This is the dramatic moment a genius otter being chased by a killer whale hops onto a boat for safety with just seconds to spare. In the incredible footage, captured in Halibut Cove, Alaska, on Sunday July 26, the otter is first seen roughly 200yds away from John Dornellas’ boat, swimming frantically as the orca follows. As it reaches John’s boat the otter swims around the outside, looking for a safe haven to climb onto as the orca closes in. Eventually, the otter jumps up onto the transom of John’s vessel moments before the whale arrives at the surface just feet away. John, 37, revealed a game of cat-and-mouse followed, with the otter hopping back into the water in an attempt to get away, only for the orca to chase it back up again three or four times.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Otter Jumps Onto Boat Escaping Orca With Seconds To Spare
This is the dramatic moment a genius otter being chased by a killer whale hops onto a boat for safety with just seconds to spare. In the incredible footage, captured in Halibut Cove, Alaska, on Sunday July 26, the otter is first seen roughly 200yds away from John Dornellas’ boat, swimming frantically as the orca follows. As it reaches John’s boat the otter swims around the outside, looking for a safe haven to climb onto as the orca closes in. Eventually, the otter jumps up onto the transom of John’s vessel moments before the whale arrives at the surface just feet away. John, 37, revealed a game of cat-and-mouse followed, with the otter hopping back into the water in an attempt to get away, only for the orca to chase it back up again three or four times.
Sometimes The Chicken Kills You, Though
In 2008, David Sedaris wrote a short piece for the New Yorker about undecided voters that has recently resurfaced. Sedaris was not sympathetic to those among the electorate who find it difficult to make up their minds:
First, this is 2008, so presumably John McCain is the plate of shit and Barack Obama is airline chicken (tepid, not likely to change your life, but, you know, fine). Sedaris thinks the choice between these two is so obvious that it should not require even a moment’s thought, which is why he can’t imagine anyone being undecided. But surely the bigger mystery is why there are so many Republicans, i.e. enthusiastic shit-gobblers (in this analogy). Surely it should be puzzling that there are so many people who are going for the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. Perhaps this should lead us to wonder: is there something wrong with the chicken that I am not noticing? And given that this seems to happen every election since at least 2000, is the problem not particular to 2008?
In fact—and I say this not just to be fatuous but because it’s leading somewhere important—eating chickens is a leading cause of death worldwide. Sometimes the chicken has salmonella! If you simply say “well, everything else on this menu is a big ol’ plate of shit,” but it turns out that the answer to “how is the chicken cooked?” is “it isn’t,” then that would have been an important question to ask before agreeing to put it in your mouth.
I point this out because it captures what’s so wrong about the way Sedaris thinks about elections, i.e. mindlessly. His analogy is actually very useful, because the point it makes is: do not think about what you are eating, think only about what you are not eating. Do not ask even basic questions about whether the Democratic candidate is any good. Just look at the Republican, realize how terrible they are, and take whatever the alternative is. In other words, “vote blue no matter who.”
We need to reject the view of politics embedded in Sedaris’ analogy. The reason I bring up salmonella is to point out that it’s not inherently a given that someone with a (D) after their name is the best choice. We have to examine the candidates carefully. Yes, the Republican Party in this country is so monstrous that there are almost no conceivable circumstances in which voting Republican is the better choice. But to refuse to examine your own candidate, to ask even the most basic questions about “how are they cooked” and what they stand for, means that over time you’re probably going to end up being served worse and worse chicken, because the airline staff (DNC) realize they can get away with serving you something that’s extremely close to a plate of shit and you’ll still eat it.
My colleague Briahna Joy Gray explains this more eloquently and less disgustingly in her “Defense of Litmus Tests.” Briahna points out that when we make it clear at the outset that we have few standards for our party’s candidate, and we will vote for them regardless of how much they depart from or even betray our values, we are preemptively surrendering the leverage that we need to use to get better candidates. One of the most absurd moments in the Democratic primary was when progressives were asked if they would support the Democratic candidate even if it was Michael Bloomberg, a racist, sexist, Republican billionaire who might arguably have actually been worse than Trump. But this is what you get if you make it clear that you’re willing to be pushed around, to sit silently and eat your poisoned chicken.
