Boosted from thisfinecrew 

Can be done from home,
estimated time: 5-30 minutes,
Deadline, July 30th

Instructions here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HOhkkOhi9fA8LQUIWU233tc-z8XPXIhMUnWTSganxlw/edit

ICE is asking the public to apply to be part of their vigilante "Citizens Academy". Well, let's give them what they asked for: thousands of applications! Except our applications are going to be...a little different.


The goal is to ruin their application process by flooding them with fake applications. That’s where you come in! We need thousands of people to take 5 minutes to submit an “application” before the deadline of Thursday, July 30th.

thisfinecrew : Acting Locally to Help Immigrants and Refugees, more organizations to support to help get kids out of concentration camps, Lights for Liberty/July 12 events

thisfinecrew  has posted a number of other collections of links in the past twelve hours and is worth looking over in general.

There's no Canadian content, so I'll add Justice For Migrant Farmworkers (Facebook | Twitter) and Rainbow Railroad as local orgs doing important work here.

 I hope if I'm ever in a situation like this, I can be as brave and calm as Elin Ersson, a young Swedish woman who defied the authorities to save a man on her plane from being deported to his death in Afghanistan.

Incredibly, she caught most of it on cellphone video and you can actually watch this master class in badassery.

I'm crying a bit. We all need to be more like her.

 Every Trump supporter you meet is okay with rape camps for toddlers.

 I think what folks don't understand—intuitively speaking, I'm not assigning any sort of blame here—is that all laws, customs, and procedures were created by humans and can be undone by humans.

I posted the "You Can't Say That You Didn't Know" poster to Tumblr (I know, I'm opening myself up to a world of shit), and someone, quite reasonably, commented along the lines of "I know ICE are evil, but what do we with children in families who cross the border illegally?" They listed a bunch of bad options, such as keeping the families together in overcrowded prisons, leaving the kids alone and at the mercy of traffickers, etc.

It's kind of an obvious thing to wonder. Because to a young person (or even a middle-aged person with a regular, fallible memory), ICE has always existed. DHS has always existed. We have always had to take our shoes off at airports. And so on. But all of these have happened not just within my lifetime, but within the past two decades. Some authoritarian shitbag decided it was necessary and did it without asking the rest of the world whether it was a thing we needed.

Same with The Economy. If average people understood, even slightly, how the markets worked, they'd fucking revolt en masse. We talk about economics as though it's a force of nature rather than the product of human decisions made by people who are only slightly more qualified than I am to make those decisions, and in some case less so.

The best part of Yanis Varoufakis' talk that I saw last month was when he deconstructed the idea of economics as a science. If a weatherman with a reputation for accuracy makes a prediction that it will rain tomorrow, he may be right or wrong, but the prediction will not affect whether or not it rains. Whereas if an economist with an equally strong reputation makes a prediction that stocks will fall, this can affect whether they do or not. Because the former is a natural system, and the latter a human system. (On the quantum level, this is possibly less true, but I am not a scientist.) 

One of the most fascinating phrases I hear all the time is, "the market is nervous," or "the market is jumpy," as if The Market is a mercurial, living beast that must be fed, frequently, with the blood of workers lest it go on a rampage. What they actually mean by this is that white men in suits are having feelings, and this will affect whether you have a job tomorrow or not.

It's easy to fall under the fallacy of natural order because we experience existence as individuals, and as individuals, we do have relatively little power. And as a culture—speaking of the West here, and North America in particular—we have been very carefully trained to avoid thinking of ourselves collectively in any unit beyond that of the family or nation state. And also, because our memories are short. I don't remember a time I didn't feel old and tired, but I must have not felt this way, once. Hell, when I started this blog—what, 15 years ago?—the tag "orwellian dystopias" actually made sense because the idea that mass surveillance was something undesirable was mainstream, rather than us happily giving up all our info to Big Zuck.

So when we ask, "what can be done about children separated from their families," the answer is, "stop detaining families at the border." Border patrol, borders, laws concerning the crossings of said borders, and even the current socioeconomic forces that have required families to flee their homes and attempt crossings of said borders, are all artificial phenomenon that we have very recently created, and none of them are inevitable or irreversible.

When we decide that there is nothing to be done about separating babies from their families and herding them into rape camps run by private military contractors in a disused Walmart with a fascistic mural of Donald Trump on the wall, we have not only entered the worst kind of cyberpunk dystopia, but we have forgotten that the forced separation policy has existed for a year or two, ICE has only existed since 2003, and Walmart, though around since the dinosaurs walked the Earth way back in 1962, has only really been in a position where it closes stores, leaving them to be converted into rape camps, in the past decade or so. Even Donald Trump, though it feels like he has reigned forever and probably will*, has only been president since 2017.

