the other hand, treats people as people, focuses on meeting needs, not demanding that people prove themselves worthy of existence, and it works.

Housing First Improves Lives
Study participants who were housed through HFCM showed substantial improvements across multiple dimensions of their lives:

High Housing Retention. Housing Retention was high overall (73%), but highest for those in housing first permanent supportive housing (HF PSH) (80%). HF PSH secures housing through a permanent subsidy and builds stability through the ongoing availability of wrap-around services.

Better Quality of Life.  Quality of life scores improved 30% after housing.

Fewer Mental Illness and Trauma Symptoms. Mental health symptoms decreased 35% and trauma-related symptoms decreased 26% after housing.

Reduced Substance Use. Housing first does not require sobriety or abstinence. However, after housing, the percent of housed participants that used any drugs fell 37%; and the number of days in the last month that housed participants used alcohol to the point of intoxication fell an average of 3 days more than it did for unhoused participants. Other substance use measures did not change, challenging criticism that housing first and harm reduction encourage substance use.

Making this approach the default in the U.S. would not solve all of our problems, but unless you view the maintenance of this hierarchy, complete with those being crushed at the bottom, as a good in its own right, then this is an obvious step to take. This isn’t some kind of “too good to be true” con, it’s just a way to do things that is, quite simply, better. Would it cost more money, when you account for all the long-term impacts of the policy? Who the fuck cares?

It’s not like we’re short on resources. Congress just increased the Pentagon’s budget again, and we’re going to pass one trillion dollars per year soon, not even including the less direct ways money is funneled into the military-industrial complex. Elon Musk is currently burning billions of dollars in an apparent effort to prove the meritocracy wrong, Bezos is trying to get infrastructure rebuilt to fit his “super-yacht”, and Bill Gates screwed with the education system because the arrogant jackass thought he knew better than people who study education.

We are not short on money. We are not short on resources. We know how to make the world better, it’s just that the people in power don’t want it to get better. Not if it threatens their power. Why should we care how cost-effective it is to meet people’s basic needs? Why is that treated as a valid question, in the face of society as it exists, not to mention the money that will be spent kidnapping, assaulting, and drugging unhoused people in NYC?

But, since it’s relevant in the world as it is, I’ll also mention that there’s evidence that a policy of doing the right thing also happens to be “economically sound”, in that it won’t cost rich people anything.

I’m angry about this, in case you couldn’t tell. Everywhere you turn, there’s another way in which the world is set up to cause immense suffering for no damned reason, other than the shitty ideas of shitty people. There are folks fighting back, of course, mostly through local organizing. Sometimes it’s standing up to the cops to stop them from “sweeping” an encampment, sometimes it’s feeding people, but a key part is listening to the people in question, not making decisions for them.

The current political momentum in our world is pushing us towards a future that is both much worse than our present, and also much worse than it needs to be. Policies like this are, of course, an attack on both unhoused people, and mentally ill people, but it’s more than that. It will also almost certainly hurt black people more than other groups, and non-white people more than white. It will be weaponized against trans people, who are more likely to be unhoused because of bigotry that cops tend to share. It will be used, to justify horrific abuse of anyone the cops don’t like, just as they’ve done with every other tool, weapon, and policy they’ve been handed. It seems designed to “solve homelessness” by warehousing people, and using drugs to make it easier.

I wouldn’t call the Democratic Party fascist, the way I do the GOP, but bipartisan U.S. policy around houseless people has always leaned towards eugenics (when not just going there outright). Combine that with the current fascist movement, and this feels similar to the detention immigrant detention facilities that were set up under the Obama administration, and expanded and made worse under Trump. This new policy is bad, but it can get much, much worse, and instead of trying to avoid that, Democrats like Eric Adams seem to be trying to move things farther in that direction.

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!

Atlanta land defenders charged with “domestic terrorism”

Back in May, I wrote a little about the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest. This is a grassroots effort to stop a section of forest to make a fake city for police training. From what I can tell, a facility like that is generally used for tactical training – group exercises that amount to training to wage war on everyday people. In my view, this would be a bad use of even a reclaimed landfill, let alone land that is currently a forest.