Notice how passive the voter is in Sedaris’ analogy. They are strapped into their seat, and their only ability is to make a binary choice between two meals. Presumably, since this is supposed to represent an election, it is not possible to “not eat at all”—they’re going to get something, and if they remain undecided, the airline staff will force-feed them the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. (Not even Spirit does that yet.) We do not participate in making the meal, we just have to accept what we are given.
But we can’t accept that candidates are just going to be handed to us and that our role is to pick the least fecal one. There is no reason we cannot have good meals, but voters have to see themselves as active participants in the political process who get to make demands of their parties, who do not just have to accept a menu of options that has been pre-decided for them.
A relevant anecdote: the last time I was on an international flight, the flight attendant told me that the meal options were chicken or fish. I am a vegetarian, so both were equally inedible as far as I was concerned. “You should have ordered the vegetarian meal,” she said. I told her I had ordered the vegetarian meal, which was true. She said that they had no record of this, and there was nothing available but chicken or fish. “Then I can’t eat either,” I said. “Because I am a vegetarian.” She looked very annoyed. Five minutes later she returned with a vegetarian pasta dish. It wasn’t half bad. The lesson: people in power want you to believe that there is no alternative to the options they give you, but oftentimes there are more available, and you only find out by making demands and sticking with them.
The difficulty here is that once Election Day rolls around, we do face a binary choice. This election is particularly painful for many on the left, because the Democratic candidate is so utterly unrepresentative of our aspirations. My personal feeling is that when it comes down to it, we do need to hold our noses and vote for him, since Trump’s reelection would be so catastrophic. But we have to do so in full awareness of what it is we’re eating. We can’t, like Sedaris implies, just refuse to ask questions about or examine our own candidate. We’re stuck with him, but we cannot delude ourselves into thinking a Biden presidency will be good. It will be not as bad as what is going on now, which is possibly the lowest bar any person has ever had to clear.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?I find that this short passage usefully demonstrates what I would call “some common bad tendencies in liberal thought” and so it’s worth analyzing closely.
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
First, this is 2008, so presumably John McCain is the plate of shit and Barack Obama is airline chicken (tepid, not likely to change your life, but, you know, fine). Sedaris thinks the choice between these two is so obvious that it should not require even a moment’s thought, which is why he can’t imagine anyone being undecided. But surely the bigger mystery is why there are so many Republicans, i.e. enthusiastic shit-gobblers (in this analogy). Surely it should be puzzling that there are so many people who are going for the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. Perhaps this should lead us to wonder: is there something wrong with the chicken that I am not noticing? And given that this seems to happen every election since at least 2000, is the problem not particular to 2008?
In fact—and I say this not just to be fatuous but because it’s leading somewhere important—eating chickens is a leading cause of death worldwide. Sometimes the chicken has salmonella! If you simply say “well, everything else on this menu is a big ol’ plate of shit,” but it turns out that the answer to “how is the chicken cooked?” is “it isn’t,” then that would have been an important question to ask before agreeing to put it in your mouth.I point this out because it captures what’s so wrong about the way Sedaris thinks about elections, i.e. mindlessly. His analogy is actually very useful, because the point it makes is: do not think about what you are eating, think only about what you are not eating. Do not ask even basic questions about whether the Democratic candidate is any good. Just look at the Republican, realize how terrible they are, and take whatever the alternative is. In other words, “vote blue no matter who.”
We need to reject the view of politics embedded in Sedaris’ analogy. The reason I bring up salmonella is to point out that it’s not inherently a given that someone with a (D) after their name is the best choice. We have to examine the candidates carefully. Yes, the Republican Party in this country is so monstrous that there are almost no conceivable circumstances in which voting Republican is the better choice. But to refuse to examine your own candidate, to ask even the most basic questions about “how are they cooked” and what they stand for, means that over time you’re probably going to end up being served worse and worse chicken, because the airline staff (DNC) realize they can get away with serving you something that’s extremely close to a plate of shit and you’ll still eat it.
