Shut these cops down.

The police murdered another black man in a suburb of Minneapolis yesterday. You’d think they’d learn: the cops are on trial in this state for the murder of George Floyd, so you’d think the word would come down to not shoot anyone for a traffic violation, at least until everyone calms down and we can get back to mindless obedience to the status quo, but no. Daunte Wright was stopped for something trivial, and it ended up with him dead in the street.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota denounced the shooting and called for a thorough and transparent investigation by an agency other than Brooklyn Center police or the BCA and for the release of all body-worn camera and dash-camera footage.

“The ACLU-MN has deep concerns that police here appear to have used dangling air fresheners as an excuse for making a pretextual stop, something police do all too often to target Black people. The warrant appears to be for a non-felony,” the statement said.

“While we are waiting to learn more, we must reiterate that police violence and killings of people of color must end, as must the over-policing and racial profiling that are endemic to our white supremacist system of policing.”

That actually wasn’t the end of it. The photo above is of a squad of Officer Friendlies descending on the neighborhood to bring their condolences to the community. And of course our governor tweeted that his prayers were with the bereaved.

Then we got the usual sensitivity from the police.

Do they ever stop to wonder if they might be the baddies?

They could have predicted how the community would react.

Then comes the usual smoke and fire and rage.

Gee, I wonder if it was worth it to keep our roads free of dangling air fresheners?

This is the first I’ve heard that air fresheners are illegal in the state of Minnesota. Apparently the Minnesota police use the presence of air fresheners as a pretext to search cars for drugs. So now you can apparently get shot for keeping the inside of your car pine-fresh.

Stop praying, Governor Walz, and disarm your thugs.

It seems to have confused him.

It’s amazing, when you think about it, how much the rantings of the darlings of the Right, like Peterson or Rand or Fuentes, align neatly with what you’d see in the word balloons of a comic book villain. Ta-Nehisi Coates is just making the clear association between fascist words and fascist bad guys.

As I’m sure you all know, the trial of the cop who murdered George Floyd is going on in Minneapolis right now. I’ve been watching it out of the side of my eye because the whole thing is ominous. What is worrying me is that Chauvin is indefensible, and his lawyers are floundering, and the prosecutors are firing on all cylinders. Everything appearing in the conventional media is uncompromising.

The witnesses are so damned effective. They brought in a series of teenagers who witnessed the killing and the casual disregard of the cops for the life of that black victim. It’s horrifying testimony.

“When I look at George Floyd, I look at look at my dad. I look at my brother. I look at my cousins, my uncles, because they are all Black,” Frazier said. “I have a Black father. I have a Black brother. I have Black friends. And I look at that and I look at how that could have been one of them.”

“It’s been nights I stayed up apologizing and apologized to George Floyd for not doing more,” she added. “And not physically interacting.”

Shortly before she was dismissed from the stand, Frazier added that she tries not to blame herself or the other bystanders for what happened to Floyd.

“It’s not what I should have done,” she said, before referencing Chauvin, seated several feet away in the courtroom. “It’s what he should have done.”

The defense line is that Chauvin was “distracted” by a violent mob and that it’s the fault of the witnesses that he didn’t release pressure on Floyd’s neck, and tried to portray them as a milling gang of thugs threatening the police.

You may think that it’s a good thing, that Chauvin is going down, that justice will be done.

Let me remind you of the usual fate of cops arrested for murder.

In the United States between 2005 and 2020, of the 42 nonfederal police officers convicted following their arrest for murder due to an on-duty shooting, only five ended up being convicted of murder. The most common offense these officers were convicted of was the lesser charge of manslaughter, with 11 convictions.

I see this as a crap shoot. The end result is going to hinge on the decision of a jury that has spent a lifetime soaking in the rancid broth of white supremacy and implicit racism, and is going to be, in many cases, trying to find excuses for Chauvin, and will be looking longingly at convicting him for lesser charges. The more powerful the prosecution, the stronger the public reaction if he gets nothing but a slap on the wrist.

