Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

Reactionary Tantrums and Free Advertising

So, as you may have heard, Bud Light’s new brand representative is a trans woman named Dylan Mulvaney. She’s apparently a big deal on TikTok, but I had honestly never heard of her until the conservative temper tantrum over this brand deal. If you’ve heard about this at all, it’s either because you drink Bud Light, or because you heard about people doing stuff like pouring out their beer, or shooting their beer with guns, or running over their beer with pickup trucks. It’s the most I’ve heard about Bud Light in years, which is the whole point.

You can tell conservatives really love capitalism, because every time a corporation makes a bid for free advertising, the wingnuts fall all over themselves in their rush to oblige. That being the case, I think it’s worth posting this old video from Hbomberguy that explains what’s happening, and why. Bud Light doesn’t give a shit about trans people, they just know that most USians aren’t extremist bigots, which means that this will bring in a lot of profit for relatively little advertising investment.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility

Human development is a fascinating topic, about which I know little. If you want the science, PZ could tell you infinitely more than I, but from what I do know, the whole process is fantastically complex. At every point in the development of pre-birth development, there are a myriad of things happening simultaneously, most of which could, in theory, go in a number of ways. Eye color is an obvious one, but there’s also hair color, facial features, vocal chords, the development and function of organs, and so on. Then, after someone’s born, there are all sorts of thing that influence how they develop as they grow up. All those experiences they have, the lessons they learn, the people around them – it all shapes the development of their brain, and while the brain may be considered “developed” in the mid 20s, most people keep learning and changing throughout their lives. Given that incredible plasticity and variation, it seems very, very unlikely to me that the one area of human development that is always consistent would be the division of humanity into precisely two sexes, let alone precisely two genders.

Take eyesight, for example. In addition to the array of eye colors, there’s also a wide spread of functionality. It’s not like the options are “can see” and “can’t see”, there are people who lose sight over their lives, and others who could never see to begin with. There are people who can see fine, but only at the very center of their vision, or people who can only see around the periphery. There are people who can’t see the difference between certain colors, but have excellent vision other than that. I admit that this is an argument from incredulity, in some ways, but the reality is that people who fall outside this miraculous gender binary that we’re supposed to have, have always existed, and have always made their presence known. There is ample evidence that trans people are who they say they are, and that they represent no threat, as a group, to anyone.

The problem is that, despite those facts, there is still a hate movement that is attempting to erase trans people from public life, and to that movement, facts do not matter. I’m absolutely certain that many of the people who are pushing this genocide forward are genuinely operating out of hatred and disgust. At the same time, they very demonstrably lie all the time, and it apparently makes no difference. I think it’s fair to say that they are, as fascists have done in the past, using hatred of a politically powerless minority as a way to rally support, justify extremism, and seize power. It’s been pointed out many times by now, but it bears saying again – this is, pretty much word for word, what the Nazis did, and it’s not a coincidence that this movement seems to share a lot of other rhetoric and “enemies” with Hitler’s party.

So, simply stating the facts is not enough. I suppose my “irrepressible complexity” argument is an effort to get some people to open their minds, if only a little, to a different perspective. Unfortunately, that’s also not enough. They’re coming for trans people right now, in some parts of the United States, which means those of us who want to be considered allies need to step up, however we can. Thankfully, some people have been doing just that, which lets me give some examples of how someone could help.

People have been speaking out at school board meetings and other public events. Legislators and activists have worked to speak against legislation targeting trans people, and to amend that legislation to reduce the harm that it can do. Teachers are working to provide a more thorough understanding of the complexity of sex and gender throughout nature, and people are showing up all over the world to oppose the leaders of this hate movement. Local communities are rallying to defend the targets of fascist hate, and to stand in opposition to fascist rallies, and (which is relevant to today) publicly showing support for the trans community.

We all have limits on what we’re able to do. Not everyone is able to be a frontline warrior, and not everyone has the power or ability to affect legislative change. As far as I can tell, while there’s always a strong need for those willing to put their bodies on the line, liberatory movements tend to understand that it takes a village to raise a movement. There’s a need for all sorts of people, with all sorts of skills, doing all sorts of things. I’m a cis guy, so I wouldn’t presume to speak on what people should do, or what counts as “enough”, but the message I’ve seen for this trans day of visibility, including from FTB alum Dr. Jey McCreight, is that the very least we can do is publicly support trans rights, and publicly show our love for the trans people in our lives.

