Our Weekly Discontents, 6/21/2021
Coffee with/from/for A Cop
Hi all! Katie Way here, entering into the Discontents Extended Universe with my newsletter All Cops Are Posters, where I dig into the ways cop culture and cop power play out online—the more ham-fisted the better, pun kind of intended. I write about both how individual police officers behave online and when and how the narratives they produce on social media bleed into our collective understanding of policing—the cop as victim, the cop as warrior, the cop as object of fandom, etcetera.
I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my favorite subjects, cops and food tampering, after now that the (former) Shake Shack manager at the center of the June 2020 Bleach Milkshake Scandal is suing two of NYC’s biggest police unions, the three cops who claimed their shakes were poisoned, and a shitload of other NYPD officers to boot.
Cops have a lot of complexes when it comes to the service industry. To be a police officer is to be locked in an eternal struggle with restaurants and coffee shops over a range of culture war-adjacent offenses, like slow or insufficiently respectful service—the kind of adversity civilians will never understand. When incidents like the ones linked above (threats of spitting in food, a cashier says “Black Lives Matter” while handing over a Whopper, etc) get written up by local outlets, they almost always include a quote from the cops involved lamenting the “discrimination” that comes with the uniform (as if being a cop doesn’t involve getting free food all the time).
All that is to say I shouldn’t have been surprised to stumble on for-cop, by-cop coffee companies peddling their wares on Facebook and Instagram—and yet!
As far as I can tell, these companies (like Blue Line Roasting and Code Blue Coffee Co.—it’s not a dog whistle if they’re screaming it, I guess) exist in the same vein of the MAGA coffee companies that Luke Winkie wrote about earlier this year in Vox: gimmicky marketing, reactive to the American right’s persistent anti-Starbucks sentiment, aimed at an audience eager to turn any purchase into a values statement/chance to wear some truly fucking hideous merch—this time, with a state-endorsed violence twist!
It’s interesting to see brands try to build around catering to cops and LEO-adjacent types like 911 dispatchers and firefighters when the concept of “coffee with a cop” is a pillar of community policing—a supposed forum for outreach and connectivity, a meatspace opportunity to humanize the badge that police departments have linked up with chain eateries like McDonalds and—yes!—the occasional Starbucks to host. (It’s worth noting that critics have complained that coffee with a cop and other community policing initiatives not only whitewash the role of police officers as violence workers, they also redirect resources away from communities and back into policing.)
Instead of looking for connection outside of the cop world, shopping with or repping these companies signals an investment in the trappings of policing and cop culture—the commodification of the job of policing, which in case anyone forgot is extremely taxing, dangerous, involves extreme personal sacrifice, has nothing to do with getting into verbal altercations with fast food restaurant workers—to push a product that 62 percent of American adults consume daily as of 2020.
Of course, this effect is achieved with varying degrees of success. Basically, some of these companies are much more developed than others—Blue Line Roasting, launched in November 2018, sells coffee varieties with names like “Peacemaker” and “Justified,” while Code Blue Coffee (founded in July 2020… interesting timing) offers more conventional fare, like “Cinnabun” and “Mocha” blends.
These companies also tout connections to law enforcement charities—general “warrior” interest coffee company Black Rifle Coffee Co.’s “Thin Blue Line” roast is “a product created to benefit law enforcement officers and their families,” while Code Blue claims on Instagram that it is a “Coffee Company supporting the military, veterans, law enforcement, EMS and other frontline workers and those who suffer from PTSD as a result of duty.” Vague!
This kind of branding isn’t going to win over the lion’s share of java fiends—again, almost two thirds of all American adults drink coffee daily—but that’s not really the point. The point is where there’s a certain slice of the U.S. population willing to inject their love of the police into their drinking culture, dating culture, and their Christmas decorations, there’s a very thirsty market.
And, as disquieting as it is to see the people hired to protect and serve shilling coffee beans specifically to other cops, that’s probably better that than whatever they’re “supposed” to be doing on the clock, right?
Okay, gonna kick it over to the rest of the team—don’t forget to subscribe to Discontents if you haven’t already! It’s free and it’s sick!
