Some leftists are echoing right-wing talking points about the South being abandoned by the .gov in the wake of Helene. It's just not true y'all. We can talk about how services could be better or about how mutual aid does things the .gov can't/won't, but let's be honest/cautious.
The people I've talked to on the ground have consistently referred to ongoing federal efforts as crucial while also emphasizing that those efforts are not reaching everyone. The scale of the disaster and the nature of the terrain are major factors. It's not abandonment.
Under Trump, we saw true abandonment after Maria. We saw 3K people die unnecessarily. Many people will be found dead in the coming days, but it won't be bc the government wasn't trying to save people. You don't have to like Biden or the .gov (I don't) to admit this distinction.
Folks who are traveling to Chicago for the DNC, please be careful about who you connect with. If you meet strangers who are talking big game about doing "epic" shit, ask yourselves why they're saying these things to someone they don't even know.
They might be cops who want you to get hyped and drunk and run your mouth. We have seen this before. In 2012, a couple of undercovers latched onto three out-of-towners who showed up to protest the NATO summit. They hung out with those guys, got high with them, and talked big.
The two undercovers recorded the activists they targeted in moments of bravado and the state ultimately hit them with terrorism charges. Those young men were not a threat to anyone. They were singled out bc they had previously recorded police in a manner that embarrassed CPD.
When he was still doing climate journalism before retiring young (and not bc that work pays big), Dahr Jamail wrote: "I am learning how to bridge gaps between myself and the people I love who are navigating in a different reality." And fuck if that doesn't resonate.
This is all my therapist heard about recently: what it is to hold so much painful knowledge that you can't just casually dump on other people bc that info has to be parceled carefully alongside ideas about what the fuck to do, or it just demobilizes people or shuts them down.
So you don't want to throw around bad news like Oprah giving away cars. "You get an apocalyptic scenario! And you get an apocalyptic scenario! And you get some bad news about sea mammals!" It doesn't end well.
"What does peace mean in the heart of empire amid the realities of racial capitalism? What does it mean to politicians whose primary concern is the maintenance of an economic system that is driving most life on earth toward extinction? It means order." organizingmythoughts.org/what-does-peac…
Noticing some folks reasoning that particular students don't deserve a militant police response bc they are "peaceful." I don't care if students break windows, shove back, or throw things; none of them deserve a militarized police response. They're protesting a genocide.
Folks should be careful about conjuring standards that determine whether someone is deserving of police violence. It's enough to say that the people protesting a genocide should not be harmed.
I'm not even sure whose values are being appealed to half the time. If people were really worried about "violence," they'd be objecting to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Many people in colonial societies believe (or simply accept as a norm, without argument) that any amount of suffering and death is acceptable within out-groups to sustain their in-group's way of life. This is especially true in the imperial core, where I live.
The idea of a "whatever it takes" stance being adopted by those out-groups, as they pursue a freer existence, or simply demand to survive, inspires genocidal zeal among many people in colonial societies. Standards of decency are about how their in-groups are treated, not others.
When such people are harmed, they say, "Nothing could justify this." When their governments harm others, they point to the injuries they have experienced as justification.