I’ve got no link to The Nib this week as we take a second to get a new website in order. Comics resume on August 12 online and in our daily newsletter–> thenib.com/daily
People outraged that Joaquin Castro made public information…public?
Y'all, I-
Releasing public information is not doxxing. Doxxing is when private information like home addresses, personal phone numbers, social security numbers, bank information, etc. are leaked out to the public. Conservatives are too dumb to understand this.
Ring’s “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal” shows police where Ring cameras are located on a map and makes it easy for them to request access to footage from individual Ring units without a warrant. Although the owners of the units are not legally obliged to hand over the footage, they may not feel comfortable turning down a request from law enforcement.
Even if a Ring owner does deny the request for footage, the police can still contact Amazon directly and request the footage through them, as reported by GovTech. If the request comes within 60 days and the footage has been uploaded to the cloud, Ring will hand it over. This essentially means that police have access to Ring footage whenever they want, even against the wishes of Ring owners.
When Sean Butterfield started door knocking for the re-election campaign of Seattle’s only socialist city council representative,
Kshama Sawant, earlier this year, he knew his task was not easy. Last
year Sawant took on one of the word’s biggest corporations, Amazon, with
a tax intended to fund public housing, and nearly won.
Butterfield reasoned that Amazon, along with the rest of Seattle’s
formidable business sector, would make its presence felt as the primary
election day on 6 August drew closer.
So it has happened. Well over a million dollars in political action
committee money has poured into Seattle’s local elections, with the
city’s Chamber of Commerce Pac alone spending $1.1m (Amazon contributed
$250,000), and two other Pacs pouring in another $477,00.
Together, the Pacs have spent over $312,000 on Sawant’s race alone, much of it coming in the form of attack mailers.
More than a dozen of Amazon’s top executives have also now donated to
one of Sawant’s primary opponents, Egan Orion. The list includes Jay
Carney, the former press secretary for the Obama administration who is
the PR and policy chief for Amazon.
Two of Amazon’s three CEOs have donated to Orion as well, with Jeff
Bezos being the only one not to have personally chipped in, according to
numbers from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.
Butterfield, a 35-year-old healthcare worker, was surprised at just how effective the money was, even when spent on campaign mailers.
Dozens have hit mailboxes in the district since mid July, and he didn’t
grasp their impact until he started seeing – and hearing – it as he
went from door to door.
“It’s just shocking when you go knock on somebody’s door, and it’s
just a barrage of these talking points,” Butterfield said. “It’s not too
hard to untie these knots, the arguments these talking points rest on,
but you can’t do that with everybody. We can’t knock on every door.”
But while the mailers might be effective, the role of business money
and Amazon in the race could play well for Sawant, who is facing five
other candidates besides Orion, with the top two going on to the general
election on 5 November.
“This race and indeed all of the city’s elections this year will be a referendum on one fundamental question: who gets to run Seattle? Big business like Amazon and real estate corporations, or working people?” Sawant told the Guardian.
A 46-year-old former tech worker who left the field to obtain a PhD
in economics and enter grassroots organizing, Sawant has built her
political career on championing social movements and taking on big
business. Her message has resonated in Seattle, a city with one of the highest rates of gentrification in the country, and where residents have become increasingly skeptical of the influence of Amazon and its large downtown campus.
Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative party, drew national attention in 2015 as one of the driving forces
that led Seattle to become the first major city to adopt a $15 minimum
wage, and again was in the spotlight in 2018 as she pushed for the
so-called “Amazon tax”.
The proposal would have levied a $275-per-employee “head tax” on
corporations making over $20m a year to fund new public housing and
homeless services. Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the US, behind only New York and LA.
The tax initially passed, but was repealed only a month later after Amazon threatened to move jobs out of the city and
teamed up with labor unions, who were afraid of job losses, in a
campaign that attacked the plan as a job-killer that could drive the
city’s largest private employer out of town.
The differences between Sawant and Orion, both ideological and
strategic, are telling in that they echo conflicts occurring between
progressives across the country. While the two agree on the problems
facing the city, like homelessness and affordable housing, they offer
radically different ways of solving them.
Sawant’s uncompromising style of confrontational, movement-driven politics has made her enemies – including some in labor
– and critics often accuse her of being divisive. Orion, an
entrepreneur known for saving the city’s pride festival, PrideFest, says
he represents a different approach.
As the executive director of a neighborhood chamber of commerce, he
accepts that business is backing his campaign. He criticizes Sawant for
receiving a substantial amount of individual donations from people outside the state
– and she’s raised more money than other candidates, reflecting the
fact that she’s an incumbent with a national profile. For his part,
Orion sees the support he gets from business as a sign of the
effectiveness of his less confrontational, more partnership-driven model
of politics.”
“Kshama Sawant is the worst partner for our large businesses. You
know, a bologna sandwich would be a better partner,” he told the
Guardian.