What I'm saying is that we don't need to simper or pray for half-measures. You could literally tear up the whole border policy and open the floodgates tomorrow and it wouldn't affect the average American one bit, except that you'd pay a bit less for fruit. It's not ordained by God, or natural laws, or any sort of complexity. Some dudes made decisions and you can make them undo it with just a little political will.

* I am pretty sure that if a Republican ran on the platform of, "no more of these pesky elections and uncomfortable talking about politics that spoils every Thanksgiving," he would win in a landslide.

 Just spitballing here because I'm only on my second mug of coffee for the morning, but how about raising the social cost of being an ICE agent. Sure, you won't go to jail, you won't be charged with human rights violations, nothing the UN is able to do is going to stick to the US, BUT the concerted efforts of a group of organized citizens can make someone's life unliveable. I'm talking about doxxing, public shaming en masse, finding out where they live. Going door-to-door to their neighbours with flyers, well sourced and with photos, explaining that the person who lives in the house down the street participates in an organized gang that kidnaps, murders, and sexually assaults children, separates them from their families, and incarcerates them. Find their social media accounts and mob them. Inflict, on a community level, the sense of shame that they do not apparently possess.

Fascism is allowed to take root when the social cost to being a fascist is low, and large groups of people are dehumanized. Fascists don't necessarily change their belief system when you make it embarrassing to be a fascist, but they are less able to organize, let alone get paid by the State for jackbooted thuggery.

 Listening to some TERF spew TERF bollocks on CBC and I'm struck by how close the TERF (and their buddies, the misogynist right) sound to the arguments of anti-immigration types. You were not born X, therefore you can never be X, etc. Is it then coincidence that the two greatest points of unity on the Alt Reich are the opposition to the human rights of immigrants and trans people?

Well, that was something.

Despite my awesome powers of prognostication, I did not expect Cheeto Benito's Alt Reich to act as quickly or decisively as they did. My entire experience with authoritarian far-right governments in North America has been that of a slow-burn, frog-in-boiling-water type situation where most of the bad shit goes down in ways far too complex for the average citizen to understand. But this is different. This is a week, and we're all in such turmoil that it is impossible to keep track of all of the horrible shit happening at once.

This is by design, of course. You are meant to be confused and overwhelmed. The point is chaos and disruption. Much of Trump's moves won't stick, can't stick, but the intention is to screw fast and hard, to leave any opposition or resistance bewildered and under-resourced.

One of the reasons why I no longer identify as an anarchist (though I still have many anarchist sympathies) is that I actually believe that a big, lumbering bureaucracy is a healthy thing. It stops, for example, one psychopathic manchild elected by a deluded fraction of the populace from acting on every single chubby he gets when he's sitting on his gold toilet. I may not be that familiar with the US political system, but there are supposed to be checks and balances to prevent this kind of thing. Trump has decided to cut through all that, and because the US government is not typically accustomed to a sole petty tyrant doing whatever the fuck he wants, it is not in a position to respond immediately. And this is what cause the massive clusterfucks at the airports.

This is the age of immediate gratification, and the US now has a Führer who acts only based on immediate gratification. The system may respond, but it's a few hours behind, and those few hours can mean a lot if the bad guy's only plan is to smash and destroy as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

There are a number of avenues for resistance, as many are currently circulating. To be honest, I'm mainly concerned with the ones I can help with as a Canadian. I'm super-pissed, by the way, in the way you can only be when you have a full, normal life going on and you need to halt it because every action that is not directed towards removing Trump from office seems like a wasted action*. In the next few months and years, I may be a stop along an underground railroad, but it can't just be action on an individual or even small group basis.

So here are a few things:

Trump is a Nazi, and anyone who supports him is a Nazi. This is how you need to view things from now on. No compromise, no quarter, no platform. Do not allow representatives of the American state to enter your country. Cut ties with your Trump-supporting relatives. Picture them all in Stormtrooper helmets or SS badges if it makes it easier. They have voluntarily given up their right to be considered humans.

Any company that supports Trumpism is the enemy—more so than regular capitalists. Delete the Uber app. You shouldn't have it in the first place—I never have, because I look at them and I see the last chance for a peaceful social democracy in which workers are able to earn a living wage yanked from under us. Punching Nazis in the face is good, but punching them in the wallet is just as effective.

Donate to the ACLU. They are the first line of defence, as we saw this weekend. I just donated and you should too.