Also, we're announcing our first event on the subscriber-only Discontents Discord, on Wednesday at 8 PM EST. We'll be having a round-robin riff-sesh on what fresh hells the future will bring in a political system essentially run by Joe Manchin. Any paying subscriber to any of the Discontents newsletters can get Discord access, so now's a great time to sign up.
Foreign Exchanges
Derek Davison
On last week’s Foreign Exchanges podcast I was joined by fellow Substacker Séamus Malekafzali and Sina Toossi of the National Iranian American Council for a preview of Friday’s Iranian presidential election. That election is over now, and as was widely expected Iran’s new president-elect is Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi. I say that Raisi’s victory was widely expected mostly because the Iranian election apparatus ensured that he would be running against an especially feeble group of opponents.
All Iranian elections involve a screening process overseen by the Guardian Council, which is empowered to weed out potential candidates on grounds of competence and generally disqualifies anyone deemed personally or ideologically unsuited for office. This has typically resulted in Iranian elections that, while not “free and fair,” were at least competitive within a certain approved range of acceptable political views. But in two straight elections (last year’s parliamentary election and this year’s presidential one), the council has been especially stifling, disqualifying all but a handful of candidates whose views can be said to lie outside a much narrower than usual band of Iranian conservatism.
This year the council outdid last year’s performance and disqualified potential candidate of prominence who might represent a real challenge to Raisi’s victory. Unsurprisingly the outcome was an election that Raisi won handily but in which relatively few Iranians were motivated to participate—voter turnout, a metric typically valued by Iranian leaders, was a dismal 48.8 percent (the lowest ever for an Iranian presidential election), and a large portion of those who did vote either left their ballots blank or fouled them in some way.
As Sina and Séamus discussed during our conversation, this election feels like a potential inflection point for the Islamic Republic of Iran, one in which its republican trappings may be discarded for something more overtly authoritarian. Raisi is generally considered to be the leading contender to succeed 82 year old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and his elevation to the presidency may have had more to do with checking off a box on his resume than anything else. He’ll come into office already under sanctions by both the United States and the European Union over alleged human rights abuses, most particularly his involvement in Iran’s infamous 1988 mass execution of political prisoners.
Raisi’s forthcoming presidency should have little effect on Iran’s participation in talks over restoring the 2015 nuclear deal, as foreign policy decisions are Khamenei’s purview and he already seems to have committed to those negotiations. But his election is indicative of the overall tenor of Iranian politics, which has skewed to the right in the face of US pressure, and that will reduce any chance for additional US-Iranian diplomacy moving forward.
Welcome to Hell World
Luke O’Neil
Last week in this piece I got back to my roots: Meandering and maudlin stream of consciousness bullshit about physical pain and weltschmerz.
The YMCA was emptier than I ever remember it being all those years I came here except for one time which was the last time I came here which was the last normal day. There used to be so many old people meandering around in here like this guy with the takes on masculinity just toweling off their balls all over the place or swimming very slowly back and forth in the pool. Maybe I just came at a slow time during the day or maybe a lot of them went ahead and died from Covid in the past fifteen months I thought. Let me look up how many people died in Brighton, Massachusetts real quick hold on.
Looks like only around 1,800 in all of Suffolk County which doesn’t seem like that much does it? Only around ten times that many people died in all of Massachusetts which also doesn’t seem like that many does it? It does but it doesn’t. My perspective on how many people dying is a lot has admittedly and perhaps understandably been thrown out of whack of late.
In any case I thought it was going to be a much more emotionally resonant experience than it was this kind of homecoming but I was just a guy putting his bathing suit on and there’s not much pathos in that no matter how you try to frame it. To be fair I was probably forcing the whole thing. It’s like how when you’re single I guess and you want to meet someone really badly and you try and try but the desperation is palpable and so it doesn’t come until you finally stop looking and then voila! love finds you. Sometimes you go out in search of a metaphor and you push too hard. The metaphors have to sneak up on you when you’re busy doing other things.
After that I published an excerpt from a new book Loud, Naked, & in Three Colors: The Liberty Boys & The History of Tattooing in Boston about two of my favorite topics: the city of Boston and old-timey tattoo history.