The struggle is ongoing, and of course it’s one-sided. Fighting back against the police would allow them to escalate through their bloated armory, so all the people can do is put their bodies in the gears of the machine, to try to stop it from rolling over the forest. They’re camping out in the trees, because that makes it less likely for the trees to be cut down. For this, they have been called terrorists:

Five people arrested at the planned site of Atlanta’s new public safety training center have been charged with domestic terrorism, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday.

What’s happening: State and local law enforcement clashed Tuesday with protesters occupying the DeKalb County forest where Atlanta wants to build a public safety training center.

Why it matters: The confrontation is the latest in the long-running occupation aimed at blocking the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed complex, which activists have dubbed “Cop City.”

Details: Accounts differ as to what took place in the deep woods off Key Road in unincorporated DeKalb County. Sean Wolters, a media contact for the resistance effort, told Axios that as of 10:30am activists camping in trees were being hit with tear gas and pepper balls.

  • The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a news outlet supportive of the resistance effort, posted a video apparently shot by one of the activists and reported police firing “chemical irritants” in their direction.

An Atlanta police spokesperson said officers and “local, state, and task force members removed barricades blocking some of the entrances to the training center.” He provided no additional information.

  • Alison Clark, a local resident who leads a group advising the center’s development, told the AJC the activists shot fireworks at first responders and then law enforcement entered the property.
  • Wolters denied this account to Axios, saying an apparent operation by APD to remove people from the trees sparked the clash.

As the Axios article notes, this situation is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. I write often about how ecosystem health is key to our survival, and we’re still very much in a system that doesn’t even see it as a factor to consider. If someone with money and power wants to clear-cut an area for pointless, or even harmful reasons, the question asked is whether they have ownership of that bit of land. The only time there’s a delay on it is if there’s a protected species there (which became protected because of political activism), or there are people there, standing in the way.

I support the effort to stop “cop city”, but I fear that there will be more violence from the police; at the end of the day, violence is their main point. Even so, these confrontations are necessary if we want real change, and I think this highlights how the priorities of our society must be changed, or we’ll be carried to destruction by the momentum of the systems we currently have.

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 BBC has warned you – the giant water lilies have no mercy.

My recent fictional escapades have had me studying freshwater wildlife, which has led to my social media recommending me more such material. That’s how I came across this absurdly dramatic clip from BBC. It’s shot and scored like a horror movie, and narrated with the sort of bloodthirsty glee that’s usually reserved for predator/prey interaction. You may see a pond covered with giant lily pads, but to the BBC, it’s the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a monstrous, spike-filled alien invasion. You may or may not have pre-existing opinions about the giant water lily, but if David Attenborough has one message for you, it’s that you should be more afraid of them.

Video: History alla PragerU

All my energy today has gone into prying a couple lines of fiction out of some crevasse in my brain, so here’s a video. It’s not new, but I find it interesting and a little entertaining, and hopefully you will as well. It’s about how conservative propagandists use history in their work.

Edit: Managed to get the crowbar down in between a couple brain wrinkles, and actually found a couple thousand words of the novel hiding in there, so that’s nice.

Charges over Flint Water Crisis dismissed on procedural grounds

The Flint water crisis of 2014 happened as a result of a Michigan democracy crisis that had started years earlier. Flint was one of the primary victims of the way the auto industry abandoned Detroit, and had been struggling financially for years. Rather than actually working to alleviate poverty and build up the community, Flint’s Republican governor decided to go with the too-popular lie that authoritarianism is more efficient and effective than democracy or other forms of self-governance. In an act of open defiance of democracy, the Michigan legislature passed a law, which the governor signed, re-instating the emergency management powers that the people of Michigan had resoundingly and directly voted to remove:

Following his election in 2010, Snyder and the Republican-controlled state Legislature expanded the powers of emergency managers. Michigan voters, through a November 2012 ballot proposal, repealed the controversial law.

But less than two months later, Snyder signed replacement legislation that he said improved upon the former law. It offered four pathways for struggling schools and municipalities: A consent agreement, Chapter 9 bankruptcy, mediation or emergency manager.

Michigan’s emergency manager law is facing scrutiny in federal court, where plaintiffs argue that the law is unconstitutional because it disproportionately targets black communities and continues a “narrative of structural and strategic racism.”

