Midrange Weekly April 19
Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention
Midrange Staff @midrangestaff
Welcome back to Midrange Weekly and wow has this weather ever been a hell of a thing. We Canadians, and especially those of us living in Vancouver, have a pathological habit to incessantly discuss the weather, but still- damn. It’s almost been nice enough out to make us forgot we are in the destabilizing throes of the pandemic’s viciously acute third wave. That last part about forgetting is of course not true as everything remains more or less horrible right now. While we may not have the living embodiment of an Austin Powers villain running our province like Ontario is currently dealing with, things are looking dicey. As none of this is really news anymore, lets dive into some more recent events.
Cops Lie
News broadcasters this week in America and beyond no doubt felt the manic pressure of a constantly shifting and iterative media cycle. They had to cut away from the trial of Derek Chauvin, facing charges for the murder of George Floyd, to cut to breaking news of Duante Wright being murdered by police at traffic stop. Before a fully comprehensive assessment of even just the basic facts in his death could be determined, journalists had to switch gears again and turn their increasingly myopic attention to the police murder of 13 year old Adam Toledo (note- we aren’t linking to the video of Toledo as it’s extremely graphic. It’s easy enough to find it online if you feel compelled but be judicious and considerate about posting it. Lot’s of people out there absolutely don’t want to see it). The veritable matryoshka doll of stories involving police brutality on black people and other minority communities carries a cannibalistic and omnivorous sense of heartbreak. Each time we try and muster the emotional and mental bandwidth to even attempt to process the monstrous actions by a local gang of marauding cops, it happens elsewhere again. I’m not surprised the media ecosystem, even after half a decade of Pavlovian signals have trained them to feed off of a constantly in flux and schizophrenic news cycle, can’t keep up. The rest of us certainly can’t either.
You cannot reform the police. Just this week: Derek Chauvin's trial for the murder of George Floyd, Daunte Wright murdered during a traffic stop, the video release of 13-yr-old Adam Toledo being shot with his hands up, while the cop who shot Breonna Taylor was given a book deal.
— Mabel Hsu (@helloomabel) April 15, 2021
We can understand to a certain extent the constant disorientation of the day’s events that news directors must somehow make sense of coherently. However, it’s long past time we iterate that that understanding and tolerance no longer extends to them using police statements as credible sources of fact and reporting. They’re not because policing is an institution built on mendacity, gas lighting, and straight up lies. They are not credible, they are not trust worthy, and their say in the description of an incident should not be factored into a report without a fairly derisive amount of scepticism. We cannot trust police assessments that say what a person was or was not holding when a cop murders them. We cannot assume due diligence was done when an internal investigation into a cop assaulting or murdering someone found they were within their jurisdictional mandate to do so. We cannot allow our representatives in the media to accept the rational that when the body cam is turned off it was an accident or malfunction; anything other than a tacit acknowledgment that a turned off body cam amounts specifically to act of premeditation on account of anything the cop does after is journalistic malpractice at best, and collusion at worst.
The language of policing needs to be excised from reporting on their conduct, the integration of their specific vocabulary needs to be reversed. We read it constantly: an officer involved shooting that resulted in a fatality. Such specious wordplay is rank with deflecting euphuisms designed to put as much rhetorical space between a cop’s actions in proximity to the person they killed. The media needs to stop deploying the coded and muted vocabulary of cops. This is murder we are talking about. Beyond that news organizations often do their best to disabuse us of the notions that these are sometimes children being killed. In regards to Adam Toledo, Sean Hannity had the temerity to refer to him- a 13 year old boy- as a man. The media is not the evangelizing voice of policing, for their words cannot be trusted as sacred. They needs to stop acting like they are.
We cannot trust these cops at their word because their word is usually a lie. We should not assume good faith accountability being practiced within their ranks because it rarely happens; when it does it’s because their hermetically sealed process tightly sheilded behind the performative and propagandistic ‘thin blue line’ has spilled into the public sphere through serendipitous virality. Look to the murder of Adam Toledo. The Chicago police department stated the officer who murdered him, and that prevailing evidence was there to back up this erroneous judgment, thought that the 13 year old child had something, possibly a weapon in his hand. They declined to release the footage initially until meet with considerable external pressure to do so. When the footage of his death was released it showed that his hands were empty. Chicago PD was forced to correct the record saying they had made a mistake. They didn’t make a mistake- they got caught lying.
