gAlienLifeform

gAlienLifeform OP , 14 hours ago

They were getting large donations from the police department, and the police department stopped donating because of their support for BLM.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. From the article,

Then, Jacob Blake was shot by police seven times in Kenosha, prompting the statewide coalition of advocacy agencies Embrace is a part of to signal their support for police reform and Embrace to release an anti-racism statement.

In response, the local law enforcement groups, which had been close working partners, pulled out of collaborative groups and the Sheriff of Barron County resigned from Embrace’s Board of Directors.

Katie Bement is the Executive Director of Embrace.

“He notified us that he would no longer support the organization or advocates for our services when survivors called 911 and he contacted other departments within our service area across county lines and told them to stop working with us too. And they did,” explained Bement.

They had been receiving $25,000 annually from the Barron County Department of Health and Human Services, but that was cut after Embrace released their statement.

“There were a lot of attempts to try to figure out, kind of, how to repair those relationships and get the funding returned,” explained Bement.

“We didn't think that we could do this work without the criminal legal system, without being aligned with the criminal legal system,” she said.

She explained that Embrace and local law enforcement agencies had spent years developing collaborative programming that Embrace didn’t want to see crumble.

Some of the 14 law enforcement agencies in the area still refer survivors to Embrace, but that’s the extent of their relationships.

[Bolding added throughout]

gAlienLifeform OP , 14 hours ago

Just to be clear about that, it wasn't just this organization, lots of domestic violence shelters and support orgs across the country lost federal funding recently when Congress cut the budget for the Victims of Crime Act. Like, here's another news story from South Carolina all about that same problem playing out there,

https://web.archive.org/web/20240515182502/https://www.wistv.com/2024/04/27/crime-victims-services-risk-40-federal-funding-cut/

gAlienLifeform OP , 14 hours ago

Actually, it was a county health department that pulled its funding in response to the pro-BLM statement and law enforcement outcry. Police departments had been participating in "collaborative programming" with this organization (not sure if that's just trainings or something else) and stopped doing that.

gAlienLifeform OP , 14 hours ago

Good question/fair point, let me improve that headline a bit

gAlienLifeform , 1 day ago

I'm going to echo everyone else recommending this podcast, it's absolutely incredible non-fiction story telling and it will really deepen your understanding of how we all got to this point in history.

To answer your question, I actually think season 8 (all about the French Commune in 1871 and how external pressures can end up causing liberals and socialists to go to war with each other) is the best one for explaining it, but it will be really confusing if you don't listen to season 7 first (which is all about 1848, when France revolted against a liberal monarchy and most of western Europe went "hey, we should do that too, but differently"), which will be really confusing if you don't listen to season 6 first (all about France 1830, when the liberal monarchy who would be overthrown in 1848 overthrew the absolutist monarchy that came before them) and all its supplemental episodes (all about different western European leaders who would see rebellions in 1848).

Season 3 (all about the French revolution everyone knows about in the 1790s) will help understand a few things going on in 6 and 7, and is also worth listening to just to understand why and how liberalism got going, but I don't think it's strictly necessary to get seasons 6-8, and 3 is ridiculously long season because the French revolution is just an insane series of back and forth plot twists that doesn't let up.

That all said, if you're prepared for something ridiculously long, the final season (all about the Russian revolutions, 1905 and 1917) is an incredibly informative and interesting listen too, and kind of completes the series (this is extremely reductive, but season 1-3 are sort of the "liberalism was a big improvement over what came before it" seasons, 6-8 are sort of the "but liberalism had its problems, which socialism tried to answer" seasons, and 10 is the "but socialism has its problems too" season).

Lastly, it doesn't really touch on the liberalism vs socialism thing, but season 4 (a history of the Haitian revolution that highlights how incredibly destructive racism and colonialism are) is probably the one season I would make everyone in the world listen to if I could.

gAlienLifeform , 2 days ago

Yeah, different article I just found does a good job explaining this,

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/middleeast/death-toll-gaza-fatalities-un-intl-latam/index.html

The clarification comes after the UN humanitarian agency OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) published a report on May 8 with revised data regarding the number of Palestinian casualties in the war. The UN agency in its report reduced the number of women and children believed to have been killed in the war by nearly half.

