Renakj.bsky.social
@ReenNahMean
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repentant lawyer and tell-all mom. student of radical social movements and believer in PIC abolition. she/her
Los Angeles, CA
Joined March 2009
the gaslighting of congress and legislatures and white supremacy and capitalism has made it hard for so many of us to see that even our wildest policy dreams are excessively reasonable. It's the status quo that's audacious.
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i cannot believe we live in a society where so many think this makes sense. endangering the lives of countless people so cops can play fast and furious over property theft?!.
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"bUT tOURism IS GOod FOr loCAL eCONomies.".
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I can't express to you how nearly unheard of it is for an Ivy League to allow the CITY POLICE (not even the campus police) to come ARREST (especially white) STUDENTS on campus. for ANYTHING much less protesting? Things are shifting rapidly and horrifyingly in this moment.
Police are currently arresting around 20 Jewish Brown University students non-violently demonstrating for a ceasefire now!
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please don't watch kanye's interview with tucker carlson. but pleeeaasee understand that his choice to go on THAT platform + willfully, strategically misrepresent Gabriella's words & actions, was a deliberate attempt to incite racist, extremist violence against her.
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y'all are fucking sick. Black women are 3x more likely to die during childbirth than white women. Maternal mortality has increased by 33% since 2020. 84% of maternal deaths are preventable. The Black infant mortality rate is 2x the white infant mortality rate. SICK.
Conservative groups have sued to shut down the Abundant Birth Project, which provides 150 pregnant Black San Franciscans a $1,000 monthly stipend. They allege the project illegally discriminates by giving the stipend only to people of a specific race
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this is what we mean when we say crime is a social and racialized construct AND that media drives mass criminalization. white kids hop a pool fence: it's a fun summer montage scene on Laguna Beach or Sweet Valley High. Black kids do it: filmed by helicopters for the 6:00 news.
Several children were caught breaking into one of the many Baltimore City pools that remain closed with their gates chained. The break-in was caught on Monday. Footage details the children breaking in, setting up "camp", and entering the water along with a scooter.
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watching white "feminists" who have had absolutely nothing to say about the slaughter of Palestinian entire lineages, NICU babies, and pregnant women express "outrage" and "sorrow" because Margot Robbie didn't get an Oscar nomination.
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gives me chills that people can see somebody experiencing houselessness & feel that the governmental failure is the fact that they have to see or be proximate to that person, not the fact that we continually fail to address the conditions that leave people without housing.
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@kwateleoyo @JiorJette to this day i associate the smell of burning plastic with the sweet relief of being at the end of 8+ hours of no food, uninterrupted pain and the same nollywood film on a loop.
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it is extremely wild to watch "liberal" universities and public defender offices threaten their staff and students with punitive bans on using terms like "settler colonialism" and "genocide." . the very same people feigning horror at the right's CRT bans are now imposing them.
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do you know what really effectively reduces the number of people experiencing houselessness and mental health crises? consensual, quality and free/affordable healthcare access and infrastucture, universal basic income and infrastructure and meaningful investments in housing.
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@PallaviGunalan Similarly, walking by an unhoused person and their dog and coming back to give resources. to the dog.
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he's mad that fashion, entertainment & (most) Black folks took her side against his. and because he can't just take a well-deserved L, he took his grievance to those he knows are most primed and eager to attack Black people, women, fat people & so many of us. it's unforgiveable.
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the terms he uses to talk about her--liberal nazi; woke mob; blatantly lying and saying she said she felt "traumatized by the t-shirt"--are calculated dog whistles used to rile up the white supremacists, extremists & hate groups who stay organized and rabid for their next target.
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my mom to my 6 week old daughter, directly in front of my face: i have never seen a prettier baby girl, not even close!.
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@SimonDalling @PlannedTheRide You actually don't have to harm anyone or even be armed to be charged with carjacking and, even if you did, how is the STATE then injuring/killing additional random people a rational solution?.