My colleague Briahna Joy Gray explains this more eloquently and less disgustingly in her “Defense of Litmus Tests.” Briahna points out that when we make it clear at the outset that we have few standards for our party’s candidate, and we will vote for them regardless of how much they depart from or even betray our values, we are preemptively surrendering the leverage that we need to use to get better candidates. One of the most absurd moments in the Democratic primary was when progressives were asked if they would support the Democratic candidate even if it was Michael Bloomberg, a racist, sexist, Republican billionaire who might arguably have actually been worse than Trump. But this is what you get if you make it clear that you’re willing to be pushed around, to sit silently and eat your poisoned chicken.
Notice how passive the voter is in Sedaris’ analogy. They are strapped into their seat, and their only ability is to make a binary choice between two meals. Presumably, since this is supposed to represent an election, it is not possible to “not eat at all”—they’re going to get something, and if they remain undecided, the airline staff will force-feed them the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. (Not even Spirit does that yet.) We do not participate in making the meal, we just have to accept what we are given.
But we can’t accept that candidates are just going to be handed to us and that our role is to pick the least fecal one. There is no reason we cannot have good meals, but voters have to see themselves as active participants in the political process who get to make demands of their parties, who do not just have to accept a menu of options that has been pre-decided for them.
A relevant anecdote: the last time I was on an international flight, the flight attendant told me that the meal options were chicken or fish. I am a vegetarian, so both were equally inedible as far as I was concerned. “You should have ordered the vegetarian meal,” she said. I told her I had ordered the vegetarian meal, which was true. She said that they had no record of this, and there was nothing available but chicken or fish. “Then I can’t eat either,” I said. “Because I am a vegetarian.” She looked very annoyed. Five minutes later she returned with a vegetarian pasta dish. It wasn’t half bad. The lesson: people in power want you to believe that there is no alternative to the options they give you, but oftentimes there are more available, and you only find out by making demands and sticking with them.
The difficulty here is that once Election Day rolls around, we do face a binary choice. This election is particularly painful for many on the left, because the Democratic candidate is so utterly unrepresentative of our aspirations. My personal feeling is that when it comes down to it, we do need to hold our noses and vote for him, since Trump’s reelection would be so catastrophic. But we have to do so in full awareness of what it is we’re eating. We can’t, like Sedaris implies, just refuse to ask questions about or examine our own candidate. We’re stuck with him, but we cannot delude ourselves into thinking a Biden presidency will be good. It will be not as bad as what is going on now, which is possibly the lowest bar any person has ever had to clear.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: An Ineffectual Biden Presidency Is Better For The Left Than An Actively Authoritarian Trump Presidency (Current Affairs).]
Convicted of Sex Crimes, but With No Victims
Jace Hambrick worked as an apprentice laborer during the week, renovating homes around Vancouver, Wash., and at a neighborhood gas station on weekends. Much of the rest of his life was online. He was hard-core, amassing a collection of more than 200 games. People told him it wasn’t smart to be so cut off from reality, but his internet life felt rich. As a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, he controlled other players’ destinies. As a video warrior, he was known online by his nom de guerre and was constantly messaging fellow gamers, particularly his best friend, Simon. Though the two had never met in person, over the last few years they paired up as teammates playing Rainbow Six Siege and Rocket League and grew close.
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.
The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
by Michael Winerip, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
NBA Season Up In The Air
"Just so you know, I'm the king of this place."
NBA season up in air as Lakers and Clippers reportedly vote to quit playoffs (The Guardian)
Image: New Yorker
[ed. What a shit show going down in Wisconsin. But what to expect when armed militias are allowed to roam freely, openly carrying weapons in a tinder box situation.]
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
A Lady’s Duty to Submit—Then And Now
In 1956, my Grandma Claire gave birth to the first of her five children and soon after divorced the father, an Australian who turned out to be a drunk and besotted loser. Her father was so embarrassed by the divorce that he banned her from the family home. Claire refused to submit and shortly after being disowned, she moved west. Her second child was born to her (and my grandfather) in 1959, at Grace Hospital in Vancouver.
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.
Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
The young wife must be warned again that the sexual act is a mutual relationship; both partners should take a full part, the wife throwing aside her previous modesty and inhibitions, and meeting her husband’s aggressive advances with a willing and active submission.“Men have been designed by nature to be the wooer and aggressor; women to be the receptive, surrendering partner,” the authors further explained. A husband should, therefore, “realize that his bride has been taught all her life to resist the sexual embraces of men, to maintain her chastity at all costs,” while the wife “should undertake active cooperation and response to his advances.”
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
Remember the Pandemic?
Never has the simple tense of a verb revealed so much about a political party—or seemed so plainly out of touch with reality.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.
But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
by Eric Weiner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Getty/The Atlantic
Suburbia, Reconsidered
It’s a weird time for the American suburbs.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.”
As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.” As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Clothing As Platform
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic halted fashion shows and shuttered malls, the harsh realities of the fashion industry’s race-to-the-bottom production practices were becoming all too clear: unsustainable for the environment and lethally dangerous for textile producers and garment workers. Yet despite news stories of dangerous working conditions and tragedies such as the Rana Plaza factory collapse, tons of garments continued to enter the market, resulting in record amounts of textile waste. In fact, according to the EPA, Americans buried 10.5 million tons of clothing in landfills each year. And it’s not just the mass-market H&Ms and Zaras of the retail world who are implicated; the luxury segment of the market is flooded with unwanted products too: Burberry was discovered to have burned £90 million worth of unsold stock over a five-year period rather than see it devalue its brand image in discount stores.
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)
In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
Monday, August 24, 2020
Why Every City Feels the Same Now
Some time ago, I woke up in a hotel room unable to determine where I was in the world. The room was like any other these days, with its neutral bedding, uncomfortable bouclé lounge chair, and wood-veneer accent wall—tasteful, but purgatorial. The eerie uniformity extended well beyond the interior design too: The building itself felt like it could’ve been located in any number of metropolises across the globe. From the window, I saw only the signs of ubiquitous brands, such as Subway, Starbucks, and McDonald’s. I thought about phoning down to reception to get my bearings, but it felt too much like the beginning of an episode of The Twilight Zone. I travel a lot, so it was not the first or the last time that I would wake up in a state of placelessness or the accompanying feeling of déjà vu.
The anthropologist Marc Augé gave the name non-place to the escalating homogeneity of urban spaces. In non-places, history, identity, and human relation are not on offer. Non-places used to be relegated to the fringes of cities in retail parks or airports, or contained inside shopping malls. But they have spread. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.
The opposite of placelessness is place, and all that it implies—the resonances of history, folklore, and environment; the qualities that make a location deep, layered, and idiosyncratic. Humans are storytelling creatures. If a place has been inhabited for long enough, the stories will already be present, even if hidden. We need to uncover and resurface them, to excavate the meanings behind street names, to unearth figures lost to obscurity, and to rediscover architecture that has long since vanished. A return to vernacular architecture—the built environment of the people, tailored by and for local culture and conditions—is overdue. It can combat the placelessness that empires and corporations have imposed. (...)
Commercial builders also emulate architecture that conveys a desirable image. At the turn of the 20th century, the administrators and businessmen of Meiji Japan commissioned Western architects to modernize their country, adopting the structures of supposed Western progress. So did the sultan of Zanzibar, whose House of Wonders has European characteristics, along with a front entrance large enough to ride his elephant through.
It was only a matter of time before corporations began to construct their own hegemonic visions of urban life. In 1928, an American town sailed up a tributary of the Amazon. It came in pieces, to be assembled into shingled houses with lawns and picket fences, a Main Street, a dance hall, a cinema, and a golf course. Henry Ford was the visionary behind the development; his aim: to control the rubber industry via exported Americanism. He named it Fordlândia.
The settlement failed dramatically. The jungle was unforgiving, and the settlers were unprepared for malarial fevers and snake attacks. Cement and iron were unsuited to the humidity. Blight spread through the rubber plantation, which had been cultivated too intensively. Ford’s promises of free health care and fair wages were undermined by puritanical surveillance, cruelty, and incompetence. Eventually, the workers rioted. As a utopia, Fordlândia was probably doomed from the start, given its founding in neocolonial arrogance. But despite its failure almost a century ago, Fordlândia successfully predicted the future of cities: utter sameness, exported globally.