The number was reduced because the UN says it is now relying on the number of deceased women and children whose names and other identifying details have been fully documented, rather than the total number of women and children killed. The ministry says bodies that arrive at hospitals get counted in the overall death count.

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq told a daily briefing at the UN that the health ministry in Gaza recently published two separate death tolls – an overall death toll and a total number of identified fatalities. In the UN report, only the total number of fatalities whose identities (such as name and date of birth) have been documented was published, leading to confusion.

According to Haq, the ministry published a breakdown for 24,686 fully identified deaths out of the total 34,622 fatalities recorded in Gaza as of April 30. The fully identified death toll comprises of 7,797 children, 4,959 women, 1,924 elderly, and 10,006 men, the UN spokesperson said, citing the Gaza health ministry.

The health authority in Gaza noted that the documentation process of casualties’ full identification details is still ongoing, Haq added.

Two officials from the Palestinian Ministry of Health have told CNN that although the ministry keeps a separate death toll for identified and unidentified individuals, the total number of people killed remains unchanged.

The total number of dead also does not include the approximately 10,000 people who are still missing and trapped under the rubble, the officials added.

gAlienLifeform , 2 days ago

Yeah, just as an example -

Marty "Big Iron" Robbins released a song in 1966 called "Ain't I Right" that said people who came down to southern towns last summer to show people a new way of life were actually a bunch of secret Communists who didn't care about America and just wanted to sow discord.

Some context: in the summer of 1964, a bunch of civil rights activists went down to southern states to register people to vote for an event called "Freedom Summer," which led to them being harassed by local police and eventually at least 3 of them being murdered by the KKK. This was a huge headline dominating story that made the American mainstream actually start paying attention to the civil rights movement and start looking at how bad racism in the south had gotten, so Robbins was totally reacting to and trying to push against that change in popular opinion when he released that song.

gAlienLifeform , 5 days ago

Speaking of remembering a time before,

Before Obergefell made marriage equality the law of the land in 2015, it was a very live political issue that lots of Republican scumbags vocally opposed and campaigned on hard. Target made a bunch of donations to a lot of those Republican scumbags in the 2010 election cycle because they wanted tax cuts, got called out on it, promised to do better, and then resumed donating to those same people a few months later.

Two years later, in the election of 2012, Minnesota Republicans got an amendment to their state constitution on the ballot that would have banned gay marriage outright. Target ran ads encouraging gay couples to do their wedding registries at their stores but refused to ever take a position on that amendment, which was ultimately narrowly defeated.

The only color of the rainbow Target has ever cared about is green.

gAlienLifeform , 5 days ago

Fair enough, I guess my point (besides just making sure these couple of historical footnotes don't go down the memory hole) is that this is all totally in keeping with Target's pattern of pretending to be progressive to get the conscientious consumer dollar and then backtracking the second they think it's in their interest to do so

gAlienLifeform , 5 days ago

If Books Could Kill did a fantastic podcast episode a while back that dove into how completely fucking stupid the 2023 backlash to Target and Bud Light both were and how mainstream media really helped them along by refusing to report it with any depth or detail

You should be able to find it here next to the title "BONUS: Conservatives vs. Pride Month" - https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2040953.rss

gAlienLifeform , 6 days ago

A spokesperson for SpartanNash, the parent company of Family Fare, said store employees responded “with the utmost compassion and professionalism.”

“Ensuring there is ample safe, affordable housing continues to be a widespread issue nationwide that our community needs to partner in solving,” Adrienne Chance said, declining further comment.

Warren said the woman was cooperative and quickly agreed to leave. No charges were pursued.

“We provided her with some information about services in the area,” the officer said. “She apologized and continued on her way. Where she went from there, I don’t know.”