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bedtime has been a disaster recently with our 4yo. every step of the way is a struggle. tonight i asked him frankly: baby, what's the deal? why is this so hard?. he said: everyone is paying attention to what we need to do and how fast I do it but nobody is paying attention to me.
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another person died a preventable death on Rikers today. the system decided $1000 bail was worth his life. why do we experience interpersonal violence as a crisis but don't have that same energy for state violence whose blood is on our hands? Pretrial freedom is public safety.
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man it's almost as if probation/parole/criminal records are less about "public safety" and more about giving law enforcement effective tools to facilitate longer-term subjugation of people even when they're not (or are no longer) incarcerated?.
wait wait wait, so the mom who ran fucking circles around a whole ass swat team to save her sons was threatened with a probation violation for talking to the media & dragged in front of a judge? thank god the judge saw sense, but who made this threat?
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In 2020, California Highway Patrol pursuits caused almost 500 accidents, injured 157 people and killed 10. At least 11,000 people in the US have died in the last 35 years due to police chases. Each of these totally preventable.
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I famously and historically cannot stand Taylor Swift. Not her "vocals" nor her "dancing." Never been willing to give her any flowers (though I always had to admit Trouble was a bop). Can barely hear her name without rolling my eyes. It's a whole thing. And then I read this.
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the police - whose unchecked violence you're there protesting, who come with riot gear, zip ties, guns, batons & who trains on how to kettle you with force so they can beat and arrest you without you being able to escape - are absolutely not at protests to protect your rights.
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this is a unsurprising womp from beginning to end. y'all's favorite "genius" and polyglot can't even say racism. the man said "some racial layers" like he was talking about a damn casserole.
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y'all truly don't have to worry about critical race theory being taught at Florida public elementary school, they refused to even teach it to us in LAW SCHOOL. in THE law school from whence it originated. even AFTER we occupied a student lounge for an entire semester demanding it.
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the portrait of my granny that was unveiled today at Yale Divinity School where she was the first Black woman to attend. every single person's time on earth is valuable and precious and meaningful but she was one of those people who, in the words of Bey, was HERE.
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sometimes i forget that our hyperincarceration crisis happened so recently (less than fifty years ago) and so quickly (prison population grew 700% in 40 years). it makes me sick and it makes me hopeful. this country made this in less than one lifetime, we can unmake it in ours.
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too many powerful Black people are more concerned about changing the narrative around Black people than they are about changing the material conditions for Black people.
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we are owed so much more than a guilty verdict. even if we disagree on whether our carceral state can bring us any justice, i hope we agree that we're ultimately demanding & fighting for a world where george floyd lives and thrives, not a world where his killer is punished.
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me, sweetly, to my three year old as he leaves for school: have a great day, baby. him, deadpan and forcefully: i'm definitely not going to have a great day. you should know that already.
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New York public libraries are being forced to close on the weekends due to 36 million dollars in budget cuts. Meanwhile, NYPD is spending 10x that to reduce transparency into their operations and better shield themselves from any accountability.
NEW: The NYPD is spending $390 million on a new, encrypted radio system. It’s no small detail: The New York Daily News obtained the crucial video of Officer Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner thanks to a call that came over the police radio
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my most unpopular opinion is that you can love & care for people who cause harm, even big harm. and that can live alongside deep rage/sadness/disappointment in their behavior, utter compassion for the victims & wholehearted belief in and support for healing & accountability.
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A man in this video straight up says: "The government will tell you that these hotels create jobs. But what kind of jobs? What about all the independent people who do their own independent work and created their own jobs but have now lost those jobs?".
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Black women are 2x as likely to report a health care provider ignored them than white women. 30% of Black women who delivered in hospitals reported they were treated poorly. And you can link it all back to systemic, structural interpersonal racism in medicine and society.
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we cannot allow our leaders to pretend that disappearing and warehousing unhoused folks involuntarily in hospitals and jails is a valid public safety strategy. this is horrifying. people need high-quality affordable and voluntary HEALTHCARE and HOUSING.