In the decades that followed, corporate architecture of the sort outside my hotel room adopted designs that expressed corporate power. It became slick and monolithic. Ruthlessly rational, it exudes aloofness—its denizens exist high above the streets in glass-and-steel boxes that maximize the expensive floor space. The earliest of these structures were inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1959 Seagram Building, which set the archetype until the 1980s. The New Formalists tried to temper this model with humanizing, historical touches—the tall, pseudo-gothic arches with which Minoru Yamasaki embellished the World Trade Center, for instance—but even then, it often harked back to earlier symbols of dominating power, like Greco-Roman classicism had done.
Eventually, aware of appearing cold and remote, corporate architecture underwent an image change. Its buildings now resemble its brands: cooler, cuter, greener, more knowing and ironic. The doughnut-shaped mothership of Apple Park or the biodome spheres of Amazon’s Seattle campus offer examples.
But these structures might be worse than the indifferent, modernist monoliths they replaced. At least the glass towers made clear that their occupants didn’t care about you, or maybe anyone. Now headquarters buildings express the hypocrisy of corporate gentility. Apple Park, with its circular form and large central garden, telegraphs connection and collaboration. But its real message is power: It is one of the most valuable corporate headquarters in the world, echoing the Pentagon in size and ambition. Shaped like a spaceship, it also suggests to the local community, which grants Apple huge tax breaks, that the company could take off and relocate anywhere in the world, whenever it wants. (...)
Vernacular is an umbrella term architects and planners use to describe local styles. Vernacular architecture arises when the people indigenous to a particular place use materials they find there to build structures that become symptomatic of and attuned to that particular environment. Augé called it “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” It aims for harmonious interaction with the environment, rather than setting itself apart from it. (...)
Creativity often works according to a dialectic process. Frank Lloyd Wright sought to “break the box” of Western architecture by shifting geometries, letting the outside in, and designing architecture within a natural setting, as he did with Fallingwater, one of his most famous designs. Wright was inspired by a love of the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai—an influence he would later repay by training Japanese architects such as Nobuko and Kameki Tsuchiura, who reinterpreted European modernist design in Japan. The goal is not to replace glass skyscrapers with thatch huts, but to see vernacular as the future, like Wright did, rather than abandoning it to the past.
by Darran Anderson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty
The anthropologist Marc Augé gave the name non-place to the escalating homogeneity of urban spaces. In non-places, history, identity, and human relation are not on offer. Non-places used to be relegated to the fringes of cities in retail parks or airports, or contained inside shopping malls. But they have spread. Everywhere looks like everywhere else and, as a result, anywhere feels like nowhere in particular.
The opposite of placelessness is place, and all that it implies—the resonances of history, folklore, and environment; the qualities that make a location deep, layered, and idiosyncratic. Humans are storytelling creatures. If a place has been inhabited for long enough, the stories will already be present, even if hidden. We need to uncover and resurface them, to excavate the meanings behind street names, to unearth figures lost to obscurity, and to rediscover architecture that has long since vanished. A return to vernacular architecture—the built environment of the people, tailored by and for local culture and conditions—is overdue. It can combat the placelessness that empires and corporations have imposed. (...)Commercial builders also emulate architecture that conveys a desirable image. At the turn of the 20th century, the administrators and businessmen of Meiji Japan commissioned Western architects to modernize their country, adopting the structures of supposed Western progress. So did the sultan of Zanzibar, whose House of Wonders has European characteristics, along with a front entrance large enough to ride his elephant through.
It was only a matter of time before corporations began to construct their own hegemonic visions of urban life. In 1928, an American town sailed up a tributary of the Amazon. It came in pieces, to be assembled into shingled houses with lawns and picket fences, a Main Street, a dance hall, a cinema, and a golf course. Henry Ford was the visionary behind the development; his aim: to control the rubber industry via exported Americanism. He named it Fordlândia.