I’m afraid that if Chauvin is not convicted of murder, Minneapolis is going to erupt in righteous outrage (this is not an argument that he should be convicted to satisfy the public). There will be demonstrations all over the place. Freeways will be blocked by protesters. I will join in the protests. Remember: no justice, no peace.

I sure would like some peace.

I noticed quite a few people yesterday trying to argue that the fact that a murderer walked into three Asian-American businesses and killed 6 Asian-American women wasn’t an act of racism, which kind of blows my mind. Of course it was! It was also an act of misogyny. And also of gun fanaticism. And puritanical religious self-loathing. And ignorance. And general hatred of unfamiliar cultures. It can be all of these things at the same time!

Have people never heard of the concept of intersectionality? Or have you just swallowed whole the conservative rejection of the idea?

Here’s another dirty concept to the conservative brain: Critical Race Theory. In part, that’s the idea that white supremacy exists, and is supported by our legal system (and, by the way, needs to be rooted out). The law turns a blind eye to racism. Hoo boy, does this Georgia police department do that. Why did that murderer kill those women? He had a “bad day” (I’ve been having a lot of bad days lately, never thought to vent by going on a killing spree). He was mentally ill (oh my, isn’t that a familiar refrain?). He was a sex addict (who focused his addiction on Asian women). The police asked him if his crime was racially motivated, and he said “no”…and they believed him. Why would a white boy from a good Christian family lie about that? The police department is rotten to the core. I’m going to guess that many of the officers are closet white supremacists themselves.

Watch this dissection of that appalling press conference.

Then there’s this Facebook post by Captain Jay Baker (the bald fuck in the video), in which he chortles over Trump’s claim that the virus was imported from “Chy-na”.

Jesus. Fire him. Cut out the rot. Defund the police.

Although he does provide a beautiful perspective into why Critical Race Theory is important and valid, I will at least say that for him.

I grew up with a grossly racist grandfather — he survived the Pacific War of WWII and came out of it with alcoholism and an abiding contempt for the Japanese. I heard so many racial slurs! He knew them all, and hated them. What I got out of it, though, was the stark contrast between what he said and what I knew. This was in the Pacific Northwest; I had many friends of Asian descent, I worked my way through summers in high school in the employ of Taki Nagasawa, who’s ethnicity you might guess from the name. What I learned from the experience was that my drunken grandpa was full of shit. That’s all. That when a racist starts spewing racism you should simply disbelieve everything he says.

So when Donald Trump started babbling about the “Chinese Flu” or the “Kung Flu”, what I saw was Drunk Grandpa raging from his armchair, sloshed to the gills on Budweiser. He’s wrong. I can ignore everything he says. Unfortunately, I can’t ignore the criminally moronic people who believed him, now fueling a wave of anti-Asian violence.

Hatred against Asian-Americans is being expressed far more freely now.

Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that experts believe to be just a fraction of the true total.

From 19 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, Asian Americans from all 50 states experienced everything ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults, from getting coughed on to getting denied services because of their ethnicity, according to a report released on Tuesday by Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition tracking incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment.

More than 68% of the abuse was verbal harassment or name-calling, while 11.1% was physical, the report found.

Once again, I find myself looking from my Asian-American friends to these abusive assholes, unable to comprehend how wrong they are. It’s madness. Why are you saying these outrageous untruths, why are you treating your fellow citizens with such contempt?

I haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of the hatred. Yesterday, a man deliberately walked into three Asian-American businesses and opened fire, killing 8 people, including 6 women of Asian descent. It’s a clear case of racial targeting and mass murder. They’ve caught the murderer, a scraggly-bearded 21 year old white man. We’re already hearing what a good kid he was.