MTA outreach teams are involuntarily hospitalizing homeless people with signs of mental illness. We rode along for a shift.
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what was harvard law school like, you ask? . well, the year after mike brown was murdered they invited a literal FBI agent to come speak to us about his brilliant idea of creating a teach for america model for policing, if that helps.
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an excerpt of the LITERAL slave code passed by the North Carolina assembly in 1831. this is what we mean when we say that funding police is funding the violent enforcement of increasingly transparent and regressive fascist, white nationalist agendas.
"The Memphis Police Department is introducing an eight-officer unit that will arrest unaccompanied minors that sell food, play loud music, are 'inappropriately dressed' or dancing in the street in Downtown Memphis" @LucasFinton .
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@SuperHiQuality @SimonDalling @PlannedTheRide I don't believe punitivity helps make us safer but putting that aside, I can't see any moral logic wherein it is worth someone's life to ensure someone stealing a car "doesn't get away.".
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@beyoncegarden the irony of this coming from a woman who I could not name, nor pick out of a lineup of one, if you paid me 644 billion dollars. .
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NY has one of the highest wrongful conviction rates in the country. "Dismissed cases soaring" means that when prosecutors LACKED SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE to convict people, they had to admit that rather than withholding it so they could railroad people into guilty pleas/plea deals.
As attrition rates among prosecutors in New York rise, and the number of dismissed cases soar, a law that helped defense lawyers is likely to be changed.
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my sister to my 4yo: are you open to some feedback?.him: no, i'm closed to feedback please.
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nobody will call for raids of tech board meetings. nobody will blame chesa for not mass jailing tech executives. nobody will write op-eds about how their kids shouldn't be exposed to techies. the "public safety" conversation is about racism and classism - not safety.
Violent crime in the crypto community is out of control
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I'm surprised because he usually loves biking there and back but I ask my Mom if that's ok and if she'll drive him home. She says sure. The second I turn to leave and close the door behind me I hear him go: Oma, I brought this here for us to *share*. LIKE??! PREMEDITATED DECEIT?
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for everyone just realizing that Harvard Law is full of extremely unserious white men peddling shockingly lazy & uncompelling scholarship that relies on the vicarious authority & presumed merit of Harvard affiliation to distract from overall lack of rigor and sharpness: welcome.
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So much of parenting is about YOU being willing to slow down & have the humility to really listen to your kids. @SupernovaMomma says misbehaving is expressing unmet needs and i've found that often kids will tell you exactly what that unmet need is if you create the space for it.
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@samah_fadil The harshness and inherent disgust with which she hits the consonants in Black and Lesbian tells you everything you need to know about where she stands, Zionism aside. Also is the claiming to be a lesbian because she. plays a lesbian on television??.
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Our three year old child has now perfected the long con and it's both impressive and harrowing to witness. Him and his Dad make banana bread. He has a piece. I go "that's it before dinner." He bugs out. I hold my ground. He *appears* to accept it.
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Incarcerated people, like all humans, shouldn't and don't have to mine their pain or justify their deep value to or for anyone. But I still feel so moved & grateful that art, people & platforms like this will change people's minds about things more fundamental than Taylor Swift.
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would love to see the side by side percentages of white New Yorkers who have been a victim of violence on the subway vs Black New Yorkers who have been a victim of NYPD harassment or violence on the subway. let's see who is really having their safety threatened and by whom.
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these students were gathered in a lounge that many alum & current students call Belinda Hall. named after Belinda Sutton, a Black woman who was enslaved by the Royal family who originally funded the law school and whose family's crest was the school's shield until 2016.
BREAKING: Under threat of administrative action, deans at @Harvard_Law just tried to remove a group of students peacefully tabling in a public gathering space, where they had been sitting for the past two weeks calling on fellow students to ask their reps to support a ceasefire!