On homelessness, Orion argues the city doesn’t need more tax revenue
from business but instead should focus on “getting better outcomes”,
with the funds currently being distributed to non-profits who work with
the homeless population.
The two also differ on how the city should create more affordable housing. Orion favors
increasing urban density and cutting regulations to encourage
developers to build more housing, arguing that would increase housing
supply, and therefore lower prices.
Sawant advocates for rent control, an idea, that despite its many critics in academia, is resurfacing as a force in Europe, with some traction
in the US as well. Like the yimbys, she supports density and upzoning,
but thinks the government and not the private sector should be doing
most of the building, saying that purely market-based solutions are
“naive at best”.
For Rich Smith, a reporter covering the race for Seattle’s
alternative weekly, the Stranger, a Sawant v Orion matchup, if it
happens in the general election, would reflect a larger clash happening
in the city between more well-off residents who identify as progressive
on cultural issues like gay marriage or immigration, but are more
moderate on economic issues like taxes or housing, and against younger,
working-class voters who are generally more willing to embrace the ideas
of socialist candidates like Sawant.
“There is a whole contingent of people in Seattle who typically have
money, who are Democrats or consider themselves progressive, and think
that Seattle is the most progressive place on the planet,” he said. “And
so they don’t like it when people point out that there’s huge issues,
at least structurally in terms of homelessness, transit, economic
inequality, housing or other crises that we’re facing,” he said.
Butterfield, the Sawant campaign volunteer, thinks her direct style makes existing conflicts more visible, and he welcomes it.
“That’s why people call her divisive and claim that she won’t bring
everyone to the table,” he said. “As though Amazon doesn’t have a voice
in Seattle politics, it’s preposterous, right? I mean, they own the damn
table.”
On Sunday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival,
an annual summer festival in the quiet city of Gilroy, California,
located about 30 miles south of San Jose. The gunman killed three people, including a six-year-old boy,
and injured at least 12 others. Police said the gunman had been shot
and killed and that authorities suspected he may have had an accomplice,
who was still at large.
Although authorities initially did not reveal the identity of the
shooter, local news station KPIX 5 reported he was a 19-year-old man
named Santino Legan. Police recovered a backpack filled with ammunition at the scene, and they later searched his home and a second location.
Little is currently known about Legan: Though witnesses claim to have
heard him say he was “really angry” while he was opening fire on the
crowd, there’s not much indication as to his potential motive for the shooting.
While his social media platforms appear to have been deleted as of
Monday morning, one post on his alleged Instagram read: “Ayyy garlic
festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.” Another post on the
now-deleted Instagram included a picture of a Smokey the Bear sign
advocating for forest fire prevention, with Legan writing in the
caption: “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to cater to make
room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?” then
plugging the text Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard.
A 19th-century text of unknown authorship (its origins have been attributed to everyone from British author Arthur Desmond to Call of the Wild novelist Jack London), Might Is Right
has long been considered a key text in the white supremacist movement,
says Keegan Hankes, a senior analyst for the Southern Poverty Law
Center’s intelligence project. “It’s widely popular and present among
ethnocentric white nationalists of all levels, from suit-and-tie white
supremacists to neo-Nazis,” Hankes tells Rolling Stone.
The text, which has been banned in multiple countries, essentially
advocates for social Darwinism, or the idea that members of certain
races or ethnicities are inherently better equipped for survival than
others. The author argues that true egalitarianism does not and cannot
exist, and that the “white race” is inherently biologically superior to
other races.
Although the social Darwinist arguments in the text were not
considered all that radical in the 19th century, when the eugenics
movement was at its height, it has since been embraced by everyone from
noted satanist Anton LaVey to Katja Lane, the wife of
white-nationalist-organization The Order founder David Lane, who wrote
the preface for its 1999 reprinting. It is also available on the white
supremacist website Counter-Currents, and the PDF version has become a
staple of white supremacist digital libraries and forums.
“The most important thing [about the text] is this belief in
ethnocentricity and biological determinism that is getting pulled from
the late 19th century to this current day,” says Hankes. “The ideas are
ubiquitous today in white supremacist circles.”
While it’s still unclear whether the shooting was racially motivated,
or if Legan had any other concrete ties to extremist circles, this
would not be the first time that a mass shooter had been influenced by
old-school white supremacist writings. The manifesto of the Christchurch shooter,
for instance — while primarily designed to incite division and troll
its readers — also contained allusions to Oswald Mosley, a 1930s British
fascist known for his Nazi sympathies and xenophobic ideology, and to
the writings of David Lane.
“Unfortunately, this is starting to feel all too common,” says
Hankes. “There’s a tragedy and we look for a connection to white
supremacy, and these are exactly the types of breadcrumbs you might
expect.”