The history of tattooing in Boston is inextricably intertwined with the long, colorful life and abrupt demise of the city’s iconic Scollay Square. Wedged between the Boston Port, Beacon Hill, and downtown, Scollay Square was a major transportation hub—first for stagecoaches, later for trolleys, buses, and trains—and a magnet for the denizens of surrounding neighborhoods. Here bankers and businessmen rubbed shoulders with store clerks, stevedores, sailors on shore leave, shoppers, stage performers, Harvard boys, daytrippers, and families out for an afternoon. A welter of rackety, hard-selling businesses vied to satisfy the crowd’s diverse appetites; by the 1890s Scollay Square was a carnivalesque neighborhood of flophouses, restaurants, bars, arcades, shoeshine joints, novelty shops, hot dog stands, movie and burlesque theaters, clothing and jewelry stores, banks and —in cramped, smoky, low-rent spaces over and under the square’s storefronts—tattoo shops, their proprietors hunched in shirtsleeves over buzzing machines.
Both those are behind the paywall. Use this 30% off coupon to check them out.
The Insurgents
Jordan Uhl & Rob Rousseau
This week we talked about Ilhan Omar getting piled on by both liberals and conservatives yet again for the crime of stating objectively true facts about the depraved violence of the American Empire. We also got into Israel’s latest assault on Gaza and that the reality of a “ceasefire” and a new Israeli PM simply means a return to the daily ongoing dehumanization and violence that Palestinians have been subjected to for decades, and how the past few weeks have revealed Canada’s racist and genocidal past and present.
In other news, we have word that Ken Klippenstein intends to try and return to the show in the next few days and we are currently taking security measures to ensure that his lifetime ban remains in place. Please keep us in your thoughts during this difficult time.
The Flashpoint
Eoin Higgins
I launch a three-part series this week at The Flashpoint based on conversations with dealers, users, experts, and advocates about substance use during the pandemic and the drug trade in general.
After working as a street level dealer over a decade ago on the East Coast, the most important asset Dion had developed was the trust of his suppliers. That took years of proving he could handle weight and distribution.
"Having credit is a big thing in this industry," Dion explained.
Last week:
BORDER/LINES
Gaby Del Valle & Felipe De La Hoz
One of our biggest motivations for starting BORDER/LINES was our frustration over the public’s fixation on the biggest, flashiest immigration policies—see: family separation—and near-total ignorance of basically everything else. Some of the most insidious policy changes of the last few years (and, really, the last few decades) have happened largely behind the scenes. These are administrative changes, bureaucratic decisions hidden under a cloak of legal jargon, but they’re just as harmful as mass raids or family separation.
Take, for example, two immigration decisions issued by Trump’s attorneys general: Matter of A-B- and Matter of L-E-A-. Both decisions narrowed the definition of “particular social group,” one of the criteria under which people are eligible for asylum. (To qualify for and receive asylum in the U.S., you have to prove that you’ve been persecuted or have a well-founded fear of persecution due to your “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”) In last week’s edition of the newsletter, we examined the Biden administration’s decision to overturn Matter of A-B- and Matter of L-E-A-.
Matter of A-B-, issued by Jeff Sessions in 2018, made it more difficult for victims of domestic and other forms of interpersonal violence to obtain asylum. The following year, Bill Barr issued Matter of L-E-A-, which overruled earlier decisions that determined families could be considered a particular social group. (Immigration courts, which are under the purview of the Department of Justice; it’s not at all independent from the executive branch.) All of this seems dense and legalistic, but the reasoning behind it is actually very simple: asylum seekers from Central America are often fleeing gang violence, domestic violence, or generalized violence resulting from decades of civil war and U.S. meddling in the region. Local law enforcement is often unable or unwilling to protect people from harm. By narrowing the definition of “particular social group,” the Trump administration effectively tried to end asylum protections for Central Americans without explicitly saying it outright.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone asking for asylum because of gang violence or family ties will suddenly be granted protections. Title 42 is still in place, the immigration courts are still stacked against asylum seekers, and the odds of winning are still low. At the very least, it’s a start.