I’m bad at making myself do actual activism these days (it’s something I’m working on), so this is me, doing the bare minimum. As far as I know, there’s zero chance that this will cost me anything, socially. My immediate family and social circle seem to all be pretty cool people, with trans friends and loved ones of their own. They, like me, have seen the joy of trans people being able to just live, without constantly having to perform a lie, and that makes it easy to understand why that’s a right worth fighting for.

An official “Day of X” generally serves to draw attention to an issue that really ought to be on people’s minds all the time. When it comes to this issue, I’m willing to bet my readers think about it at least as much as I do, so while you probably don’t need my two cents, here’s my advice to myself: Look for ways to help, especially where you are. Even if there’s not an active effort to oppress trans people where you live, there are probably still groups working to build and organize support for trans rights. If you find yourself with money to spare, look for activist groups that are fundraising, or even just trans people who need help making ends meet. Keep an eye out for events like the one in Dublin that I missed today. It’s good to show up for events like that, and they’re a way to network with other activists if you’re looking to do so. If you want to be considered an ally, show yourself to be one through your actions.

Video: Pat Robertson’s surprising trans take from 2013

I’ll have a longer post up later for Trans Day of Visibility today, but I wanted to share this video clip. Apparently, back in 2013, notorious Christian fundamentalist and bigot Pat Robertson was asked about trans people, and his response, while far from ideal, underscores just how recent and manufactured the current trans panic actually is. Pat Robertson said that sometimes women are born in men’s bodies, or men in women’s bodies, and that it’s not a Christian’s place to judge. I don’t know that he’d say the same today, and it doesn’t wash away the harm he’s done, but it’s an interesting glimpse into what a pretty extreme person had to say about the issue a decade ago.

Video: Why is RIKERS Still Open? The War on Bail Reform

The cash bail system in the United States is based on the mistaken notion that, without holding someone’s money hostage, they wouldn’t show up for their court date. There’s not much evidence to support this, and ample evidence that, in effect, cash bail serves to allow poor people to be locked up without trial, simply because they are poor. When those people are being held in a place like Rikers – sometimes for years – the nightmarish conditions can drive them to suicide, or to giving a false confession just to be able to return to their lives in some way. Olayemi Olurin is among other things, an attorney and abolitionist who’s made a name for herself recently with her cutting political commentary. She’s been very vocal about the ongoing human rights violation that is the jail on Rikers Island, and this clip from her new show does a good job making the case to shut down Rikers, and end cash bail:

Environmental Racism Made Worse by Global Warming: West Coast Edition

One key to understanding the world as it exists today, is understanding that most of it has been shaped by white supremacy for most of the last few hundred years. That’s not the only factor, but it’s one of the biggest ones, and it is still an active ideology, in one form or another, in most of the ruling class of the so-called “West”. This doesn’t just affect non-white people in those countries, though, because the colonial empires – primarily the U.S. these days – still exert a great deal of control over the so-called “Global South”.

Environmental racism is one effect of white supremacy, both on the global scale, and on the local scale, as the least powerful are routinely forced to live with exposure to mine runoff, industrial chemicals, coal dust, traffic pollution, and more. When it comes to traffic pollution, keep in mind that a combination of segregation, redlining, and malice in designing the interstate highways system, black communities were very deliberately forced, by the government, to live with higher air pollution, on average, than white communities. As with climate change, none of us are safe from air pollution, but it is not a coincidence that in a country built on white supremacy, as the United States was, non-white people have it the worst.

I say “as with climate change”, but the reality is that climate change isn’t really separable from air pollution. Global warming, in a myriad of ways, both causes air pollution, and makes “existing” pollution more dangerous. I suspect one would find similar results around the globe, but for a local example of how this works, and how it relates to race, we can look at this study of how the rising temperature will make existing inequality worse:

“We have known that air pollution disproportionally impacts communities of color, the poor and communities that are already more likely to be impacted by other sources of environmental pollution,” said the study’s lead author Jordan Kern, assistant professor of forestry and environmental resources at NC State. “What we know now is that drought and heat waves makes things worse.”

