Tag: acab

Still too much

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching1 Comment

Something fun about civil disobedience in middle schools: they don’t … quite get it? They decided they were going to walk out of the building during advisory today, and that the actual protest itself would take place during advisory and fifth hour, with everyone returning to class afterward and the rest of the day proceeding as normal. Consequences: an unexcused absence for those two classes for all students who protested. As we all know, two class periods of unexcused absence actually prevent you from going to college, so there was a lot at stake here.

Well, first, a lot of them didn’t quite get that since this was a protest and they were breaking rules, there wasn’t going to be, like, an announcement over the PA system that it was time to go outside and be civilly disobedient. I had kids actually asking me if they needed to check in with me in Advisory before going to the protest. No! And when there were a ton of them just sort of lurking nervously in the hallways after the tardy bell had rung, I put my teacher voice on and told a mess of them to make a decision and either go outside or head to Advisory.

To which the response was, I shit you not, “We can just … go?” Yes! That’s kind of the whole idea. You just go, whether the teachers want you to or not. It isn’t called civil obedience.

(I am quite proud of three of my Algebra kids, who took on a leadership role and were the literal first three kids out of the building. That takes more bravery than you might think at this level, especially from kids who are generally predisposed to following rules.)

I also was correct in predicting that our administration, who were all outside monitoring and more or less keeping everyone in the parking lot, would be fielding requests for permission to go to the bathroom. Also kind of hilarious. I’ll walk out of class, sure, but go to the bathroom without permission? Madness! Chaos!

Go ahead, ask me how many of them didn’t get their coats before going outside, since generally they’re not supposed to have coats on during the day.

The decision was made and swiftly communicated that none of us were to bar or prohibit the kids from leaving our rooms if they chose to do so, but that they would not be allowed to go back and forth from outside to inside, and if they came inside, either because they needed to pee or they were cold, they were to return to class. Again, given the ages of our kids, I don’t find that unreasonable.

My kids all had a math test today (and I swear I didn’t schedule it to be a dick about the protest) and the ones who stayed behind– a little less than half of the class– still had to take the test.(*) I wrote the answers on the board. Left them there for two minutes and then erased them. One of them still got answers wrong.

Anyway, then the cops showed up. I think— keep in mind that I wasn’t out there, so this is all secondhand, and may contain inaccuracies– that the intent was at least mostly benevolent. They weren’t there to arrest anybody or cause any trouble and they didn’t bring, like, any crowd control shit with them. I’m pretty sure our regular SRO was part of the group.

The only thing is, two days ago a student’s older brother was murdered by the local police. Another former student, now a 9th grader, was shot not far from school by a still-unidentified assailant and is currently still hospitalized. My understanding is he’s stable but that word can mean a lot of different things.

Our kids are, to put it charitably, not in the mood for the police at the moment. And from what I’ve heard, it got kind of ugly quickly, as some unclear percentage of our students shifted from anti-ICE to ACAB. There may have been some snowball-throwing as well; I’m not clear about that. It was brought under control quickly– I’m not sure how much of that was the administration and how much of it was the kids realizing that they needed to rein each other in– but that could have gotten really bad really fast. My biggest worry was that ICE was actually going to show up; luckily, the worst-case scenario did not take place, for once.

All of this is just today’s work nonsense, by the way; there was home nonsense and family nonsense as well, but I’m not in the mood to get into that right now.

I kind of need tomorrow to go well.

(*) a lot of whom indicated to me that they wanted to be outside but their parents had forbidden them to. In fact, one girl’s father works in the building, and he called me to make sure she was in class. I think I would probably have lied to him if she hadn’t been, tbh.

This is too goddamn much

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

In the last 24 hours there have been two teenagers shot, one killed, in two separate incidents in the town I teach in. One has a direct connection to my school; the other has not been identified yet.

I can’t tonight. Sorry.

Clear enough?

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

To be completely clear: On immigration

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments
photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

I have said this, or variations on this, before. But this is the type of message that bears repeating.

No human being is illegal.

I favor completely unrestricted immigration to the United States. I don’t care if you get here on a private jet or by walking across the border. I don’t care if you have “papers” or not. If you think a better life can be had by coming to America, I think you should be allowed to live here.

Immigrants are not taking anyone’s jobs. The way I know this is the kinds of jobs immigrants work are always hiring, and I don’t see anybody lining up to work them.

Immigrants are significantly less likely to be criminals than US citizens, and frankly I don’t give a fuck if we end up bringing a statistically insignificant handful of criminals along with all of the honest immigrants. We have plenty of home-grown assholes and criminals as is, and I’ll happily trade that Nazi trash creature Stephen Miller for a dozen Mexican murderers anyway. They can move into my fucking neighborhood. We’re still better off. This is the “poisoned M&M” question all over again. If the M&Ms represent human lives, I’ll eat the whole fucking bowl. I don’t give a shit.

ICE should be abolished immediately, and anyone who still works for that agency could be dropped into an active volcano with no actual loss to humanity.

Let anyone who wants to come here in, and give them a path to citizenship. If they break the law along the way treat them like anyone else who broke the law.