Emergency managers were given near-total power over their jurisdictions, and could outright ignore local elected officials. This was the setting in which the decision was made to switch Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, to save money, resulting in the poisoning of thousands of people, and potentially permanent brain damage for an entire generation of Flint’s children:

 

While it’s still difficult to know for sure, it seems like the decision to ignore warnings about the need for treatment to prevent corrosion was also apparently made to save money.

“As we all know, the water plant itself is operating fine, but without corrosion control chemicals, it had a detrimental impact on the lead pipes,” Adler said.

The city “made the decision” not to use corrosion controls “because they didn’t think they needed it,” Adler said. The state Department of Environmental Quality failed to ensure the chemicals were added, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency didn’t alert the public when an employee first raised a red flag.

“It was a failure at every level, all along the way. This was a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement of a public health issue,” Adler said.

A previously released email showed that Flint water plant supervisor Mike Glasgow was also concerned about the conversion to Flint River water just days before the city would formally close a valve that had delivered Detroit water for nearly 50 years.

“If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction,” Glasgow wrote in an April 17, 2014, email to officials at the state Department of Environmental Quality, suggesting management above him had its own “agenda.”

When we hear this person talking about “a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement”, I think it’s worth noting that this was a spokesperson for Republican governor Rick Snyder. The GOP has a long-standing hostility towards the general concept of “government”, and they lean heavily on the notion that bureaucracy is both always bad, and only a government problem. Pretty much any time I get into an internet fight about healthcare systems, I have to explain to fellow USians that all the paperwork they have to deal with from health insurance corporations is also bureaucracy. With the USPS, the deliberately unpleasant tax system, under-funded schools, and many other areas of government, conservatives have a record of using sabotage not just to allow their corporate overlords to get away with harming people, but also to support their antigovernmental rhetoric by making the government worse on purpose. They like when there’s a huge government catastrophe like this, because it’s tailor-made for their perennial antigovernmental talking points.

And as always, the only parts of the government they actually dislike, are the ones that make life better for the general population. What’s more, their constant efforts to spread corruption and dysfunction also provide a degree of protection for themselves. There’s a quote that I’ve shared before:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s from a comment by a composer named Frank Wilhoit, and while I don’t know how I feel about the broader argument he was making, this definition is useful all by itself. The conservative project of dismantling government, and then using the dysfunction they have caused to advocate for further dismantling, serves to both remove protection from the out-groups, and remove bindings from the in-groups. This was a crime of conservative, authoritarian governance, for which thousands of people will be paying for the rest of their lives. All of it happened under the authority and supervision of Rick Snyder, the Republican governor who signed the law bringing back the emergency management system his constituents had just rejected.

And a judge has thrown out charges against Snyder on procedural grounds:

A district judge in Genesee County tossed a pair of misdemeanor charges levied against former Gov. Rick Snyder for his involvement in the Flint water crisis, citing previous court rulings that state prosecutors incorrectly used a “one-person grand jury” to indict Snyder.

Snyder, who was governor in Michigan from 2011 to 2019, was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty by a public official. Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding the charges Wednesday.

Behm’s order technically does not dismiss the charges, but sends them back to a lower court for dismissal.

Behm cited a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from June which stated government prosecutors erred in 2021 when they had a circuit judge serve as a “one-man grand jury” to indict Snyder and the other officials. She also noted circuit court rulings to dismiss charges against other former state officials which cited the Supreme Court ruling.

Snyder is the latest former official to have charges tossed related to the Flint water crisis, although state prosecutors, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, have vowed to continue seeking charges related to the case. In October, charges for seven other former state and Flint officials were dismissed, although the state’s prosecution team has indicated it will appeal the decision to dismiss the charges.

In a statement, the prosecuting team said it plans to appeal Behm’s order.

“As we have reiterated time and again, rulings up to this point have been on process alone — not on the merits of the case,” the unattributed statement says. “We are confident that the evidence clearly supports the criminal charges against Rick Snyder, and we will not stop until we have exhausted all possible legal options to secure justice for the people of Flint.”

Snyder’s lawyer, Brian Lennon, said in a statement the prosecution efforts have been “amateurish and unethical.”