Long was described as a religious person by a former classmate at Sequoyah High. The 21-year-old graduated in 2017. The classmate said Long’s dad was a pastor, and he had seemed “innocent” and “nerdy.”

“He was very innocent seeming and wouldn’t even cuss,” the classmate told The Daily Beast. “He was sorta nerdy and didn’t seem violent from what I remember. He was a hunter and his father was a youth minister or pastor. He was big into religion.”

Social media posts from the Crabapple First Baptist Church show Long and his family had a lengthy history with the church. Long’s father is not listed as a pastor at the church. The elders of the church released a statement to Heavy.com, saying they were “grieved” and “heartbroken.”

“We are grieved to hear the tragic news about the multiple deaths in the Atlanta area. We are heartbroken for all involved,” the statement said. “We grieve for the victims and their families, and we continue to pray for them. Moreover, we are distraught for the Long family and continue to pray for them as well.”

Posts indicate he attended the church with his mom, dad and his younger sister. His mother organized events at the church, like a movie night with a cotton candy machine.

He wouldn’t even cuss! But he could draw a gun and cold-bloodedly kill young women.

His mom sponsored movie nights! With a cotton candy machine! I bet the movies were all rated “G”, too. But she raised a son with a broken moral compass.

Long was also involved with the church’s Student Ministry Team as recently as 2018, according to minutes from a meeting of the elders. He was one of 11 people who served as team members, which “exists to see students receive Jesus Christ as Lord, and walk in Him, being rooted in the faith.”

The Daily Beast reported an Instagram account that “appeared to belong” to Long professed his love of God and guns.

“Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life,” a tagline for the account said.

Maybe the church and his family taught him the wrong things, and failed to teach him the important things.

You know what else perpetuates the bigotry? That we know this much about the shooter, that we’ve been served up these little dollops of presumably worthy things about him — religion, cotton candy, guns, prayer, nerdy, innocent — and we know nothing about his victims, who are all faceless Asian women who worked at a spa (wink, wink), and whose lives aren’t summed up with a list of trite objects. Now they’ve been reduced to objects themselves, the murderer is the subject, the verb is “killed”. Maybe eventually they’ll send a junior reporter off to get a quick summary of their lives, but it won’t be a front page story.

I wonder if some editor is thinking now that it would be a good idea to send a young Asian woman reporter off to cover that story (and get traumatized all over again) that’ll get buried somewhere in the back of the paper, and looking over the newsroom, is dismayed to notice they haven’t hired anyone to fit that role.

They also need to find someone to rewrite the puff pieces they’ve done on the murderer, to point out that he was a hate-filled gun-waving homicidal Jesus freak from a morally bankrupt family, with no excuses.

The right-wing freakout over Dr Seuss is amusing. The get everything wrong, but there is such wild-eyed outrage over his publisher not publishing books containing offensive illustrations.

Yes. That’s how it works. The people who own his works are exercising their right to not publish them. It’s not censorship, and it’s not driven by some imaginary leftist cancel culture.

I’ve been reading Seuss for most of my life, we read his books to our kids, and there are some that are popular with my granddaughter right now. They’re great books! No one is taking the Cat in the Hat out behind the chemical sheds. But there are definite examples of crude stereotyping of Asian and black people in some of them, and they taint the good.

I knew that Theodore Geisel had worked as a propagandist during WWII, as did some of the great cartoonists associated with the Warner Brothers label. If he were still alive, he’d probably be relieved to see that his racist works were being removed from the shelves of children’s libraries. We shouldn’t forget that Geisel approved of the internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry, or that he used crude steretoypes of African people, but it’s for the best that that stuff isn’t used in humorous primers intended to help children learn to read.

My grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII, and came back filled with a lot of hatred and bigotry (which he did not outgrow, unlike Theodore Geisel). While I would like my grandkids to know something about their great grandparents at some point, I’m not going to start by sitting down and teaching them all the slurs Grandpa used for Asian people. That would be taking the wrong message from the experience.