Write, call, email, tweet your MP or whatever elected representative you have. Any government that does business or maintains ties with the US is practicing appeasement, and ought to be treated with the respect due to Neville Chamberlain or Vichy France. We should all be withdrawing our ambassadors, shuttering our embassies, and threatening to cut business ties. I don't even care if the latter is realistic right now—these are not realistic times.

Trudeau's tweets are not enough. It is public grandstanding, not actual policy. The quota was capped at 1000 and is now closed again.

Fight fascism wherever you are, in any way you can, be it with your words or fists or finances. The discourse is changing. Nick Kouvalis, officially the Worst Person In Canadian Politics**, gets away with calling people "cucks" on Twitter now. Fight them. Fight them all. We are at war.

* Incidentally, though, in the future, can we please allow the entire world to vote for US presidents, not just Americans? If your actions are going to affect everyone, we ought to get a say.
** Campaign manager for Rob Ford and now Kellie Leich.

I don't have much to contribute to that thing that happens whenever a Western country experiences a horrific attack. It's all been said by people smarter than me. All I can do is extend sympathies to people who are near or have family in Paris—and Beirut; to be honest, I know a lot more Lebanese people than I do French people—and feel sad and shocked and disgusted.

But I wanted to share one really good thing. This is the first good thing on LJ I'm going to say about Dustin Waterhole's government, though I've mentioned a few good things they've done elsewhere. And I think, in general, they're reprehensible opportunists. BUT.

One of their election promises was to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada before the end of the year. There's been a lot of talk about how difficult that's going to be, both logistically and politically. Personally, I don't think 25,000 is enough—this is a humanitarian crisis beyond the scope of my imagination, and if we're not doing everything we possibly can, we are failing—but it's a good start and better than Harper would have done, of course.

The attacks on Paris yesterday would have been a chance for the Libs to back out of their commitment and score political points with the hawks and racists. (The attacks on Beirut, of course, would have no affect either way, because doesn't that sort of thing happen all the time over there to those people? No need to light up the CN Tower or change our Facebook icons to the colours of the Lebanese flag.)

They have confirmed, as of today, that they are still going ahead with it.

This is absolutely the correct decision. After all, the horrors we saw in Paris are the selfsame horrors that Syrians and others—oh yes, don't forget that Syria is not the only refugee crisis—are fleeing. It was the correct thing to do a few days ago and it is the correct thing to do today.

It is, furthermore, how the world should react to terror and tragedy—with compassion, empathy, and levelheadness.

So colour me surprised and impressed.

So I was in Hampstead today, participating in the Justicia for Migrant Workers vigil commemorating the eleven people killed in a van crash six months ago. The situation today is no less dire—if anything, it's gotten worse. Six migrant workers have died in the last two weeks. The drought conditions have caused crops to fail, meaning that many of the migrants who come here to cultivate and harvest our food—often paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing so, earning below minimum wage and barred from unionizing—were summarily deported to their home countries. Changes to unemployment mean that many Canadians who would otherwise be eligible for EI will be forced to take jobs that previously only migrants would, pitting the reserve army of the unemployed against the already dreadfully exploited farmworkers. Part of the struggle for better working and living conditions involves recognizing that these folks even exist and reminding the country of the horrific lives they lead, just so that we can have cheap food.

The call-out from Justicia:

Six months have passed since the tragic accident that killed eleven people near Hampstead, Ontario. Amongst the dead were 9 migrant chicken catchers from Peru. The impact of this accident has been felt across the hemisphere as families struggle to cope in the wake of this accident. To commemorate the sixth month anniversary, Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) is organizing a March and Vigil entitled 'Remembering the Dead, Standing up for the Living'. It will take place Sunday July 22, 2012 starting at noon.

Working with the survivors of the accident, the march and vigil is being organized to raise awareness of the thousands of migrant workers who have been injured, become or sick while working in Canada.

The survivors of the crash, Javier and Juan, wish to break the invisibility not only of their situation but to raise the profile of the conditions faced by migrant workers across Canada. Their message is clear: Federal and Provincial laws designed to protect migrant workers don't work! Fundamental steps need to be taken to ensure that migrant workers are treated with respect and dignity. Our demands are as follows:

Safe working conditions
Status upon arrival
No fees for work
Equal access to all entitlements
Modernize labour laws to reflect the realities of migrant workers
No repatriations and deportations

Where can I find more information?

web: http://www.justicia4migrantworkers.org/
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/100416336771056/
email: j4mw.on@gmail.com

"Buy Ontario" doesn't sound too wholesome now, does it?

( more pictures under here )