“The state has already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing meritless misdemeanor charges and this case should now be considered closed,” Lennon said. “The prosecution team’s statement saying it will appeal this ruling is further proof that they intend to continue their efforts to weaponize the court system against their political enemies.”

They always claim persecution, but I can’t help but note that the United States will hold people for weeks, months or even years without trial, often over petty shit like suspected shoplifting, but poisoning thousands of people? Well, that is generally done by members of the in-group, whom the law protects, but does not bind, and years later, the “criminal prosecutions” section of Wikipedia’s water crisis article shows an awful lot of dismissals.

More and more, I’ve been realizing that the United States is a conservative country, in that it is set up, at every level, to maintain racial and economic disparities. It’s not just the legacy of redlining, or environmental racism, or civil asset forfeiture, or white supremacy in law enforcement, or racism in the courts, or racism in legislation – it’s also a parallel infrastructure designed to smooth the way for those at the top (who are almost all white men). When you’re at the bottom, when the system screws up, you pay the price. At the bottom, you can spend years in prison even when everyone in the legal system agrees on your innocence. At the top, you can steal millions, and get a finger wag as you’re gently told to give it back.

And race is absolutely a part of this. Flint, MI is a predominantly Black city, and that fact is a big part of how this whole situation came to be in the first place. The system does actively harm poor white people as well, of course, but they are much more likely to be treated as part of the in-group that gets protection and exemption from the law, if their crimes and conduct merit honorary membership. That option is generally not available to people who aren’t white (though exceptions are sometimes made for wealth, power, or allegiance/usefulness to wealth and power). I think George Zimmerman – the man who murdered Trayvon Martin – is a good example of that. He had no authority, and not much in the way of political and economic power, but he adopted the role of being a member and defender of the in-group, and is therefor in the clear. Kyle Rittenhouse also comes to mind. There’s always some reason. Zimmerman was probably over-charged, given the available evidence. Was that an honest mistake by the prosecutors? Who can say? But the overall pattern is suggestive, to me, of more than just coincidence. They say justice delayed is justice denied, and it seems like we’ve seen nothing but delay on this case.

I’m glad to hear that prosecutors will keep trying, but the fact that this is where they’re at, so many years later, demonstrates the degree to which our “justice” system exists to serve and maintain hierarchical order, not any meaningful notion of justice.

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!

O’ahu, Red Hill, and the environmental disaster that is the U.S. armed forces.

The U.S. military is an ongoing environmental disaster and violation of human rights. The United States of America has been engaged in war, officially and unofficially, for 92% of its history, and as time has gone on, that war has become increasingly destructive not just to humans and our surroundings, but to the environment. Those who’ve been paying attention will know that pollution and the effects of environmental degredation do far more harm to those at the bottom of the political, economic, and racial hierarchies of the world.  This is why justice has become a key part of the modern environmental movement, and why dismantling white supremacy, capitalism, and other hierarchical systems is a crucial part of our fight for a better world.

Part of that effort includes understanding that the United States is still very much a colonial empire that exerts power on a global scale, and that works to maintain the injustices created in the establishment of that empire. The native people of the various bits of land the U.S. has claimed – those that survive – are still very much under the thumb of an occupying power, and it shows. The Water Protectors who have been opposing the Keystone XL pipeline probably got the most attention over the last decade, but similar fights have been ongoing not just across the United States, but around the world. Many of the fights are against corporations, which often have government support, but some are also directly against the U.S. government. One of these that has gone under-reported is the ongoing poisoning of O’ahu’s drinking water by the U.S. Navy.

For nearly 80 years, the U.S. Navy has stored well over 100 million gallons of fuel in 20, 20-story massive underground storage tanks in Kapūkakī, also known as Red Hill, a ridge between Hālawa and Moanalua.