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friendly reminder: NY has one of the highest wrongful conviction rates in the country & over 3/4ths of violent felony arrests are ultimately dismissed. this is the backdrop on which electeds are begging for *more* people to be caged for months before they've even had any trial.
Hochul says there's a vast difference in how judges in NYC & elsewhere are using bail, with far more leniency in the city despite her/Leg efforts to tighten bail laws in recent years; she wants court system push to ensure judges use bail more (again, as sub for pre-trial remand).
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@GregCfollows @aaronnarraph I'm so so sorry to hear that. It's truly the exact opposite of public safety.
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when applying to law school, i was surprised that Harvard didn't offer full rides or merit scholarships because i thought they'd lose out on talent. come to find out they first cut a deal with the other top 3 schools (Yale & Stanford) to act in concert to force applicants' hands.
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law schools train students to do & reward them for doing exactly this: make morally indefensible arguments devoid of considerations of what's right or just, because that's "thinking like a lawyer." the faster you master this ability in 1L, the more "promising" a student you are.
As a novelist, when I heard about this, I wanted to put a face to it, to understand who could stand up in court and argue for children being denied basic necessities. This is a video of a woman ‘just doing her job’. A cautious bureaucrat, an illustration of the banality of evil.
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@JacindaAuMaroc I get that, it's why I said white. But in my experiences even then it was generally campus police doing the harassing for IDs etc.
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for those saying "why don't we do that here" - a big reason why it's harder is because of our gargantuan, overresourced, hyperpunitive criminal legal system and our prison culture. one of the many reasons why ending mass incarceration is a labor issue.
Electricians cut off Macron's power. This is how it's done.
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But Joe Garcia in one article of raw and beautiful storytelling did what decades of an entire media and legions of Swift loyalists never could: it made me pause and rethink whether maybe I didn't have it all the way right. And he did it without even asking me to reconsider.
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The work I do requires me to constantly be asking myself: what changes peoples minds? What makes us revisit our long & deeply held beliefs? What shakes us out of our apathy? Shifts the way we distribute empathy and care? Makes us rethink who and why we love or hate?.
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And then I read this beautiful piece by Joe Garcia and it feels so clear that this can and often does: bearing witness to people, artists, humans who have the courage and talent to share the contours of their humanity and struggle and not so guilty pleasures with others.
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@thesoulasylum I've never understood this genre of almost like, perversely bragging about how racist your family is but then pretending that it's shame. I cannot tell you how almost eagerly white people have "confessed" to me about their racist family members and I'm like. ?.
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not a single one of those things is violence.
“Violent protest is not protected; peaceful protest is. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes . none of this is peaceful protest.”. — President Biden condemns many campus demonstrations.
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please dont come crying to us next time Trump calls these outlets/ democratic establishment fake news because you're making a truth teller out of him. this is a fucking run of the mill bike lock. people have repeatedly affirmed that the folks *inside* the encampment are students.
Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard shows the chains used to secure Hamilton Hall at Columbia University. "This is not what students bring to school. This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities."
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can y'all imagine being able to free people and reunite families with the literal stroke of the pen and just. not doing it?? raising my glass tonight to the incarcerated people freed tonight and the communities in which they belong.
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baby girl, lawyers are responsible for creating and/or justifying a wildly disproportionate number of shittiest things about this country. and even if we weren't, we're a group of people who happen to share a professional qualification, not the sisterhood of the traveling pants.
I refuse to publicly delight in the struggles of other lawyers, even when they are Rudy Giuliani, and even when my entire being wants to crack jokes at his expense.
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@RetiredLineCook As self appointed probono counsel for your son, I'm gonna need you to delete this tweet.
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it is hella antiBlack to give prosecutors platforms to talk about what communities they criminalize need. DAs engage with Black communities in very narrow, pathologizing, punitive ways, during people's worst & lowest moments. of course their perspective is skewed and inaccurate.