For the study, researchers estimated emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter from power plants in California across 500 different scenarios for what the weather could look like in future years, which they called “synthetic weather years.” These years simulated conditions that could occur based on historical wind, air, temperature and solar radiation values on the West Coast between 1953 and 2008. Then by using information about the location of power plants in California and how much electricity they would be generating under different weather conditions, they estimated air pollution within individual counties.

They saw the worst air pollution in the hottest, driest years, which Kern said is due to the demand for more air conditioning during hot years. In addition, drought can impact the availability of hydropower. The excess electricity has to come from somewhere else, which is where fossil fuel plants come in.

“One of the things we were interested in was teasing apart the relative roles of drought, which can be chronic, lasting for months or years, versus heat waves, which can happen like a flash in a pan,” Kern said. “We found drought is a driver of chronic pollution exposure, but heat waves are responsible for these incredible spikes in emissions in a short period of time.”

They also saw that counties with a higher existing pollution burden were disproportionately impacted by pollution during drought and heat waves. Counties that were more diverse by race and ethnicity were also far more likely to be impacted by increased emissions from power plants during droughts and heat waves.

“The more diverse your county is by race and ethnicity, the more likely you are to be impacted by air pollution on an annual basis,” Kern said. “During a drought, the relationship is more pronounced.”

Ideally, those power plants will be replaced with nuclear and renewable power sources, but it doesn’t seem like our leaders are in any hurry to get that done, which means we’re still forced to deal with fossil fuel plants. This is also not a problem that can be viably solved by asking people to not use air conditioning, or by rationing power during heat waves, because those heat waves are getting longer, and hotter, and killing more people as the climate warms. We’ve always needed to adapt our surroundings to deal with temperature, but we’re entering the first phase of human history where increasing numbers of people will need access to artificial cooling to survive.

The study authors also explored policy scenarios, and found that taxing companies for pollution produced would help the problem except during heat waves, but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I find that solution to be inadequate. As with the rail companies, power generation and distribution should be nationalized, as a first step in ending the use of fossil fuels. There may be a place for using taxation to gently guide corporate behavior, but this is not it. Even if I did not believe that electricity should be treated as a public good, these corporations have been continuously demonstrating, for longer than I’ve been alive, that they cannot be trusted to operate responsibly, or with any concern for the public good. Justice demands it, both as a response to the climate crisis, and as one very small step toward dealing with environmental racism.

Cops botch raid, sue homeowner for being mean

Still sick, but I think the congestion is clearing up. Not in a way that makes my head any less filled with sludge, but in a way that I’m not leaking as much.

On an unrelated note, a funny-not-funny story came across my twitter feed, and I figured I’d share it with you, my adoring readers. I’m generally pretty out of touch when it comes to pop culture, but I do remember the song Because I Got High coming around when I was in high school. Until today, that song (the version played on radio anyway) was all I really knew about the artist. I didn’t even know he went by “Afroman”.

Well, as it turns out, his home got raided last year by a whole bunch of cops apparently looking for narcotics and kidnapping victims. Like I said, I don’t know much about the guy. I think the odds are good that he had cannabis somewhere, which the U.S. government erroneously calls a “narcotic”, but I think it’s much more likely that someone lied in the process of getting the warrant. The thing is, Afroman had security cameras in his home, and so got footage of the cops breaking his gate, breaking down his door, going through all of his stuff, and taking at least some of the cash they found in the process. They also messed with his security cameras.

Now, my non-USian readers may not be aware of this, but in addition to the problem of white supremacy in law enforcement, cops also have a habit of raiding homes based on flimsy evidence (or just raiding the wrong homes), destroying property, traumatizing and sometimes assaulting or killing people, and leaving without an apology or any compensation for the destruction. I don’t know about you, but that would piss me off, and if I had video of someone breaking into my home and stealing my money – yeah, I’d probably post the footage and write about it. What I wouldn’t do is make a music video, because I am not a musician.

Afroman, on the other hand, is.

