Our Weekly Discontents, 6/14/2021
You've got to keep the death machine churning
Hello everyone, it's Eoin Higgins from The Flashpoint.
Here are some thoughts on death.
Alabama is getting close to completing a gas chamber to kill inmates on death row.
The state made the announcement in a federal court filing last week.
The court filing did not describe how the proposed execution system would work. When the Alabama legislation was approved authorizing nitrogen hypoxia, proponents theorized that death by nitrogen hypoxia could be a simpler and more humane execution method. Death would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, thereby depriving him or her of oxygen.
Bleak stuff. But execution by nitrogen gas—a technically legal method of execution that's never been put into practice—is part of what's becoming a pattern around the country. Faced with a shortage of chemicals for lethal injection due primarily to the bad press for companies involved in the practice, states are turning to other means to keep the death machine churning.
In Oklahoma, gas is a contingency method of execution, though the state has enough chemicals for lethal injections. Discourse Blog's Jack Crosbie wrote last month about a new bill in South Carolina that would force death row inmates on death row to decide between the electric chair or the firing squad.
That these barbaric methods of execution are becoming more widespread may, as Crosbie wrote, result in the public turning against state-sanctioned murder. But I fear that the opposite will happen—that the more brutal the state’s violence is, the more it becomes normalized in American society.
Last week at The Flashpoint:
This week, the connection between housing and the service industry and how a former IDF soldier's experiences radicalized her on Palestine.
I'm running a 20% off Summer Solstice sale this week! If you're interested, click here.
Now let’s hear from the rest of the crew.
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Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
On Friday I wrote on the disgusting treatment of Ilhan Omar by both Republicans and Democrats alike and about how this same treatment is meted out to anyone who actually describes America as it actually is.
…our military exploits are essentially the large scale version of how the police operate within America which makes sense because America itself is the self-styled cop of the world: incapable of addressing any situation without bungling in guns blazing sowing endless pointless destruction in our wake. One boot on an innocent’s face the other boot stomping firmly on our own dick.
While it’s bad enough that we cause so much suffering what’s worse is that then on top of that and also like cops we need to be big fucking pissing babies about it whenever anyone tries to call us out on our bullshit. Barbarians and martyrs at once. There’s no difference between what’s coming out of the Democratic leadership right now than what you typically hear from any police union when someone has the temerity to suggest that they might perhaps acknowledge they’ve got something of a temper problem. Catch Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the leadership in the role of fucking Pat Lynch of the New York Police Benevolent Association. Crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you and crying and hitting you.
Before that I published the latest in our series of pieces about the culture-wide shift going on in the service industry. I spoke with the owners of a lauded Portland, ME bar about how actually treating their workers well has paid off.
“The fact of the matter is, when you do the math on a sustainable wage in the restaurant industry you’re looking only at a 10-15% increase in prices to get from $5 an hour to $15. It doesn’t take all that much to make those numbers work. There are price increases you can spread across a whole bunch of items on the menu, and your guests are going to accept them. Especially if you’re out there saying, hey, we’re paying people well. Especially now, people want to give their money to businesses that are aligned with them in other ways besides just making good food.”
The latter piece is for subscribers only but use this coupon for Discontents readers to get 30%.
Cruel and Usual
Shane Ferro
This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the framing of the uptick in gun violence as a conversation about how many cops we have or should have is much too narrow. Even if you accept the premise that more police equals less violent crime, which I do not, we are not getting to zero violent crime anytime soon. And given that, we talk too little about the ways in which government fails communities that see a lot of violent crime. If it were me, I would simply give people in those communities cash, but there are other, more traditional ways in which a government could allocate resources.
The issue with violent crime, to really simply things, is that it is bad for society when people get hurt, and when they die. Reducing violent crime reduces harm, and ultimately death. But assuming there is some crime, there are other ways to address the harm and ultimately death associated with it. Like, uh, having hospitals to treat people who are injured in shootings.
Do you know what New York City does not have? Well-allocated trauma centers that are appropriately spaced geographically such that people who get hurt in this city are equally likely to survive regardless of where they are. This is unsurprising to anyone who was paying attention during covid, when people who needed hospitalization were dying at much higher rates in the outer boroughs compared to Manhattan.
In fact, most of southern Queens, where there are a lot of shootings, proportional to other parts of the borough and the city, has no trauma center within 3 miles. That means it takes significantly longer for people who are injured there to reach doctors and surgeons that could potentially offer live saving treatment. According to an analysis by the Trace in 2019, being shot more than 3 miles from a trauma center was correlated with a 27% higher fatality rate than if a person was shot within a mile of the hospital.
If we really care about reducing harm, rather than appearing Tough On Crime, where is our commitment to funding healthcare?
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle & Felipe De La Hoz
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Stephen Miller and the whole Trump-era immigration policy apparatus was the “paper wall” of arcane regulatory changes that collectively did more to stop immigration into the country — of every kind — than any physical wall or troop deployment ever could. The Biden administration very early on took some flashy actions to roll back key aspects of that paper wall, but has since seemed at a bit of a loss as to how to approach the monumental task of toppling a structure that Miller spent four years painstakingly constructing out of thousands of different policy memos, regulations, agency rules, and the like.