Immigration is an unconditional societal good. We are better off because of these people, and the people most opposed to immigration are reliably the worst among us.

I know who I stand with, and I will not apologize.

My day in two images

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video gamesLeave a comment

This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker: Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.

(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?

My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.

This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.

Make it make sense

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was behind this … person … for a bit on the way home from work today, and the cognitive dissonance hurt so badly that I had to get a picture. You can, no doubt, see the “TEACH PEACE” sticker on the left there; that’s fine. The problem is the decal on the right, which, just in case you can’t quite parse it, is a Punisher skull, with an American flag overlaid on it, with the words “FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT” around it. This image in red vinyl, basically. As an open endorsement of American fascism it’s not quite as overt as, say, a thin blue line cross, but it’s pretty fucked up! In general, any time you see someone idolizing the Punisher, that’s a bad person, and they are to be avoided (I’ve said this before: any police organization in particular that uses that logo needs to be dissolved, immediately) but combining it with “teach peace” is just fucking unhinged. The fact that it’s on a pickup truck is even weirder; that may be the only pickup truck on the planet with a “teach peace” sticker on it.

I can see someone already fixing their fingers to suggest that a married couple owns this truck and one of them picked one sticker and one picked the other; these people should not be married and they should also own separate cars. It’s unfair that they managed to cause me pain when all I was trying to do was get my ass home from work. I mean, the one who is married to the Punisher asshole is probably in pain every day, but I want them both to suffer.

Anyway, it’s April so I hate my job; there is no place in the world that is worse than a middle school in the spring, except that there is, and it’s a middle school during standardized testing during the spring. Unfortunately I have to go to that place every day, and tomorrow I get to be there from 7:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night, and then I have to go back on Friday morning for some fucking reason, so don’t expect much out of me tomorrow and whatever you get on Friday is going to be through a veil of barely repressed rage. It’s gonna be awesome for everybody, is what I’m saying.

Neck-deep in human waste, underneath the jail

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

This post has almost been about several things already; Gift of Gab, one of my favorite hiphop artists, passed away earlier today, and there will still likely be a post about him in the next couple of days. I’ve had a post about critical race theory brewing as well.

And then this murdering shitbag cop’s sentencing came down, and, well, that’s probably the most timely thing I could be writing about right now.

270 months. He murdered someone he knew by kneeling on his neck for nine and a half minutes and for that he will serve 22 and one-half years in jail. If the crime hadn’t been filmed, we’d likely never have heard of it, and he would no doubt have continued to be a murdering, racist asshole for the rest of his career.

I’m of two minds– well, several, really– about all this. He was convicted of second degree murder, for which the recommended sentence was 10 years, and the prosecution was pushing for probation. So the fact that he got over twice the recommended sentence is a good thing even if the defense was hoping for 30 years. I brought this up on Twitter earlier about an entirely different criminal; I don’t know that I’m any good about determining how long sentences should be for crimes.

The person I was talking about then was one of the Capitol rioters; she was in the building for around 10 minutes and committed no acts of violence while she was in there, and she got three years of probation. Is that “enough”? Hell, I don’t know. Would jail time have been better? 3o days of jail, to pick a number, instead of three years of probation? Six months? Is that too much for participating in an insurrection for ten minutes and not being one of the ringleaders of the crowd?

And this man gets 22.5 years for cold-blooded murder in broad daylight. Which doesn’t sound like enough; life without possibility of parole sounds great to me. Sure, there are more direct ways he could have murdered George Floyd; he was convicted of 2nd degree and not 1st for a reason. But George Floyd will still be dead when and if this man gets out of jail.

Well, okay, but he’s going to be spending that entire time in solitary, and when I am in a less bloodthirsty mental state I recognize that any amount of time in solitary confinement in America’s jails amounts to psychological torture, to say nothing of fifteen years, which is what I’m seeing would be the minimum amount of time he’d serve (who knows if that’s right, because Twitter, but whatever.). Fifteen years of solitary confinement 23 hours a day is not a sentence that many people can be expected to survive, and if they survive it, what emerges is not the person that went in. And I’m strugging, right now, to balance that need for justice and vengeance (not the same thing) with my disgust at the carceral state in America. I would prefer that jail be a place for rehabilitation and not for punishment. But it isn’t, and it likely won’t be in my lifetime. And this creature is not about to be the hill I choose to die on to fight the badly broken American justice system. The fact that he was convicted at all is remarkable, to say nothing of the sentence being more than the bare available minimum.

So.

I don’t want this to happen to anyone, but if it’s going to happen to anyone, it may as well happen to him. I’m not sure how that stands as a moral position, but it’s what I have at the moment. If he doesn’t like it, he probably should have listened to the crowd of people begging him to stop strangling another human being under his knee until that man died crying for his mother.

Briefly

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I am not done sorting out my feelings about the Derek Chauvin trial– and I doubt that I will be until after he is sentenced. And I am definitely not done sorting out my feelings about the fact that less than 20 minutes after the trial a cop gunned down a sixteen-year-old Black girl in Columbus.

I kinda hate it here right now, and I’m incredibly tired, and I’m wearing my Black Lives Matter shirt to work tomorrow.