Now, if cops were halfway decent people, were at all secure in themselves, or had a sense of humor, they’d see the funny in this, and move on. They fucked up and it made them look bad. Unfortunately, it seems that all cops are, well… They’re suing him for emotional distress and violation of privacy because he filmed them breaking into his home on a bullshit warrant, and made a music video or two with the footage:

Seven members of the Adams County Sheriff’s Office who raided Joseph Foreman’s home last year are now suing him claiming, among other things, that he invaded their privacy.

Four deputies, two sergeants and a detective are claiming Foreman (a.k.a. “Afroman”) took footage of their faces obtained during the raid and used it in music videos and social media posts without their consent, a misdemeanor violation under Ohio Revised Code.

They’re also suing on civil grounds, saying Foreman’s use of their faces (i.e. personas) in the videos and social media posts resulted in their “emotional distress, embarrassment, ridicule, loss of reputation and humiliation.”

The plaintiffs say they’re entitled to all of Foreman’s profits from his use of their personas. That includes, according to the complaint, proceeds from the songs, music videos and live event tickets as well as the promotion of Foreman’s “Afroman” brand, under which he sells beer, marijuana, t-shirts and other merchandise.

Oh yeah, that’s right – they broke into his home, traumatized his kids, broke the home itself, and stole money from him, knowing that there’s basically no way for them to be held accountable for damage or rights violations, but they are the victims here. I’m willing to bet that this lawsuit is both amplifying their humiliation far, far beyond what it otherwise would have been, and it’s probably also increasing Afroman’s profits from the whole affair. Maybe this whole thing would have gone better for them if they’d apologized and offered to help him repair his door.

On the question of “why was kidnapping on the warrant?”, I’m inclined to think that it was to justify a no-knock raid where they broke his door off its frame and went in with guns drawn. “Kidnapping” seems to be the go-to justification for violent raids. To me, that says they wanted an excuse to kill him, either “accidentally” or on purpose. I’m sort of dismissing the idea that they honestly had reason to believe there was a kidnapping victim there, not just because they didn’t find any evidence of it, but also because, as I’ve said before, cops lie all the time, get warrants for this shit far too easily, and suffer zero consequences for destroying homes and lives. At this point there’s far more reason to doubt cops than to believe anything they say.

Afroman’s response to the lawsuit sums things up well, I think:

“They can tear my door off the hinges, steal my money, disconnect my camera, and now in their lawsuit they’re saying I’m humiliating them,” Foreman tells Rolling Stone. “They humiliated me! So I guess I won the humiliation contest.”

Foreman was in Chicago when the cops raided his home on Aug. 21, 2022. His now ex-wife was there, however, and took several videos to accompany all the footage from the security cameras. Foreman says she also FaceTimed him so he could speak with one of the officers. He remembers asking the officer if they’d found anything, or if he was under arrest. He claims the officer replied “No” to both questions.

Foreman says he then asked, “Will you help me put my door back on the hinges?” The artist says the officer “cracked this grin, started waddling his head, and said, ‘I’m not required to do that.’”

That interaction provided the primary fodder for “Will You Help Me Repair My Door?,” with the song offering a comprehensive beat-by-beat breakdown of the raid. Foreman croons about — and shares actual video of — the cops searching his suit pockets and CD collection, disconnecting his security system, breaking down his front door, and allegedly taking his “legal, work-hard-everyday, pay-taxes money.” (The aforementioned money issue involved the Adams County Sheriff’s Office coming up $400 short when they returned the confiscated cash to Foreman last November; the issue was finally resolved in February after an independent investigation.)

[…]

Whatever money Foreman has made off the situation now appears to be in the crosshairs of the seven plaintiffs from the Adams County Sheriff’s Office. The officers are seeking damages in excess of $25,000 on four of the counts listed in the suit, as well as attorneys fees, and a court order that would prohibit Foreman from publishing any other content related to the raid. (A lawyer for the plaintiffs did not return Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.)

Foreman, however, hardly seems phased. On Wednesday, March 22, he shared a statement from his lawyer, Anna Castellini, on Instagram, who said they’re awaiting the results of a public records request from Adams County and are “planning to counter sue for the unlawful raid, money being stolen, and for the undeniable damage this had on [Foreman’s] family, career and property.”