Located a mere 100 feet above Oʻahu’s primary drinking water source these deteriorating tanks have leaked more than 180,000 gallons of fuel over their lifetime. Their walls have corroded to less than the thickness of a dime and are under high pressure from the large volume of jet fuel. While the Board of Water Supply maintains that Oʻahu’s drinking water is currently safe to consume, the recent pattern of leaks suggests that the tanks and their connected distribution system are failing and have a high probability of catastrophic failure that would make our water supply undrinkable:

– In 2014, 27,000 gallons of jet fuel leaked from Tank 5.
– In March 2020, a pipeline connected to Red Hill leaked an unknown quantity of fuel into Pearl Harbor Hotel Pier. The leak, which had stopped, started again in June 2020.  Approximately 7,100 gallons of fuel was collected from the surrounding environment.
– In January 2021, a pipeline that leads to the Hotel Pier area failed two leak detection tests. In February, a Navy contractor determined that there is an active leak at Hotel Pier. The Department of Health only found out in May.
– In May 2021, over 1,600 gallons of fuel leaked from the facility due to human error after a control room operator failed to follow correct procedures.
– In July 2021, 100 gallons of fuel was released into Pearl Harbor, possibly from a source connected to the Red Hill facility.
– In November 2021, residents from the neighborhoods of Foster Village and Aliamanu called 911 to report the smell of fuel, later found likely to have come from a leak from a fire suppression drain line connected to Red Hill. -The Navy reported that about 14,000 gallons of a fuel-water mixture had leaked.
– The Navy’s own risk assessment  reports that there is a 96% chance that up to 30,000 gallons of fuel will leak into the aquifer over the next 10 years.

The Red Hill fuel tanks are an environmental time bomb threatening the drinking water for 400,000 Oʻahu residents.

In general, the default position of the U.S. government is that if it did anything bad, no it didn’t. My first encounter with this was in high school, when I was briefly involved in the movement to close the School of the Americas/WHINSEC, and to bring justice to its victims. In addition to attending a protest in Georgia, signing petitions, and doing all that sort of stuff, the group I was with also met with a US army PR officer, who simply denied that anything bad had ever happened in association with the institution or its graduates. Skim through the list of notable graduates on the Wikipedia link above, you’ll note one or two things that don’t seem to align with that story.

The same is true here. This news report on the crisis has some pretty good reporting, including the fact that the Navy was warned about this almost a decade before it happened, and they were denying it past the point where their own people, living on-base, were getting sick. It seems that the main civilian water supply is still clean, but there’s no way to be sure that the contamination just hasn’t reached that far yet, or that another spill won’t happen at any time.

I think it’s also important to note, here, that the callous disregard that the U.S. government holds for powerless people extends to those people tied to its military. There are a lot of veterans and military families who’ve had to spend their lives in and out of hospitals and trying to get coverage for ailments caused by exposure to burn pits, agent orange, and a host of other stuff, and it looks like these folks are joining their ranks.

More than two dozen families have joined a lawsuit accusing the U.S. Navy of making them sick from jet fuel that leaked into the tap water in their Hawaii homes.

There are now more than 100 people in an amended lawsuit filed Thursday that also accuses the Navy of destroying more than 1,000 water samples collected from affected homes.

The families say in the lawsuit the samples could have revealed chemicals in the water.

Navy spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. James Adams said the Navy doesn’t comment on current litigation.

A fuel storage facility in the hills above Pearl Harbor leaked petroleum into the Navy’s tap water system last year and sickened nearly 6,000 people, mostly those living in military housing.

The lawsuit was initially filed in August with four families alleging the Navy hasn’t fully disclosed the scope of the contamination and hasn’t provided appropriate medical care to those who are sick.

The lawsuit said the Navy continues to claim families are not sick from the jet fuel exposure.

It’s honestly very reminiscent of the way fossil fuel companies have denied contamination from fracking activities, denied the risk of earthquakes from wastewater injection, denied climate change… Why, it’s almost like the U.S. military and the fossil fuel industry are sharing notes! As always, I am with these families in their fight for justice, and I’m with everyone fighting to defuel Red Hill and end that threat to the aquifer.

But, of course, the problems don’t end there. While the fuel tanks will supposedly be empty by 2024, the process has been delayed by a different toxic spill.

The Navy says there is no evidence of any drinking water contamination after a spill of about 1,100 gallons of fire suppressant at a fuel facility in Hawaii.

A cleanup is underway at the Red Hill fuel facility after the spill Tuesday of Aqueous Film Forming Foam, which is used to suppress fires caused by flammable liquids such as fuel and contain PFAS, a class of chemicals that are slow to degrade in the environment.