I feel like there's very few opportunities these days to say this, but the cops and business owners in this situation actually seem to have behaved in a very humane and decent way here, so that's a nice surprise

gAlienLifeform , 6 days ago

I mean, I would add on not sticking her with a criminal charge as an important thing they didn't do here, because the whole story of "oh you missed a court date because we sent the notice to an address you haven't lived at in years, so now we're fining you on top of the original criminal charge that brought you in here, [soon] wow, you've got a lot of missed court dates and unpaid fines, you look like a career criminal who needs the book thrown at them" happens a lot,

And there's a very real chance that the contractors looked the other way and then this woman's residence got discovered they could have lost their licenses or otherwise gotten in trouble

Like, I think what you're pointing out is a really important perspective and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that a woman with a home was made homeless here, but I think a lot of relatively powerless people here tried to be as humane as an inhumane system would let them be, and I think that's important too. I think the way this world gets less shitty is when more people start making these little steps towards revolutionary kindness and then those little steps start getting bigger and bigger.

gAlienLifeform , 6 days ago

Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues.

"The Catholic Church," it told us, "teaches that masturbation is a grave moral disorder."

No, I would say Justin is about the same level of strange in the ways that matter

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 days ago

I think one thing we all should have learned from the past 8 years or so is that there are no dumb questions when it comes to the checks and balances on our various government entities and who is actually going to follow whose authority

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 days ago

That's definitely one path to go down, another way I would try to figure it out would be to subpoena all the officers who were there that day and make them tell you who gave them their orders, which will probably lead you to some field commander or another mid level person who was given orders who could be subpoenad and asked the same question, and so on

gAlienLifeform OP , 6 days ago

Fair enough, there's no good reason something like that wouldn't be possible, but there certainly are reasons it will probably never happen

gAlienLifeform , 6 days ago

These missing cases have included Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey, the force’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, and six deputy chiefs whose assignments include the department’s transit bureau and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The allegations against these high-ranking officers include being “discourteous” to a suspect, drinking while on duty, improper use of department property, and wrongful searches, frisks and uses of force.

In the chief of department’s case, Maddrey was docked 45 vacation days over a 2015 incident in which he impeded internal affairs officials who were investigating an altercation with an ex-lover and fellow officer. The incident ended with the officer brandishing a gun at Maddrey. When a reporter looked up Maddrey’s discipline record on Wednesday, the department’s system reported no disciplinary cases against him.

[Bolding added]

Imagine how it would go if some NYPD officers walked into a situation where two people who weren't cops (or friends or cops) were having a breakup fight and one brandished a firearm at the other

gAlienLifeform , 8 days ago

Motion denied

gAlienLifeform , 8 days ago

They're very good at identifying talented developers /s

gAlienLifeform , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

The auditing firm for Trump Media and the auditor’s owner were charged Friday with “massive fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission for work that affected more than 1,500 SEC filings, the federal regulator announced.

The auditor, BF Borgers CPA and its owner Benjamin Borgers have agreed to be permanently suspended from practicing as accountants before the SEC, and also agreed to pay a combined $14 million in civil penalties, without* admitting or denying the allegations, the SEC said.

So we didn't find out that the SEC thought this auditor committed criminal conduct until the SEC had already negotiated this settlement where they don't have to admit any wrongdoing? Bang up job enforcing the laws there guys, that will definitely deter this kind of conduct from other bad actors in the accounting industry /s

*The article actually says "with" there, but the SEC post it links to says "without," so I'm fairly certain that was a typo in the news article

e; It really should go without saying, but since the conversations on this website have effectively reduced my whole personality to "why aren't more people talking about how this Democratic administration's handling of the federal government is falling short of what that party says they stand for," I feel like I should say I doubt we'd see even this pittance of enforcement out of a Republican government, so, yeah, I sincerely hope these pathetic losers get another four years to keep disappointing me because the alternative is still a hell of a lot worse

gAlienLifeform OP , 12 days ago

I mean, I'm not surprised that border patrol are being power tripping assholes to a Democratic governor and the Biden administration isn't lifting a finger to stop them, but usually when I predict things like this people get upset with me

Either way, it's a great example of why rescheduling weed isn't sufficient and Biden needs to deschedule it immediately. Fuck it, he can say he's "returning the issue of marijuana to the states," Haley moderate Republicans voters should like that.

e; actually she apparently supported a national abortion ban, guess I misremembered that one