The Adam Toledo was so horrifying that Chicago boarded up municipal buildings before the video was released. That tells you all you need to know.
— roxane gay (@rgay) April 15, 2021
When Army medic Caron Nazario was driving home and pulled over and literally threatened with his life multiple times by the cops, before they pepper sprayed and assaulted him, the offending cop was summarily fired. Except not really because this happened in December of last year. Nazario filed a lawsuit, the multiple perspectives of recorded footage were considered and the cop faced no serious consequences. Only in April of 2021 when the footage of the incident permeated the internet did the police department performatively decry this outrageous conduct and dismiss the officer. They did so once again because they got caught.
The cops tell us ridiculous, hilarious lies, and then become offended by our lack of obsequiousness in believing them. When a police officer, a 27 year veteran, murdered Duante Wright at a traffic stop, she claimed she had meant to reach for her taser and got confused. What? Putting aside the utter inanity of such an excuse, this isn’t the kind of rhetorical dead lock defense the police think it is. If a cop can’t tell the difference between a gun and a taser, they shouldn’t have either. Wright was murdered just a ten minute drive from the court room where Chauvin was on trial for killing Floyd last year, and yet the symbolic agony of such a thing is overshadowed considerably by the conduct of Chauvin’s defense lawyer Eric Nelson. Concerned that the suffocating miasma of virulent racism so deeply entrenched in Minneapolis policing might sway the jury against his client, Nelson requested the jury be sequestered to keep the news obscured from them. The judge said no. Even adjacent institutions will intrinsically, instinctively even, attempt to gaslight the public in hopes of perpetuating a specific and flawed narrative of cops as a heroic force for good.
This institutional and near conspiratorial conduct extends like a malignant network to myriad subsets of the media environment. Until just a couple of days ago publisher Simon & Schuster had inked a book deal for Jonathan Mattingly, the cop that murdered Breonna Taylor in her sleep. The deal has been rescinded which puts the eventual publication of the book in doubt, but only after staunch public outcry for ever giving this person an outsized platform. One wonders what kind of paradoxical and universe imploding passages would be in a book about a person who literally got away with murder and got a book deal for it bemoaning his victimization by cancel culture. Hopefully we’ll never know.
The cops and their supplicants don’t just lie about specific incidents that they would very much like you to believe are isolated. Their entire perspective on the systemic value and requirements of policing brazenly eschew common sense and common values. Much of the modern policing code of conduct is based around qualified immunity, which broadly asserts that a cop’s job is so dangerous, that a great deal of their actions, no matter how morally onerous or repugnant, is permissible in service of their safety, and thusly not subject to civil lawsuit or other forms of recompense. A cop, under the guise of just being perpetually fearful for their life, is able to project that alleged fear onto civilians under the auspices of their own defence. They can put others lives at risk, kill others even sometimes, under the rationale that their job is scary at times and they got a little freaked out/trigger happy. The Venn diagram of people that support this asinine line of thinking and also those that think the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a regular civilian with a gun is likely a perfect circle I would imagine. Certain parts of America, such as Colorado and New York City have begun to take steps to limit qualified immunity. Multiple representatives of various police unions have thrown a number of tantrums over the prospect, claiming that cops can’t do their jobs if the spectre of prosecutorial accountability is constantly encroaching on them. This is a pretty audacious thing to say. No other industry in the world allows such perpetual and disastrous incompetence without under going serious and painful reforms. If the cops can’t do their jobs without blanket permission to terrorize the citizens they are ostensibly here to protect then they can’t do their jobs. The more heuristically apt way to understand all of this is simply that the cops can’t do their jobs. Not if that job is making a community of color feel safe and protected. As if it ever was. -Tristan
What Is The America First Caucus And Why Is It So Stupid?
If you’re ever of the reliving persuasion that American politics can’t possibly get any dumber, you’ll either want to reconcile with reality or go live in a cave somewhere. Perhaps course correcting from a devastating week of not being mentioned much in the news cycle, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is back on her nativist MAGA bullshit by starting a new caucus with a few of her fellow Trumpian sycophants called the America First Caucus. A little on the nose Marjorie!