Habibti Please
Nashwa Lina Khan
Nashwa and Ryan are in a bad place this week: Doug Ford’s Ontario. Doug Ford’s Conservatives rammed through Bill 307 limiting criticism of the provincial government. For the entirety of the pandemic there was no urgency for an adequate paid sick days plan, to stop COVID evictions, to roll out an accessible vaccination program, to redress long-standing issues throughout the Long-Term Care system, among other ongoing and present crises. The list of crises throughout this pandemic in Ontario that needed urgent action, but didn't receive the attention or prioritization by the Ford government, is long and the fallout for bungling the management of these issues will be felt for years to come.
In this episode Nashwa and Ryan sit down with Andrea Horwath, MPP for Hamilton-Centre and the Leader of the Official Opposition New Democrats. In this interview Nashwa and Ryan wanted the audience to learn more about Andrea and the Ontario New Democrats. This episode focused on provincial issues such as the vaccine rollout. The rollout continues to be a disservice to Ontarians as many have witnessed egregious lines at pop-ups and people rely on a community-driven twitter feed for information about the vaccines. Ryan and Nashwa also ask about the Ontario NDP’s launch of the Green New Democratic Deal. You can find it here.
We are witnessing a burgeoning fascist movement in Ontario and throughout Canada. Bill 307 was rammed through last week after courts had deemed it unconstitutional because it unjustifiably violated Ontarians’ right to freedom of expression – in particular affecting this important right during elections. Instead of appealing the decision, the Ford government invoked s. 33 of the Charter: the Notwithstanding Clause. The legal rule is an emergency tool governments can use to override certain Charter rights, even after a court deems a law unconstitutional. This tool has never been used in Ontario because invoking the Notwithstanding Clause means that a policy is going to violate fundamental civil liberties. This shows just how far Ford will go to achieve his political goals.
In Ontario, one could describe the current electoral political arena as something like the Sanders versus Trump showdown that never materialized in the US. With decades of Liberal governments neglecting Long-Term Care, destroying our public services, and so much more, the NDP finally holds a position as the official opposition in a way they previously have not.
Wars of Future Past
Kelsey D. Atherton
Incendiary balloons are a centuries old weapon of war, but a profoundly ineffective one. Relying entirely on the strength of the wind to deliver precision guidance, the gap between what harm is possible from incendiaries and what harm is likely is oceans-vast. Literally the case in World War II, where the military of Japan built helium balloons that would ride the jet stream to cross the Pacific, venting gas in the heat of the day and dropping ballast in the cool of the night.
History records this wind-borne balloon assault as the first intercontinental weapon, though it should also say up-front that this is likely history’s most ineffective intercontinental weapon. From over 9,000 balloons launched, the death toll was just six civilians, all in one family who tragically stumbled across an unexploded payload.
Incendiary balloons are back in the news as a weapon of asymmetric warfare, and I think the gap between the potential and actual harm in the 1944-1945 campaign is instructive. To specifically manage the threat of the balloons, the United States elevated forest fire management to a matter of national security. It shows that harm mitigation is a viable response when the actual threat is low enough. In this week’s upcoming Wars of Future Past(out soon!), I talk about the connections between incendiary balloons, nuclear weapons, missile defense, and weapons as policy choices.
Discourse Blog
Hi all, Crosbie here again. What a week! Here’s what we’ve got. Jack skewered the absurd cable news “body language analysts” for the Biden-Putin summit, and Paul wrote the definitive takedown of Felix Salmon’s morally bankrupt “deep dive” into unemployment fraud.
Meanwhile, I wrote about war. Or ending it. Or not ending it, as the case may be. That’s America, baby!
Paul’s off to a quick start this week as well: check out his scoop on a leaked memo from the hypocritically named “No Evil Foods” that shows them brutally laying off workers without severance.
In case you were wondering, huh, I wonder if Discourse Blog continued their “Worst Politicians in America” series: yes. We did. It’s Ohio this time, one of the worst states (sorry) filled with some pretty terrible politicians.
And while you’re there, don’t miss Rafi’s post about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s surreal apology for, you know, downplaying the Holocaust, or Sam’s blog about Texas’s latest power crisis.
To close us off, you know what it is: time for Caitlin to make everything fun again. Here is her definitive ranking of every state bird in America.