“This is egregious,” Kathleen Ho, a Hawaii environmental official, said in a news release. “AFFF contains PFAS forever chemicals — groundwater contamination could be devastating to our aquifer.”

At least we have them to protect us from the bad guys, right? I suppose one small ray of light is that if the water supply does end up being contaminated, we’re closer to being able to remove PFAS from it. What’s interesting is that there seems to be some kind of cover-up underway relating to this spill. I suppose it could be serial incompetence, but at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I’ll just say that this seems odd to me:

The state Health Department is demanding that the military release video of the latest spill at the Red Hill fuel facility.

Last week, military leaders said there was no video of the toxic spill of firefighting foam concentrate.

But officials later corrected that, saying there was actually video.

But the military says it won’t release the closed circuit video because it “may impact the integrity of the investigation.” Instead, military officials say they’ll allow the state Health Department regulators to see the video without sharing a copy.

The Health Department, in response, said it’s imperative that the Joint Task Force on Red Hill makes the video available to the public as soon as possible in the “interest of honesty and transparency.”

Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, called the military’s decision “ludicrous.”

“This just isn’t a matter of transparency or even after the fact investigation, this is a matter of saving lives,” he said.

Kat McClanahan, former Pearl Harbor resident, worries about the impact of the toxic concentrate on the environment ― and says the military should release the video to clear up doubt.

“I’m scared that they are hiding something, that something else is going on,” she said.

Gary Gill was deputy director of environmental health for nine years at the state Health Department under two governors. The Navy’s 27,000-gallon fuel spill from Red Hill happened in 2014 during his tenure.

“With a facility as complex as Red Hill and as old as Red Hill you can just assume there’s going to be a continual number of these events,” said Gill.

In 2013, Gill saw naphthalene ― a chemical in gasoline ― detected in the Navy’s monitoring well just 20 feet from the Red Hill drinking water shaft. The military dismissed it, he said.

“I think the Navy’s chain of command and their mission, they are there to be ready for war,” said Gill.

“They don’t really have the resources or the imperative to manage these environmental issues,”

I often talk about how we need to ensure that fascists no longer have the power to hurt people, or that billionaires no longer have the power to mess with other people’s lives the way they do not. The U.S. armed forces have demonstrated over, and over, and over again that they cannot be trusted to handle toxic materials in a responsible manner, even if one was so lost to humanity as to approve of everything else they do. Empires come and go, borders change, and priorities change. At some point in time, the U.S. government will no longer control Hawaii, but they’re playing with poison over a water supply that could, if managed carefully, support human life on that island for centuries to come.

The way we’re going, it’ll end up being yet another place that has to rely on imported water, because someone couldn’t be bothered to invest enough to protect such a vital resource. At some point, we’re going to run out of places to import clean water from.

I started this post by mentioning the colonial aspect of the U.S. presence in Hawaii, and while the Native Hawaiian community isn’t the group “primarily” affected by this particular leak, it’s worth remembering that all of this is happening in a broader context. The main interest the U.S. government has in Hawaii is its usefulness as a military base. That usefulness does not require the people of those islands to have good lives, or even lives at all, so there’s little incentive to invest in protecting natural resources. This is demonstrated with murderous negligence like the saga of Red Hill, but it’s also demonstrated in what being part of the U.S.A. has meant for the people of Hawaii. A combination of tourism and rich people buying property is making life increasingly difficult for Native Hawaiians, to the point where they’ve been actively asking people to stay away. As with so many other aspects of our society, the way we do things right now just isn’t working, and the longer it takes us to accept that, the more damage will be done, and the harder it will be to clean up, repair, or recover from it.

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Video: The Continually Escalating Anti-LGBT Rhetoric

Jessie Gender is a good source of information on trans issues and Star Trek. She has done a number of deep dives into the propaganda and misinformation surrounding trans people and the movement for trans rights, and this video is no exception. The United States (and that country is not alone) is currently in the midst of a murderous campaign to erase queer people from existence. Obviously, I think there’s validity in pointing to hypocrisy, inconsistency, and projection from conservatives, but it’s far more important that those of us who support trans rights understand what’s happening. The violence we’ve seen is the goal of this rhetoric.

This will not go away by itself. Genocide is the right word for this project. The goal here is exterminationist mass murder, and it’s up to us to stand up to the fascists, and to take away their power to do what they’re doing. This video is a good breakdown of the whole situation, in my view, and worth your time.