Because of the raid, and especially the issue over the confiscated cash, Foreman believes it’s important to “identify” the officers involved. “The public needs to know,” he says. “Because when they keep stuff quiet in little rooms, it might take a crazy turn. But when the public is aware, they go to do something that makes sense.”

These people are supposed to be public servants. We’re told every day that they protect and serve the people, even as it becomes more obvious every day that they serve the wealthy capitalist class, and the white supremacist hierarchy of the United States. In that interview, Afroman talks about how the stuff mentioned in Because I Got High, like missing court dates and having cars impounded, isn’t funny at all, but turning it into humor can be a way to process and cope with hard times. Likewise, having your kids and spouse held at gunpoint isn’t funny, but the songs that he made out of it absolutely are. I’m going to conclude with that, and leave you with what I would call the most angry of the songs I’ve heard about this (which is still an incredibly goofy music video). I think I would have just been angry, but he took something horrific, and made it funny.

Video: Gender Criticals Don’t Understand Female-Only Spaces

Every cavity in my skull is filled with gunk right now, so I’m doing the bare minimum and focusing on healing. I recently planted that pollinator garden I was totally gonna set up last spring (can’t imagine why anyone would think I had ADHD), and I’ll post pictures as soon as I figure out why my phone’s camera stopped working right after my last software update. The location gets limited sun, so I over-planted the seed mix, and I’ll thin things out if some plants clearly can’t handle the light conditions. That’s about as much consciousness as I’ve got to stream for you, so here’s Mica from Ponderful discussing the topic of female-only spaces:

Short-term and Long-term: Democratic Governor Makes Minnesota a Sanctuary for Trans People

I am, in general, pretty cynical about the U.S. electoral system. It’s designed to empower conservatism, and has been shaped to make change that benefits the working class nearly impossible. Yes, there are victories, but every single one has come as a result of decades of grueling and dangerous work by the people who most need that change. The Republicans want the U.S. to be a fascist, white supremacist state, in which the power of capitalists – the aristocracy – is unchallengeable, as long as they support the fascist agenda. The Democrats, or at least their leadership, still seem to want the world to be held in stasis in the mid 1990s, but will go along with social change when someone else does the work.

That’s not exactly a difficult choice to make, but neither is it a pleasant one. When it comes to foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, though the Dems are, on rare occasions, a bit less hawkish. Biden won’t try to hunt down and murder trans people, but he’ll continue working to undermine any alternatives to capitalism, and to prevent things like universal healthcare.

In a lot of ways, at least to someone who pays attention, workers have become alienated from politics in a manner similar to how they’ve been alienated from their labor. It’s something that affects our lives on a daily basis, but we have very little say in how it goes. In both cases, getting change that helps us, and not just the capitalist class, requires us to work together outside of a system that very much does not want us to do that.

It’s frustrating, and for those working to make things better, it’s often exhausting. I can easily understand why so many people often try to avoid thinking about it. We can have massive demonstrations to change policing, and after paying a bit of lip service, the Democrats go ahead with giving cops more money, while the GOP accuses them of defunding – something they have neither the courage, nor the desire to do – and howls for more violence from police

That’s why I advocate for systemic change, outside of electoral politics. Our system does change, but it does so slowly, and at great cost. The decades it took to ban leaded gasoline, or to end segregation, or to get gay rights, or to get trans rights – people died during those delays, because of those delays. People are dying right now, because of the backlash against advances in trans rights.

And as hard as people fight for their right to their own damned lives in the United States, that barely touches the horrors of the military-industrial complex, and colonial economic policies. Find me any politician in the U.S., and I can find you a reason why they should not be trusted. Bernie defended the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and has voted for any number of objectionable things. Katie Porter just talked about how impressed she was by the far-right ethno-nationalist Benjamin Netanyahu, and her support for Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. I’m certain that a great many politicians are pressured into supporting stuff that they don’t like, but it’s often hard to tell when that’s the case, and when they just support bad things.

It’s discouraging. I said I get why people just tune out, but I also get why people become intensely invested in a version of anti-establishment politics that says, “both sides are the same, so let’s burn it all down”. If only it were so easy.

