Eder Campuzano: Feds, right-wing media paint Portland as ‘city under siege.’ A tour of town shows otherwise (The Oregonian)
Critics say the government’s slow response to requests for transparency and the national media’s focus on the most salacious moments of the city’s demonstrations prove both federal officials and national reporters care more about property damage than the physical injuries protesters sustain on the streets.
Portland officials’ claims that demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism cost downtown businesses upward of $23 million and video of protesters toppling a statue of Thomas Jefferson at a high school in North Portland drew headlines across the country.
But follow-up reporting of a faulty business association survey that mischaracterized sales losses due to coronavirus-related closures as protest-related or the school district’s push to rename many of its buildings in a nod to the movement that led to the statue’s toppling haven’t spread beyond local media.
Neither have stories about the protesters volunteering to feed houseless Portlanders in downtown parks, a group local police removed from the parks in front of the federal courthouse ahead of Wolf’s visit.
John McWhorter: The Dehumanizing Condescension of ‘White Fragility’ (The Atlantic)
And herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous.
A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people. In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.
In 2020—as opposed to 1920—I neither need nor want anyone to muse on how whiteness privileges them over me. Nor do I need wider society to undergo teachings in how to be exquisitely sensitive about my feelings. I see no connection between DiAngelo’s brand of reeducation and vigorous, constructive activism in the real world on issues of import to the Black community. And I cannot imagine that any Black readers could willingly submit themselves to DiAngelo’s ideas while considering themselves adults of ordinary self-regard and strength. Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome.
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White Fragility is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think—or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.
Piper McDaniel: Portland protests end Friday downtown in tandem force by federal, local police (The Oregonian)
Amid renewed calls Friday for federal law enforcement agencies to stop policing Portland protests, those officers once again closed in on demonstrators and used tear gas at least twice to break up crowds downtown.
The overnight force against protesters by federal police came soon after Oregon’s attorney general announced she was suing several federal agencies over the arrests of protesters. Several other state and local officials, including Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, also criticized the federal presence.
Yet after Portland police declared the downtown demonstration to be unlawful early Saturday morning, federal and local officers emerged at the same time to advance on protesters.
Joseph Bernstein: Andy Ngo Has the Newest New Media Career. It's Made Him a Victim and a Star. (Buzzfeed)
I think Andy Ngo’s work is designed to confirm some truly ugly American instincts: that something inherent in Islam makes Muslims unassimilable, that minority groups using their status cynically is as big a problem as discrimination against them, and that a tiny pocket of the American left poses as great a threat to the freedom of Americans as a federal government careening toward permanent minority rule. I think his methods are unsafe, inimical to good journalism, and border on propagandistic. But he’s not a grifter.
Calling him a grifter is a way of saying that no one clever and dedicated enough to do what he’s done might actually have the politics he does. That’s a comforting thought for some, I’m sure. I’m not even sure Ngo is a troll, except to the extent that literally the entire conservative media machine, from social media to nighttime news, is a troll on liberals. I think he’s ambitious and savvy, and he wanted to break into a right-wing media world that speaks to an enormous national audience that shares parts of his worldview.
And what’s the best way to do that? What is the national story that has given a whole generation of journalists, myself included, across every stratum of media, a platform? The never-ending American culture war, online and offline, that sometimes breaks out into violence. There’s not a lot of news in what Ngo does. It’s not man bites dog that antifa is violent or that some hate crimes are made up or that college students say dumb things. But there is a demand, a big one, to showcase leftists and minorities as villains. How many freelance videographers nursing well whiskeys in the dive bars of Brooklyn would trade a few punches from a Proud Boy for a job at Vice? The media is shrinking, and to squeeze oneself in needs a leg up: a connection, an uncommon aptitude, or the willingness to do things other people simply aren’t.
With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places.
Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors.
And it's going to be a while till we travel again.
Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while.
A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.
Many of those arrested were volunteers working with Riot Ribs, a barbecue tent that has been serving up free food to anyone who asks since the Fourth of July. From the sidewalk of SW Salmon, the volunteers who avoided arrest watched the blue awning of their stand collapsed by government contractors, still within the boundaries of Lownsdale Square Park. The volunteers hadn't been able to grab anything associated with the stand, including a large stainless steel grille they'd received the night before from Pok Pok, and thousands of dollars worth of food donations that they'd planned on feeding to hungry people.
Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson: Federal Law Enforcement Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab Protesters Off Portland Streets (OPB)
Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.
The tactic appears to be another escalation in federal force deployed on Portland city streets, as federal officials and President Donald Trump have said they plan to “quell” nightly protests outside the federal courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center that have lasted for more than six weeks.
Alex Zielinski: Hall Monitor: Crossing the Line (Portland Mercury)
Yet Wheeler has been clear—and honest—about one thing.
“Portland continues to be used as a staging ground for violence night after night,” he said Sunday. “This is causing unprecedented harm to our communities, livelihoods, and Portlanders continue to fear for their safety.”