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imagine a world where more media & political commentators had the intellect, range and cojones of @msolurin. we blame folks for being civically unengaged but it's things like this - calling bullshit, refusing to pivot off facts- that give folks tools to evaluate our electeds.
Eric Adams not only revived police units that were disbanded in 2020 for their disproportionate abuse against Black and brown New Yorkers, he revived stop and frisk. Since he became mayor, 97% of all stops and searches have been on Black and Latino New Yorkers.
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in the first three years following medicaid expansion (which made behavioral/ health accessible to poor and low-income people) reduced arrests by 20-32%. in denver, providing supportive housing for people with repeat criminal legal system contact led to a 40% decrease in arrests.
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there's endless evidence showing correlations between income & mental health + how guaranteed income programs of even 1k a month can help pull people out of poverty and improve health outcomes. meanwhile, the costs for mental illness hospitalizations in 2015 was over a billion.
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another reason why i've long chafed at the "everyone deserves to feel safe" framing. because feeling safe is different from being safe. and history has shown that state violence &subjugation & the forceful disappearing of Black, brown & poor folks is what makes many *feel* safe.
New York officials have flooded the subway system with cops and military personnel in a show of “security theater.” Will it actually make people safer—and is that even the point?
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The Georgia AG is explicitly listing mutual aid and social solidarity as damning evidence in RICO charges. Creating a paper trail to criminalize community care when exercised by "undesirable" people.
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But the fact that the "solution" is always more cops, more jails, more prisons, more detention should tell us that maybe the people in power are solving for something other than public health and public safety.
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i many of us say this a lot but it is *really* starting to feel parable of the sower-y. and it's crucial we resist the increasing normalization followed by criminalization of poverty when every day more and more of us are struggling to make ends meet, with our mental health etc.
That so many “cop cities” are popping up (e.g., Baltimore, Nashville, SF, ATL) as cities are being inundated with houselessness, unaffordability, and human misery means that surveillance, punishment, and incarceration are elected influencers’ chosen solutions to poverty.
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there's no question or confusion about the policy choices that will reduce suffering and increase quality of life and safety for everyone in this society. and as much as people gripe about the cost, they're almost always less expensive than police, jails and prisons.
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i bristle every time I hear the word crime. i hate it/the deeply racist, classist way it's used/understood. it's less about conduct and more about who's doing it. 2 black siblings get in a fight it's called crime. 2 white siblings get in a fight it's called nothing at all.
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This changed my mind. Not about the inalienable worthiness of folks inside and about the unjustifiable cruelty of human caging because thankfully I already knew that. But about Taylor Swift. My disdain for that lady was one I never thought I would pivot even an inch from.
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To report on having secured a 4 hour daily "pause" in a genocide to better facilitate forced displacement of indigenous people as if it's good news is an insult and an abomination.
WASHINGTON (AP) — White House: Israel agrees to 4-hour daily 'humanitarian pauses' in fighting in Northern Gaza to allow civilians to flee.
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we watch people needlessly die on Rikers & all prisons & jails and our leaders call for more incarceration. we watch hundreds of thousands die from covid & our leaders defund testing, drop mask mandates. it's not at all an exaggeration when people call this country a death cult.
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when students at Harvard Law School demanded more programming that addressed police violence after Mike Brown's murder in 2014, the school invited a literal FBI agent to come speak to us about his brilliant idea of a Teach for America model for policing.
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@nypost after months of rabid "criminal raging through the streets" coverage, in this instance: "NYC subway passenger" is the person who is actively murdering and the victim is "unhinged man." this publication's commitment to demonizing and dehumanizing Black people makes me see red.
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i think especially white advocates would do well to remember that most Black people who suffer or die from policing & incarceration didn't ask to be calls to action. didn't want to be. weren't martyrs. weren't killed because they took a stand. didn't willingly sacrifice anything.
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what does politicizing a tragedy even mean?. if someone's car brakes were repeatedly malfunctioning & they hit and really harmed someone, in what universe is continuing to solemnly drive the broken car *more respectful* to the victim than hauling ass to try to fix the brakes?.
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20 minutes later he goes: can we walk to Oma's (my mom's) house just to say hi. Gets casually interested in bringing her some banana bread. I think nothing of it. We walk to my mom's house to drop off the bread. As soon as we get there he goes: can I stay for a little with Oma?.
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when NYC is defunding schools & libraries for "counter-terrorism" robodogs, you know the time to turn up was yesterday. See Cop City & all the states passing egregiously fascist + anti protest laws. The state is transparently preparing to enforce ever more authoritarian agendas.
The NYPD is resurrecting Digidog the robot dog - in instances of hostage situations, bomb threats, counter-terrorism and other high-risk or hazardous situations. They bought 2 for $750k
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@sailormooona @thvbIoom @LittleMs514 @kwateleoyo @JiorJette Don't let a strong gust of wind spin a braid around on its axis. I would literally be crying in the mirror in excruciating pain trying to gently maneuver the braids out of the middle part the braider ALWAYS did.
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it is so lol that the entire discovery reform issue is basically DAs being like "dude, we have the evidence. no, you can't see it, that's wild. how dare you even ask. but TRUST US this person should be in prison.".
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who amongst us could have possibly guessed?.
New videos show that it was *the cops* who did the attacking. Two NYPD cops harassed a group of young Latino men just cause. Then, in an attempt to falsely arrest one of the men, the cops grabbed & attacked him. The man's friends then tried to defend him from a beatdown & arrest.
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the NYPD didn't prevent this shooting, didn't mitigate any harm as it was happening, didn't stop the shooter in the immediate aftermath & yet they're STILL the institution we've deemed to be credible experts on the situation?.
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so interesting to see nearly the *exact* same arguments leveraged against "from the river to the sea" as were against "Black Lives Matter" and "Defund the Police." it's a diversion tactic that is very much meant to divert attention from/slow the momentum the movement is gaining.
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"fucking tyrants. foh! fucking clowns in costumes. motherfuckers." is absolutely the 2023 "I yield my time, fuck you.".
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Obama just threw shade at the current uprisings by implying what respectability stans often say which is that protesting "politely" and getting beat down without reacting is what wins American support. Not only is it wildly problematic it's a revisionist history that just wrong.
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Rent crisis. Hundreds of millions cut from social services to give to cops. Overtaxed & underresourced healthcare system. These are the threats to public safety, not the people who suffer most because of these choices. Unhoused people need housing. Jail is not a housing policy.
“Those of us who want to live in a world where Jordan Neely is not only alive but was not hungry, was not unhoused, should be very focused on demanding the types of policies we know make us all safer.” See full interview of @FWDus’ @ReenNahMean on @MehdiHasanShow
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I'm not going to share that NY Post article about the young white man choking a Black man to death on a subway, but as someone who would only ever want to be a billionaire so I could buy the Post and immediately put it out of business, this is unconscionably bad even for them.
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In 1990, a random white stockbroker transplant with no political experience decided to run for Congress as a Republican in a majority Black congressional district in Houston. When he handedly lost to the Black incumbent, he decided it was because of unfair racial gerrymandering.
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Prison. Abolition. Is. A. Feminist. Issue. Also, human caging in and of itself is brutality.
A female inmate at one of our nation’s most brutal women’s prisons is reportedly paralyzed by officers and the state of Florida says nothing.
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y'all remember when NYPD went fully beserk, held multiple press releases and damn near called a state of emergency when some black kids splashed them with water?. meanwhile at the capitol. .
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this is so deeply fucked. the sole Palestinian member of Congress being censured and called a liar for supporting her literal family's right to life, to freedom. soon this will be a badge of honor the way Barbara Lee's Iraq war vote was. for so so so many of us, it already is.
BREAKING: The House votes 234-188 to censure Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib for “promoting false narratives” about the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and for her use of the phrase "from the river to the sea," which is considered by some as a call for ending Israel's existence.
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