Before diving any further into the inane morass of all this, a quick little primer on congressional caucuses is in order (don’t worry they aren’t that complicated). A caucus is an organized yet informal organization within congressional ranks comprised of a number of like-minded representatives whose values and policy goals align. A caucus will use their collective political capital and media presence to proselytizes legislation they support or attempt to sabotage that which they don’t. The most noteworthy and influential of these groups over the last decade has undoubtedly been the House Freedom Caucus. It was formed off the momentum of the disruptive Tea Party movement, which was an upheaval of more aggressive and subtly racist conservative orthodoxy born in response to President Obama mostly just existing. Notable members of the House Freedom Caucus included Mark Meadows who went on to join the ignoble line of Chiefs of Staff to Trump, Kevin McCarthy who crawled his way up the later to House Minority Leader and Jim Jordon who is a sexual assault cover upper and all around piece of shit. Quite the assortment of dudes! Keep that in mind in a minute or so.
Back to our friend Representative Greene. Hoping to get in on the action of throwing her legislative influence around (although its not clear she is actually interested in policy, she’s more of a shameless culture warrior), Greene has started her America First Caucus. If your initial, instinctual read on this situation is that this is all a pretext to push more of her white supremacist, great replacement theory fear mongering, that’s a bingo. Some of the mission statements from the caucus are pretty insane, promoting an adherence to Anglo-Saxon traditions and that immigrants should only be allowed in if they contribute something monetarily. This nugget on infrastructure is pretty choice, “that reflects the architectural, engineering, and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. In other words they want America to look as white as possible. Another fun one is, “a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxxon traditions”. Here’s a real zinger:
"societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country."
This is all pretty racist stuff! That last part about an immigrant invasion also stands in contrast to decades of evidence on the economic contribution of immigrants as well as crime rates relating to citizens that were not born here. Also, hey Matt Gaetz has joined the caucus too. You remember Gaetz, the alleged child sex trafficker. Nothing screams good old American values like moving a 17 year old across state lines to pay her for sex. This kind of delusional and inelegant rhetoric is too much even for the aforementioned House Freedom Caucus, who made a name for themselves by dressing their economic dogma and legislative obstruction in racist dog whistles for most of the last decade. Kevin McCarthy even offered an on the record rebuke of the group, saying something to the effect that the GOP is not the party of nativist dog whistles. Putting aside the fact that oh wow is that ever not true, you know things are getting a little extreme when you’ve lost McCarthy and his allies.
Pretty remarkable condemnation of the America First Caucus from a fellow member of the House Freedom Caucus https://t.co/trOhunpUQH
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) April 17, 2021
Things get slightly more awkward when looking at the not just racist, but explicitly fascist history of the term America First. Dating back to the days leading up to Hitler’s genocidal conquest of Europe, sympathizers within the United States latched on to the idea of countries being polluted with individuals of insufficient purity. It wasn’t long before the connections at home and abroad with the Third Reich were embarrassingly acute. One would hope that would be a painful lesson every subsequent American would internalize but it would seem that’s not the case.
America First and Nazis have been associated for nearly 100 years. pic.twitter.com/Oq00Vq7OgJ
— 😺🌊😾 Willow 😾🌊😺 (@Fuzzy_Fuzzbutt) April 16, 2021
Anyways, Greene has no stated legislative agenda and Gaetz, for his roughly 3.5 years in congress has yet to draft a single piece of legislation. Expect the America First Caucus to be very loud and angry, complain about cancel culture and do very little else. Which is of course- if you were to ask Greene at least- the American way. -Tristan
UPDATE: AND IT LOOKS LIKE GREENE IS SCRAPING THE WHOLE IDEA AS OF SATURDAY DUE TO INTENSE BACKLASH IN HER OWN PARTY. SOMETIMES THE SYSTEM WORKS!
We’ve Morally Raced To The Bottom
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by tommaso79/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
If you were to ask me today if I felt that most people were inherently good, I’d quickly reply, “yes, I believe they are.” I say this knowing full well how evil humans can be. This world presents plenty of them everyday. Nevertheless, despite our failings, I still live my life hoping I’ll see the best in people. I always will and that will never change.
I believe it’s in us to aspire as individuals. To want to achieve and be greater than we are right now. But, despite our best intentions to be good to one another, inside each of us lies a bedrock of features that cater to our most destructive impulses. Boredom, indifference, apathy, lust and deviance lie as core tenants of our most shameful attributes. Each taps into our moral code and each tests what type of person we are and aim to be.