But it’s time Wheeler acknowledges who is truly bringing this violence into our community: Unarmed 20-somethings in black hoodies, or heavily armed law enforcement prepared for war.
Including some centering techniques, `li::marker`, and `display: inline-flex`, `column-rule`, `background-repeat: round`.
There are a lot of CSS properties that some don’t know about, or they know about them, but forget to use them when they’re needed.
91-DIVOC is home to many data-forward, high-quality, interactive, and informative visualizations made during the global pandemic created by Prof. Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider. I hope you'll spend some time and nerd out on data with me! :)
A teapot or a watering can with the spout pointing at itself. A one-inch-long ruler. A door with three doorknobs.
is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani.
Great demos for mostly-CSS card flip, cube, and carousels.
With the introduction of CSS transforms, elements could be shifted, rotated, slanted, squashed and stretched. Web designers were finally able to catch up to print designers. With CSS 3D transforms, web designers can move past their print counterparts and explore a new realm in graphic design.
Thread by @clairewillett: on the assassination of Fred Hampton
When you learn white people history in white people schools your whole life, one of the most poisonous threads running through it is this confident, implicit trust in institutions. This idea that the government, while imperfect, is nonethless reliably on the side of Good For All.
Most white people learn about the Civil Rights Era only through a few carefully-selected MLK quotes misinterpreted as a call for niceness. If you're about the Black Panthers at all, it's often with an air of danger and menace, even now.
So I didn't learn about Assata Shakur and the Panther 28, I didn't learn about Fred Hampton and COINTELPRO, I didn't learn about Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover and the Southern Strategy and the FBI's strategic attacks on Freedom Riders, until I was in my thirties.
we as white people have NO LIVED CONTEXT for what it means to grow up as Black in America, where the entire system of law enforcement is not just not there to help, but is actively at war with you, and carefully rewriting the narrative to make the victims look like the threat.
This is a tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests.
It will remove identifying metadata (Exif data) from photographs, and also allow you to selectively blur parts of the image to cover faces and other identifiable information.
Kelsey Smoot: White people say they want to be an ally to Black people. But are they ready for sacrifice? (The Guardian)
If the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button?
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The truth is, genuine allyship is not kindness, it is not a charitable act, nor is it even a personal commitment to hold anti-racist ideals – it is a fall from grace. Real allyship enacted by White Americans, with a clear objective to make equitable the lived experiences of individuals across racial lines, means a willingness to lose things. Not just the extra $50 in one’s monthly budget by way of donating to an organization working towards racial justice. I mean palpable, incalculable loss. The loss of the charmed life associated with being a White person in America. Refusing a pay raise at one’s job and insisting that it be reallocated to co-workers of color who are undoubtedly being underpaid. The loss of potentially every close relationship with other White friends and family members who refuse to acknowledge or amend their behaviors that reinforce systemic oppression. The loss of bodily safety, by way of physically intervening when violence is being inflicted on to Black bodies.
This notion, one of true allyship, extends so far beyond the purview of contemporary White engagement with racial justice that it seems fanciful; almost laughable. I hardly ever allow myself the mental space to contemplate it. To wonder, if the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button? Would they truly want to wake up tomorrow, in an America in which my life mattered just as much as theirs, if it came at the cost of all they have come to know and enjoy in the vein of White privilege? To expect true allyship from the White people in my life would be to ask them to be willing to sacrifice the thing that they covet most, though they may never be truly conscious of it: their Whiteness. So, I don’t. I respond to each message I receive with “thank you for thinking of me”, place my phone face downward on my desk, and prepare for another day of navigating White America.
Thread by @RottenInDenmark on ‘cancel culture’ (Twitter)
I think this is why the "cancel culture" moral panic gets under my skin so much. *So* many of Americans' false unof people and events come from the fact that the media was traditionally run by a tiny number of gatekeepers.
James Beckwith: A Time Lapse World Map of Every Covid-19 Death (Kottke)
From January to the end of June, over 500,000 people died of confirmed cases of Covid-19. In order to demonstrate the magnitude of the pandemic, James Beckwith made a time lapse map of each Covid-19 death.
“Each country is represented by a tone and an expanding blip on the map when a death from Covid-19 is recorded. Each day is 4 seconds long, and at the top of the screen is the date and a counter showing the total numbers of deaths. Every country that has had a fatality is included.”
As was the case with the pandemic, the video starts slow but soon enough the individual sounds and blips build to a crescendo, a cacophony of death.
Anne Helen Petersen: Inside Enya's Irish Kingdom (Buzzfeed)
Over the course of three decades and with 80 million records sold, Enya has morphed into more than musician: She's her own adjective. What makes her music — and the mysterious woman behind it — appealing to so many? Anne Helen Petersen visits the reclusive singer in Ireland.
Checkboxland is a JavaScript library for rendering anything as HTML checkboxes.
You can use it to display animations, text, and arbitrary data. It also supports plugins, so you can build more powerful APIs on top of it.
Checkboxland is dependency-free, framework-agnostic, and fun! 🙃