The road to revolutionary change is slow, difficult, and full of frustration. Personally, I lean towards the opinion that – for all their evils – it’s better to vote for the Democrats in the short term. I say that not because I think they’ll do what I want, but because I don’t think that what I want can even be done, within the U.S. political system. From that perspective, I’m not looking for who will fix things for me, I’m looking for who will do the least harm and/or the most good, within the confines of our unjust and corrupt government. The revolution, of course, will have to come from the bottom.

I think there’s a danger in that perspective as well, however. We need systemic change, so anything short of that is inadequate, right? Well, no. I don’t think so.

I was, for a short time, intrigued by accelerationism – the idea that real change will arise spontaneously when conditions become unbearable. This is basically identical to the justification for the cruel and deadly sanctions placed on places like Iraq or Cuba – sure, it hurts the populace, but that’ll just give them incentive to rise up and free themselves from their oppressive rulers! Maybe that’s how it worked in France that one time, but in general, when people are struggling to survive, that takes up most of their time and energy. I think that the social networking that can come from that struggle can, in theory, become the foundation for a future revolution, but that requires the addition of time and resources beyond bare survival.

That’s why it’s so important that, as we work for a better future, we do what we can to save and improve people’s lives now, even if each improvement is far to small, and far too slow for any real satisfaction.

Fortunately, some changes are pretty big, especially for those people directly affected:

[Minnesota Governor Tim Walz] signed Executive Order 23-03 on Wednesday. It orders state agencies to protect people seeking gender-affirming healthcare in Minnesota, as well as the entities that provide it. State agencies are also specifically forbidden from providing information or assisting investigations to penalize trans people and their allies for seeking transition-related care. Judgments from other states that terminate parental rights because the parent provided their child with transition-related care will not be recognized by the state of Minnesota, and the state will also refuse to comply with subpoenas that seek information about trans people who travel to Minnesota to obtain care.

Additionally, the executive order tasks the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) with preparing a report that summarizes the literature on the safety and effectiveness of gender-affirming care, to be presented to the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Legislature by the end of the year. The order also strengthens protections for insurance coverage of transition-related care and mandates MDH to refuse to approve HMO contracts that discriminate against people on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.

Noting that other states have “curtailed access to, or even criminalized” transition-related care, Walz’s executive order recognizes that “these actions pose a grave threat to the health of LGBTQIA+ individuals by preventing them from affirming their gender identities through safe and scientifically proven treatments.”

The executive order will be effective 15 days from the date of publication. It comes alongside a bill, HF 146, that would enshrine these same protections into Minnesota state law. Introduced by Rep. Leigh Finke, the state’s first out trans legislator, the bill will likely pass the House in the coming weeks, but Governor Walz told PBS that the escalating attacks on trans rights in other states made the need for such protections more urgent.

“Families who have fled are already here, and many more are planning to come,” Finke told the Minnesota Reformer. “We’re going to be ready to take care of them, and to provide them with the health care they need.”

This is great news, and it’s why I tend to prefer Democrats. Trans people, and the parents of trans kids, have been fleeing Republican-controlled states for a little while now, because of the growing efforts there to carry out a trans genocide. The problem is, there are so many anti-trans laws, and they’re coming so fast, it can be hard to know where to flee to. Moving is expensive, especially if you’re moving to a different state, so it’s not hard to believe that someone could move to a place that seems safer, see that change, and be stuck because they used up their resources. Journalist and activist Erin Reed has been maintaining a risk assessment map for just this purpose, and while she still needs to update it to include the latest info, she has said that this bill will upgrade Minnesota to being among the best states in the U.S. for trans people to be able to live their lives in relative peace.

I am especially glad to hear that Minnesota will, explicitly, not help those states seeking to persecute trans people. The companion bill, as far as I can parse the language, expands emergency jurisdiction over children present in Minnesota even if that’s not officially their home state. I believe the standing law gives that jurisdiction in cases of abandonment or abuse, while the new law expands that to include the inability to get gender-affirming care. I think there’s a strong argument for that inability being a form of abuse, but given how many people clearly disagree, it’s good to see it spelled out like that.