How many times have you heard or even said the phrase, “oh boy, if the world knew the things I’ve searched on my computer?”
(waiting…)
Let me guess, I’m sure it’s quite a lot.
The internet, with its endless possibilities indulges our own worst impules. It gives us freedom to explore and act on things we know we should not do. The battle lies not with what exists, but with how we decide to live. What we let in. Giving life to destruction leads our own best intentions down a path of moral failings.
From The New York Times:
A 16-year-old girl in Perth, Australia, a good student and popular in school, took a naked photo of herself while standing in front of a bathroom mirror. She sent it via Snapchat, so that it would automatically disappear in seconds, to her 17-year-old boyfriend, with the words: “I love you. I trust you.”
The boyfriend took a screenshot before it disappeared and shared it with five of his friends. They in turn shared it with 47 of their friends. Within a few days, more than 200 people in the school had a copy. Someone uploaded it to a porn site, naming the girl and her school; over three months, with the help of online searches directing people to the site, the photo was downloaded 7,000 times. The family moved to a different city, but students there found the image as well, so the family fled to a different state in Australia.
Paul Litherland, a former Australian police officer who worked on the case, told me that the photo was posted on porn websites all over the world, so the girl felt she could never escape. She refused to attend school. She self-medicated with drugs. And then, at the age of 21, she took her life.
This excerpt comes from an op-ed that came out this Friday by Nicholas Kristof. It’s titled, Why Do We Let Corporations Profit From Rape Videos?
Her boyfriend’s indifference towards her wishes, privacy and respect led him to do an awful thing.
His friends deviance led them to forward it amongst their peers.
The collective apathy of others for her well being gave them the freedom to not care.
Our own lust prompts us to search for content we’d be ashamed to admit.
Watching porn isn’t a bad thing. But what we type in should not be at the mercy of how naughty our brains can go. If we let our own worst impulses take over, morally all we’ve done is raced to the bottom. It may seem all fine and dandy in your own little world, and for the most part, it probably is. Until you read the excerpt above, then it isn’t and that’s the worst outcome we should ever want. - Jamie
FLUX FIVE
This Week:
The Innocence Mission “St. Francis And The Future” 2019 See You Tomorrow
The Future Sound Of London ”Cascade” 1994 Lifeforms
Leroy Hutson “So In Love With You” 1973 Love Oh Love
Katzu Oso “Pastel” 2018 Pastel
The Jones Girls “Dance Turned Into A Romance” 1980 At Peace With Woman
Enjoy! - Mick
Things From The Internet We Liked
Fat Witch Cat Just Wants To Fly
We often don’t post enough genuinely heart warming content. Twitter user @fancysmudges helps us out with a concept story board of a cat that wants to fly with all the other witch cats but is just a little too heavy. Guaranteed to melt even the most ossified and cynical of exteriors.
Concept: a witch cat that's too fat to fly pic.twitter.com/JsNu9ZFjAM
— Julia🍒🌻 (@FancySmudges) October 29, 2020
Two Weeks Is A Long Time To Be Married
We’re back on Twitter comedian Kylie Breakman’s feed. This time she takes us through the all too true tribulations of bing a child of divorce. Sort of.
6-year-old divorcée pic.twitter.com/DtYuzDULWv
— kylie brakeman (@deadeyebrakeman) April 12, 2021
Andy Stott Is Back With His Brand Of Melancholic Electronica
UK producer Andy Stott has released his new LP Never The Right Time. over the years he has carved out one of the most ornately distinct styles of cerebral and fragile electronic music. Check out one of the best tracks on the album, The Beginning.
Apple’s Stunning IOS 14 Privacy Move Comes Into Effect This Week
From Forbes:
It’s been a long time coming. Apple first announced a stunning new privacy feature that would require all apps to ask for explicit permission to track in summer 2020. The feature, dubbed App Tracking Transparency (ATT), was expected to launch when iOS 14 arrived in September last year, but it was delayed after pushback from firms including Facebook.
Screw Facebook!
Pro tip: if you own an iOS device, next week is likely to bring you the most significant improvement in digital privacy in the history of the internet. And it will kneecap Facebook. 🍿
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 17, 2021