Video: Beau of the Fifth Column on why it’s important to understand US capabilities

I am generally of the opinion that it’s good to have an accurate understanding of the world, whether or not that understanding is uplifting or encouraging. If the situation is bad, that’s not great, but pretending it’s better than it is doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better situation. While I don’t think that war is a good response to it, the U.S. empire is a problem, and a lot of that has to do with the primary tool of that empire – its armed forces. The unfortunate reality is that the U.S. has actually been getting something for the trillions it has spent on its capacity to wage war. Anyone who wants the kind of global change that we here at Oceanoxia are seeking, will need to consider that.

Absurdities, atrocities, and the murder-clowns of fascism

The fact that I’m writing this is, in itself, evidence that things are not going well in the United States. Nick Fuentes is a despicable fascist weirdo who, ideally, none of you would ever have heard about. He’s a holocaust denier, a white supremacist, calls openly for dictatorship, all that jazz. I’ve been aware of him for a while because a few youtubers I follow have talked about him on occasion, but he never seemed worth my writing about. In most ways, he’s still not worth writing about, except for the fact that he’s managed to attach himself to someone far more famous.

I think one thing I never realized about fascist leaders, growing up, was how deeply strange they all are. I suppose that’s partly my fault, given that they’re famous for murdering people over absurd lies, but I think some of it also has to do with the mythologizing of Nazis in U.S. media. They’re portrayed as relentlessly competent, caring only about efficiency and results, capable of great feats of engineering and blah blah blah. The reality is that many of their so-called accomplishments were little more than propaganda. The Autobahn, for example, existed before Hitler rose to power, and he just claimed credit for it.

If I had to guess why this propaganda persists in our society, I’d say it’s probably because of how close fascism is to capitalism in general, and neoliberalism in particular. I might have felt a need to explain that statement a decade ago, but now I feel I can just point to the GOP. They’re not much different from how they’ve been for my whole life, which is why they’ve been able to go so far, with so much support. Likewise, the Democrats aren’t much different from the Republicans, with their efforts to create the mass incarceration crisis, their opposition to universal healthcare, and their habit of going far harder against the left than the right. And that’s ignoring the decades of U.S. support for fascism abroad.

There’s just a little too much coziness there for anyone in power to want the public to have a clear idea who and what fascists are.

For those who are somehow unaware, Kanye West has started openly peddling anti-Semitic and other right-wing propaganda, and in turn has been warmly embraced by a succession of odious people. The two most recent are Milo Yiannopolis (also a fascist – has been filmed singing with saluting neo-Nazis, had a password referring to The Night of the Long Knives, and the list goes on), and Nick Fuentes.

The three of them just had dinner with Donald Trump, and while it apparently didn’t go well, Trump was supposedly very impressed with Fuentes. To me, that means that we’re likely to see more of that piece of shit, so it’s worth knowing who he is. I’m sharing two videos today, because I don’t particularly want to write about him, specifically, again. I feel that these do a good job of covering who he is, who he appeals to, and why it’s not good to have him closer to the halls of power.

I have a bit of a confession to make. During my time as a lurker around the periphery of the New Atheist movement, I frequently heard a Voltaire quote – perhaps you’re familiar:

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

Until the last few years, I didn’t really get that. I knew that a great many horrible acts had been committed in the name of beliefs I considered absurd, but the same is true of good acts. I still think society would be better if religion was entirely removed from governance, but I think I now have a more complete idea of what that quote’s about. Fascism arose from liberal democracy, and both systems came centuries after Voltaire, but looking at what they believe right at this moment, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on the scale of absurdity that’s available. These are deeply silly people, who will happily justify torture, murder, terrorism, and genocide.

Fascists are the killer clowns that keep showing up in pop culture. I don’t like the trope, because I’ve known a number of professional clowns in my life, and they’ve all been wonderful people, but I think it’s the best illustration of the problem. Trump, Fuentes, Yiannapolis, Kanye – fascists, including their leaders, tend to be deeply ridiculous people. In some ways, that’s their superpower, not just because it means they’re not taken seriously at first, but also because they seem to be fueled by humiliation. They attract ridicule to themselves like flies to a pile of shit, and they can’t handle even the smallest amount of it. They cannot function in a world where people make fun of them, so they want to murder everyone who does, rather than considering why they might come across that way.