In the long term, the USian fascist movement is still going strong, and there’s still a very real danger that the GOP will take over the federal government again, and do far more damage than the last time. As I said earlier, the U.S. is set up to empower the aristocracy, and to empower conservatism. It will take much, much more than this to actually safeguard trans rights, or any other civil rights, for that matter. It will take more than this to end US support for fascists and their ilk in other countries. It will take more than this to build the world we want. There’s a lot more work to do, for the long-term.

Humans don’t experience life in the long-term, though, and this isn’t just me saying “people can’t plan ahead”. When we’re hungry, we need food. When we’re cold, we need warmth. When we’re being attacked, we need defense. It does no good to promise that those things will be available to us in 20 years, because if we don’t get them now, we won’t be here to collect then, even if that promise isn’t a lie.

Laws like this save lives, and while that should be enough to support them as-is, laws like this also move us towards our long-term goals. Those lives that are saved or improved by legal protections, are very likely to be a powerful part of continuing movements for liberation. Our dream of a better world depends on our collective power, and that depends on all of us caring for and protecting each other now. That doesn’t mean we try to make the movement risk-free, but rather that we do everything we can to ensure that people can choose what risks they take on. All we have is us, and so it’s extremely important that we take care of, and empower “us”.

I doubt that governor Waltz wants all the same changes I do, and I’m sure he’d be happy to send in the police to oppose a movement for economic democracy, for example. I won’t say that none of that matters, but it matters far less than this does, at this point in time. This executive order is a clear win, and I hope that HF 146 is passed into law very soon. The fascists are coming for trans people right now, and it’s great to see people in government fighting back in a materially effective manner.

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Important Video: “Gender Criticals” & Autism

I’m not sure where I first encountered the despicable practice of using autistic people as a political weapon, but it was probably the anti-vax movement. Some time after that, I learned why so many autistic people hate the organization Autism Speaks, and not long after that, I started to become more aware of how our society systematically fails, abuses, and kills people with all sorts of disabilities and neurotypes. In recent years, the reactionary “Gender Critical” movement has been using the bigoted notion that autistic people don’t know themselves or their own experiences, to attack trans people. It’s something that requires dismissing what autistic trans people have to say, often while claiming that those same people “don’t have a voice”, and so need some Rowling-style “feminist” to speak for them.

Mica of the Youtube channel Ponderful does an excellent job dismantling this bullshit, and giving her perspective as an autistic cis woman of the sort that the transphobes claim to speak for. Fair warning, this video does get a bit dark, as it goes into topics such as the frequency with which disabled people are murdered by their parents and other caregivers, and abusive “treatments” for autism. It’s an informative video, and it closes out with comments from autistic trans people, because it turns out that they actually do know their own minds, and they have voices with which to speak for themselves.

 

Video: How pseudoscientific “911 call analysis” became a weapon against US citizens

Back in October, I posted a Münecat video dismantling the bullshit of “body language experts”, and one of the problems she points to is the destructive use of these so-called experts in the legal system. 911 call analysis seems to be a version of that, but instead of body language, we have cops and their ilk “analyzing” 911 calls, and arbitrarily deciding whether they think the person making the call is lying. This fits in well alongside polygraph tests and lying about evidence, as another tool police can use to try to bully or gaslight a person into making a false confession:

As you heard, her [20 year old] son initially said that his mom had killed herself, before realizing that she had been bound with a belt and stabbed many times.

The cops pulled him into an interrogation room and kept him there for 13 hours, convinced that he was the murderer. Why? Well, why on earth would he have assumed his mom committed suicide? (3:23)

They were convinced it was him, but eventually, the cops checked his location data on his phone and found that he was nowhere near his home when his mom was murdered, and DNA at the scene was connected to a man who had been arrested multiple times for burglary in the past and who was eventually convicted of the crime.

In the Rebecca Watson video below, you can hear the 911 call (there’s a content warning before that point, in case you need it), and yeah – the kid sounds all over the place, and initially mis-understood what he was seeing. Based on that, and some cop’s opinion of what he would do under those circumstances, they interrogated him for 13 hours. I think most of us are aware of how miserable it would be to be locked in a featureless room with a cop for 13 hours, constantly being accused of murder, and fed stories about what a shitty person you are. How much worse would that be if your mother had just been murdered? If you had found her body?