Recently, we’ve gotten some more indications of the direction that Biden wants to go in. An internal ICE memo grants greater prosecutorial discretion to ICE prosecutors to dismiss cases involving longtime permanent residents, people with medical vulnerabilities, people who’ve been in the country since they were children, and others. (Yes, in this system the arresting officers, detention officials, and prosecutors are all part of the same Homeland Security agency. The judges meanwhile, are under the Justice Department, meaning everyone is an executive branch employee.) U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services changed some rules to prevent applications from being summarily denied due to minor errors or inconsistencies, and DHS Secretary Mayorkas hinted at some further easing of its draconian regulations.
Still, it hasn’t been all sunshine for immigration advocates. Mayorkas also stood behind the incredibly restrictive Title 42 border policy, and it was reported that the department had begun using an invasive surveillance app that includes facial recognition on would-be asylum seekers before they even entered the country. VP Harris memorably went to Guatemala to tell Guatemalans to “not come” to the United States. As we wrote in last week’s BORDER/LINES, it seems the administration is pursuing the dual strategy of starting to ease the severity of the immigration system domestically while fortifying the country against future humanitarian migration.
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
To cheaply stop drones, the U.S. Army is asking for an anti-drone bazooka that costs no more than $37,000/unit, or an anti-drone ground station that can stop drones at the low low price of just $15,000 apiece. Earlier this month, I wrote about this bazooka quest for Popular Science, but it’s fresh in my mind this week as I contemplate the long-run implications of the Albuquerque Dongcopter.
On the scale of military drones, ones that are built to be bombs or provide targeting information for deadly weapons, those prices make some sense. Yet even at the highest end of what the dongcopter could have been, a weapon that costs $15,000 to destroy a $500 drone is massive overkill. I don’t know, yet, if police are explicitly looking at the same kind of military-grade tools for the fight against dongcopters, but I expect we’ll see military surplus trickle down to local boots.
What that means more immediately, as the Army looks for a human portable drone stopper that actually works, is that older models, overpriced versions of jammers on airsoft rifle stocks, might find their way into police hands as a sort of modest overreaction.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
Last week the Quincy Institute’s Annelle Sheline joined the FX podcast to talk about the broken Yemeni peace process and what Western governments (i.e., the United States) could do to fix it. Of course this presumes they’re more interested in a peaceful resolution to Yemen’s war/humanitarian catastrophe than they are in trying to punish the Houthis, which to be fair assumes facts not in evidence. Annelle and I also spoke about the UAE’s effective annexation of Yemen’s Socotra and Mayun islands as well as growing signs of unemployment-fueled unrest in neighboring Oman.
Habibti Please
Nashwa Lina Khan
Last week Nashwa and Shaadie of the Habibti Please gang spoke to Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method. You can find the premium teaser here, the full episode can be found on substack or patreon. They focused on Muslim socialism, feminism, haunting, how we remember and so much more. Shaadie and Nashwa also did a live recording about Jakarta Method, the Victims of Communism memorial and a Q and A, hosted by Harbinger Media Network. Check it out here. Lastly, Nashwa and Ryan hosted Member of Provincial Parliament in Ontario, Canada Jessica Bell to discuss the Green New Democratic Deal, COVID evictions, and transit in the province. Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kim Kelly
This past week I broke my freelance fast and wrote a piece for The Nation about the 1,100 Alabama coal miners who are now staring down their fourth (!) month of a strike against Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, and who are facing increased company violence in the form of vehicular attacks on the picket lines. Multiple strikers have been sent to the hospital after being hit by trucks driven by bosses or scabs, and yet somehow, it’s been mostly crickets on the media front. I’m supposed to be focusing on writing my book right now, but I keep being drawn back into this story; it’s become very personal for me, and it feels like no one else is going to cover them if I don’t. With that in mind, I have a few more pieces on the strike and the people behind it dropping later this month.
Read more about all that here.
Discourse Blog
Hi all, Crosbie here with another update from Discourse Blog. We started off last week with an interview with Discontents’ own Nashwa Khan, about Palestinian solidarity across the West’s muslim diaspora.
Some other highlights, I think, were Rafi’s blog about Emmanuel Macron getting slapped across the face (extremely good), Jack’s blog about the ProPublica investigation into the super-rich’s finances, and Paul’s report on the state of employment classification for Uber and Lyft drivers in New York. Also, I went to Anna Wintour’s house. Or, outside of it, I guess, as the New Yorker Union shouted rude things at her because her company pays them pennies to put out the most famous magazine in the country.
Elsewhere, Sam wrote about Kamala Harris’s brutal, blunt proclamations on immigration, and Jack wrote about the newest wave of antisemitism smears against Ilhan Omar. Oh, and I also went to NYC Mayoral candidate Eric Adams’ house. Weird week for me visiting rich people’s places of residence. As a capstone to all this, here is the Smith College Librarian rap video. If you don’t know what that is instantly then don’t click the link, it’s not worth it, save yourself. See you next week!