They believe absurdities – more and more of them every year, it seems – and based on those absurdities, they want to murder or enslave most of humanity. As with everything else they do, it might be funny, if our political and economic system didn’t keep giving these people the power to ruin lives.

I don’t think Kanye will ever be president, but this does seem like a way into more “mainstream” politics for those who’ve attached themselves to him, as someone who will reliably get press attention. The GOP’s big divide isn’t between fascism and fash-adjacent neoliberalism, but between which brand of fascism they think will get them into power. By all accounts, Trump loves sycophants, and that seems to be consistent among authoritarians. For those of you who knew nothing about this douchebag when you started reading this post, I’m sorry to have inflicted him upon you. Unfortunately, it’s likely that he and other bozos like him will remain a mutual affliction for as long as fascism is viable in the United States.

 

“When a movement is selling an image of exceptionalism and strength, their design is to attract patrons who are unexceptional and weak.”

A video and some thoughts on propaganda

Whenever anyone starts discussing the accomplishments of communist governments, someone is likely to pop up to point out that those governments are authoritarian. The example I see most often is that someone on the left will point to Cuba’s high literacy rate, and the rebuttal is to say that that was just part of their efforts to propagandize the population. Now, I’m far from an expert on Cuba, but this is one of those subjects where I actually have at least a little relevant experience.

In 2001, I was invited to be a travelling companion for a friend who felt called to visit the Cuban Quaker community. New England Yearly Meeting, to which we belonged, has a sister relationship with Cuba Yearly Meeting, and exchanging visitors is fairly common, though the ability to do it has varied depending on the whims of politicians. At that time, I spoke effectively no Spanish, and didn’t really have the time or inclination to learn. That was, in hindsight, rather bad manners, but I was going there to keep my friend company, and she had actually been studying the language.

It was an interesting trip, but the thing I want to focus on here is Cuban propaganda. There absolutely was a lot of it. Some took the form of murals and slogans, but the primary medium was the Cubavision channel. It had content 24/7 (as did the other channel, which carried pirated movies and soap operas), including speeches by Fidel, cartoons about Cuba being a thorn in the foot of the U.S. (The U.N. were portrayed as cowardly worms, subservient worms, if memory serves), and other patriotic events. At that point in time, I saw Cuba as pretty unambiguously Authoritarian™, with little clear idea of the island’s history. I did want the embargo to end, and saw it as a big problem for the Cuban people, but I think considered Castro to be as much of a problem. I’m still a bit uncertain on the subject, but it’s less clear-cut to me these days.

I also noticed, as I paid more attention to U.S. affairs, how much our own political pageantry paralleled that which was condemned as authoritarian when communists did it. That could be the patriotic displays at sporting events, the ubiquity of heroizing military recruitment ads, the requirement that all politicians always remember to say that “America is the greatest country in the world”, or political rallies with jingoistic rhetoric and political songs and musical numbers. Fidel had six-year-olds singing about The Revolution, and Bush had six-year-olds singing about him and American greatness. Ditto Obama and Trump, and it was gross in both of those cases too. The enraging reality is that to live in the United States is to move through a miasma of propaganda.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

Again, this is not unique to the United States, but it’s necessary to point this out and discuss it because USians, as a rule, tend not to believe they’re subject to propaganda, or when they do believe it, they tend to see it as “that which supports the opposing side” more than anything. I think part of the problem there is the way the development of capitalism has worked to hide who holds power, by separating economic and political power (at least in terms of rhetoric), and reshaping the law so that the greatest power tends to be held outside the government. That power is wielded through campaign donations, direct advocacy and messaging, lobbying, and the other forms of corruption with which we’ve become so familiar.

It is also wielded through the media – not just the more obvious news and political commentary, but also through entertainment media. I’ve shared some material on “Copaganda” here, but while this is part of Skip Intro‘s Copaganda series, this video is about the Top Gun movies, and the Pentagon’s involvement in Hollywood. This isn’t a comprehensive dive into that subject, but it’s a dive worth taking regardless.

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!