And all they had to do to avoid tormenting that poor man was check the location data on his phone, or wait for the DNA evidence. They didn’t do that first, because they care more about getting a conviction – any conviction – than they do about the danger of imprisoning, or executing, an innocent person. The more you dig into the policing system in the U.S., the more examples you find of cops just absolutely wrecking people’s lives because they’re too lazy, too cowardly, too sadistic, or too full of themselves to do their jobs properly.

Now, I don’t have a very large audience, but there’s always a chance someone will come along and read this, who might think I’m being too hard on cops. Maybe this is a technique that’s supported by science, or that was pushed on cops, right? Well, no.

In 2009, a cop named Tracy Harpster, from a small town in Ohio that rarely saw a murder, published a preliminary study in which he combed through 100 911 calls, half of which had been made by the person who was later convicted of the crime being reported. He did this to identify patterns, coming up with a list of features he noticed in the “guilty” calls, like not immediately pleading for help, not demonstrating sufficient urgency, being polite by using words like “sorry” and “thank you,” giving extraneous information, or insisting that the victim is dead when their condition isn’t 100% known to the caller.

Though Harpster had no scientific training, that kind of analysis IS normal and even necessary in science – it’s a first step that says “hey, here’s a pattern I noticed in THIS dataset.” But because the researcher at this point is specifically looking for ANY data points that stand out, literally looking for the anomalies, it’s impossible to say that those anomalies will be found in a larger dataset. For instance, if I have a bag of 100 different colored marbles, I can reach in, pull out a handful, and record what I notice: 7 blue marbles and 3 red. That doesn’t give me a definitive answer but a hypothesis: if you pull one more marble out of that bag, it has a 70% chance of being blue. The next step is to test that hypothesis by reaching in again and grabbing a new handful and seeing if the numbers line up. And then doing it again, and again, and again.

Harpster never bothered with that crucial second step of actually testing the hypothesis. Others did, with one study in 2020 and another from last year both finding no correlation between Harpster’s list and actual cases of deception. But those studies haven’t mattered, because Harpster’s preliminary analysis had already been shared by the FBI to law enforcement agencies across the country, who immediately started putting it to the test and finding great “success” at identifying criminals based on their 911 calls. These successes encouraged Harpster to start charging for 2-day training sessions, paid for by taxpayers, in which he trained investigators on how to use his magical checklist.

Investigators quickly realized that because there was no actual scientific backing for the checklist, they would have to sneak it into court cases without actually calling Harpster (or “trained” detectives) as an expert witness, since there are rules for what qualifies as expert testimony in court. ProPublica has reams of documents that catch prosecutors doing this red-handed, creating a playbook on how to use Harpster’s now-debunked pseudoscience in court without subjecting it to scrutiny:

“First, identify law enforcement witnesses who have taken Harpster’s course. Then tell them how to testify about the guilty indicators by broadly referencing training and experience. As Esteves, the prosecutor in Iowa, put it in an email: “Have them testify why this 911 call is inconsistent with an innocent caller, consistent with someone with a guilty mind.”

“Next, prime jurors during jury selection and opening arguments about how a normal person should and shouldn’t react in an emergency. Give them a transcript of the 911 call and then play the audio. “When they hear it,” a prosecutor in Louisiana once told Harpster, “it will be like a Dr. Phil ‘a-ha’ moment.” Finally, remind jurors about the indicators during closing arguments. “Reinforce all the incriminating sections of the call,” another prosecutor wrote, “omissions, lack of emotion, over emotion, failure to act appropriately.”

“Juries love it, it’s easy for them to understand,” Harpster once explained to a prosecutor, “unlike DNA which puts them to sleep.”

Cops lie. They lie all the time, and they lie to everyone. They lie to juries, they lie to attorneys, they lie to the general public, and they lie to judges. They’re trained to lie, encouraged to lie, and rewarded for lying, and they do not care how many lives they destroy. It seems unlikely to me that that will change so long as we maintain this unaccountable class of violent people, who are given rights and authority over everyone else. 

There is, of course, more to the story than these quotes. For the rest of it, check out the transcript linked at the top, or Rebecca Watson’s excellent video below: