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heather christie

@heatherannchristie

I'm 49. Madly in love with @madtrukr
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heatherannchristie
antigonick
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antigonick
After tears, the chest is less sore, as if some goddess of humanness within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.

—Sharon Olds, excerpt of “Known to be Left”, in Stag’s Leap

#poetry
heatherannchristie
resonanteye
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theoutcastrogue

Copaganda does three main things.

First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.

The evidence shows otherwise.

— Alec Karakatsanis, “Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”” | Jacobin, July 2022

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pumpacti0n

More relevant resources about destroying the myths of policing as a positive institution:

heatherannchristie
gentlerainmorninghush
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unavernales

a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:

  • medical workers on the ground are describing finding hundreds of bodies. the current death toll in the media is, unfortunately, only a fraction of the reality
  • hospital workers are describing injuries and trauma as if survivors had come out of a warzone
  • thousands are still missing
  • an apartment complex for the elderly was lost. not everyone could get out. people were saying goodbye to loved ones over the phone
  • people who did get out of lahaina were leaving with ashes covering their faces and nothing but the clothes on their backs. people are losing everything.

hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.

donate to maui united way, the maui food bank, mutual aid, and maui humane society