The settlement failed dramatically. The jungle was unforgiving, and the settlers were unprepared for malarial fevers and snake attacks. Cement and iron were unsuited to the humidity. Blight spread through the rubber plantation, which had been cultivated too intensively. Ford’s promises of free health care and fair wages were undermined by puritanical surveillance, cruelty, and incompetence. Eventually, the workers rioted. As a utopia, Fordlândia was probably doomed from the start, given its founding in neocolonial arrogance. But despite its failure almost a century ago, Fordlândia successfully predicted the future of cities: utter sameness, exported globally.
In the decades that followed, corporate architecture of the sort outside my hotel room adopted designs that expressed corporate power. It became slick and monolithic. Ruthlessly rational, it exudes aloofness—its denizens exist high above the streets in glass-and-steel boxes that maximize the expensive floor space. The earliest of these structures were inspired by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1959 Seagram Building, which set the archetype until the 1980s. The New Formalists tried to temper this model with humanizing, historical touches—the tall, pseudo-gothic arches with which Minoru Yamasaki embellished the World Trade Center, for instance—but even then, it often harked back to earlier symbols of dominating power, like Greco-Roman classicism had done.
Eventually, aware of appearing cold and remote, corporate architecture underwent an image change. Its buildings now resemble its brands: cooler, cuter, greener, more knowing and ironic. The doughnut-shaped mothership of Apple Park or the biodome spheres of Amazon’s Seattle campus offer examples.
But these structures might be worse than the indifferent, modernist monoliths they replaced. At least the glass towers made clear that their occupants didn’t care about you, or maybe anyone. Now headquarters buildings express the hypocrisy of corporate gentility. Apple Park, with its circular form and large central garden, telegraphs connection and collaboration. But its real message is power: It is one of the most valuable corporate headquarters in the world, echoing the Pentagon in size and ambition. Shaped like a spaceship, it also suggests to the local community, which grants Apple huge tax breaks, that the company could take off and relocate anywhere in the world, whenever it wants. (...)
Vernacular is an umbrella term architects and planners use to describe local styles. Vernacular architecture arises when the people indigenous to a particular place use materials they find there to build structures that become symptomatic of and attuned to that particular environment. Augé called it “relational, historical and concerned with identity.” It aims for harmonious interaction with the environment, rather than setting itself apart from it. (...)
Creativity often works according to a dialectic process. Frank Lloyd Wright sought to “break the box” of Western architecture by shifting geometries, letting the outside in, and designing architecture within a natural setting, as he did with Fallingwater, one of his most famous designs. Wright was inspired by a love of the Japanese woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Hokusai—an influence he would later repay by training Japanese architects such as Nobuko and Kameki Tsuchiura, who reinterpreted European modernist design in Japan. The goal is not to replace glass skyscrapers with thatch huts, but to see vernacular as the future, like Wright did, rather than abandoning it to the past.
by Darran Anderson, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty
[ed. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as so many cultural institutions die left and right, victims of pandemic economics.]
Defunding the Police: Seattle's Stumbling Blocks
Seattle was on the verge of taking one of the most radical steps of late toward large-scale police reform of any city in the US just last month.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.
But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.
The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers.
Mere hours after the vote, Best, the first African American leader of the department who has held the position for only two years, announced her retirement.
“The idea of letting, after we worked so incredibly hard to make sure that our department was diverse, that reflects the community that we serve, to just turn that all on a dime and hack it off without having a plan in place to move forward, it’s highly distressful to me,” she said during a news conference last week. “It goes against my principles and my conviction and I really couldn’t do it.” (...)
Stephen Page, associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, told the Guardian that what appears to be missing in Seattle, Minneapolis and New York is leaders transforming police reform from a rallying cry to a precise plan.
“None of those discussions in any of those cities at this point seem to be taking seriously these questions of what, exactly, are we doing if we’re not funding the police and how are we going to do it,” he said. (...)
In Seattle, one of the key challenges during this process has been collaboration. While city council members have said they’ve tried to work with the police chief and mayor during the defunding process, at last week’s news conference Durkan characterized the last few weeks as an “absolute breakdown of collaboration and civil dialogue”. (...)
The council president M Lorena González, council member Teresa Mosqueda and council member Tammy J Morales said in a statement that they were sorry to see Best go, and again stressed the importance of city leaders working together during the law enforcement reform process. But they also made it clear that this has in no way deterred their efforts.
“The council will remain focused on the need to begin the process of transforming community safety in our city,” the statement said. “This historic opportunity to transition the SPD from reform to transformation will continue.”
Isaac Joy, an organizer with King County Equity Now, one of the coalitions that has pushed to defund the department by 50%, said there is potentially a silver lining to Best’s departure: it presents an opportunity to find someone to lead the department who can be a “thought partner on listening and responding to the community’s demands, to divest from our police force, demilitarize our police force and start reinvesting and making Seattle a city that everyone can thrive in”.
He also stressed that the leader should also be Black.
Joy explained that’s because of the “police history, specifically as it relates to the enslaved, the Black population and that being the root of the police force. And so, in order to rectify and address that root, you do need Black leadership, you just, along with Black leadership, you need the support of the department, the support of the mayor, the support of the council.”
Earlier this month, the coalition released a blueprint for cutting the police budget and reinvesting that money into such groups as those developing alternatives to policing and providing housing for people in need.
On Monday, the council unanimously approved a resolution that includes a variety of goals for 2021, including creating a civilian-led department of community safety and violence prevention, and moving the city’s 911 dispatch out of the police department.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.
But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.
The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers.Mere hours after the vote, Best, the first African American leader of the department who has held the position for only two years, announced her retirement.
“The idea of letting, after we worked so incredibly hard to make sure that our department was diverse, that reflects the community that we serve, to just turn that all on a dime and hack it off without having a plan in place to move forward, it’s highly distressful to me,” she said during a news conference last week. “It goes against my principles and my conviction and I really couldn’t do it.” (...)
Stephen Page, associate professor at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, told the Guardian that what appears to be missing in Seattle, Minneapolis and New York is leaders transforming police reform from a rallying cry to a precise plan.
“None of those discussions in any of those cities at this point seem to be taking seriously these questions of what, exactly, are we doing if we’re not funding the police and how are we going to do it,” he said. (...)
In Seattle, one of the key challenges during this process has been collaboration. While city council members have said they’ve tried to work with the police chief and mayor during the defunding process, at last week’s news conference Durkan characterized the last few weeks as an “absolute breakdown of collaboration and civil dialogue”. (...)
The council president M Lorena González, council member Teresa Mosqueda and council member Tammy J Morales said in a statement that they were sorry to see Best go, and again stressed the importance of city leaders working together during the law enforcement reform process. But they also made it clear that this has in no way deterred their efforts.
“The council will remain focused on the need to begin the process of transforming community safety in our city,” the statement said. “This historic opportunity to transition the SPD from reform to transformation will continue.”
Isaac Joy, an organizer with King County Equity Now, one of the coalitions that has pushed to defund the department by 50%, said there is potentially a silver lining to Best’s departure: it presents an opportunity to find someone to lead the department who can be a “thought partner on listening and responding to the community’s demands, to divest from our police force, demilitarize our police force and start reinvesting and making Seattle a city that everyone can thrive in”.
He also stressed that the leader should also be Black.
Joy explained that’s because of the “police history, specifically as it relates to the enslaved, the Black population and that being the root of the police force. And so, in order to rectify and address that root, you do need Black leadership, you just, along with Black leadership, you need the support of the department, the support of the mayor, the support of the council.”
Earlier this month, the coalition released a blueprint for cutting the police budget and reinvesting that money into such groups as those developing alternatives to policing and providing housing for people in need.
On Monday, the council unanimously approved a resolution that includes a variety of goals for 2021, including creating a civilian-led department of community safety and violence prevention, and moving the city’s 911 dispatch out of the police department.
by Hallie Golden, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Karen Ducey/Getty Images
[ed. This once beloved city has gone absolutely nuts. Forcing your first black female police chief into retirement is not, as they say, a good look. Good luck to Carmen Best, she tried her best.]
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)