Bedroom Shay

Sometimes this is the best way to get warm! And who doesn't like nice warm buns? ^_^

Jeez you guys! So much to talk about. Number one, we're okay, I still haven't gotten The Virus (though I got sick for a few days and that was really scary! It turned out to be nothing serious). I hope you guys are staying healthy out there!

Number two, I got a new computer for the first time in like eight years! It was my present for doing our taxes. >_<

It's amazing, but I'm having a hell of a time getting my 3D stuff working right. It renders so much faster than my old computer - I went from a GeForce GTX 780 Ti to a new GeForce RTX 2070 Super (and a little less relevantly for rendering, from a 6-core Intel Core i7 3930k to an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 3700X - my first AMD CPU, I've always been an Intel fan).

The new computer uses an onboard SSD that doesn't have room for all my 3D files, so all my art stuff is on my old HDD drive, which I was for some reason not able to install in the new computer. I don't know why, it just wouldn't even power on with one or both of my old HDDs plugged in properly (even though I used the same cords and connectors out of my old computer to install it in the new one). Hopefully I'll get that to work. I don't know if maybe the smaller power supply is not enough to add HDDs - it has 650W though, I feel like that should be enough, but my old PSU is 850W I think, so maybe that's the issue, or maybe the way it was built the BIOS settings aren't friendly to the idea (I built my last one, but this new one was from NZXT).

Because of this problem, I had to get an external connector to hook up a SATA HDD via USB, and 1 - it's slow, 2 - the file permissions have been a headache and I had to "run as administrator" to access anything, but I think I've sorted that out, and 3 - my 3D software is not PROPERLY recognizing all my old content and adding it to the library for some reason - it'll recognize it sort of, and I can load files manually, but it's SUPPOSED TO have everything kind of loaded in and ready to use as a content library, and it's not doing that currently. It's not even doing that with new files that I save, which is especially weird. I'm kind of assuming that it's because (for now) the HDD with all the content is considered a "removable drive"? So it doesn't want to count it as a part of its permanent content library? I dunno.

There are still a few things I can try to get it to understand that the content is there, and hopefully one of those options will work. Otherwise, I really hope I'll be able to install the HDD properly into the case where it belongs. If not, well... I got it to work but manual-mode instead of library-mode is painful.

Number three, I hope you guys are safe if you're in U.S. cities right now. COVID-19 lockdowns already had people in a pressure-cooker, and now it's all blowing up.

(EDIT: Seriously, SERIOUSLY stop reading now if you don't want to "get political", because I am about to "get political" and I know some people don't like that)

I don't know what to say about it, except that in the city where I used to live police were a cruel and criminal gang who got away with all kinds of horrid extremely racist shit with no accountability (and that's just the horrid extremely racist shit I specifically know about), and I have no reason to believe that it's not exactly the same in many other cities. I will ALWAYS support protests against police brutality and corruption.

That support doesn't change if a protest turns into a "riot", people SHOULD riot in response to injustice - taking a knee certainly didn't change anything. This country was founded on riots in response to injustice. As Dr. Martin Luther King said "Riots are the language of the unheard."

That being said, (exposed) undercover cops are lighting shit on fire and breaking windows and throwing rocks at uniformed cops in riot gear -- like they ALWAYS do at protests they don't like (everyone I've ever known who is an activist has always talked about how easy it is to spot the undercover cops starting shit -- but it doesn't matter that activists can spot them, the performance is for the media, so the media can say it's a "riot" and justify a violent crackdown in response, without angering the general public). Also "chaos tourists" and "agent provocateurs", many of whom are white middle-class kids from affluent suburbs who can LEAVE when shit gets bad because it's not happening in their neighborhood, are ALSO lighting shit on fire and breaking windows and throwing rocks at cops, and then leaving the protesters, many of whom are black and live in those neighborhoods, to bear the brunt of police violence in response. Activists and protest organizers are trying to stop them.

Also, police don't NEED an excuse to just start gassing and beating and arresting and they are doing so at protests where there is NO provocation too. Police are also shooting tear gas at people just sitting on their porches watching the protests, and beating people just trying to walk home with their groceries in those neighborhoods (incidentally, tear gas is an illegal chemical weapon, the U.S. military hasn't been able to use it in warfare since WWI. U.S. cops throw that shit around like it was buy one get one free at the chemical weapons supply store).

It's all bullshit. And it's the kind of thing that always happens, so that folks can look at out of control riots and go "those people are bad, police have to beat and gas them because they're bad". Look at social media and you'll see people saying "sure the police murdering their one millionth unarmed black man without even charging him with a crime (he paid for his groceries with a large bill and the clerk thought MAYBE it was a fake bill, for no reason, so they called the cops), that's bad, but these violent hoodlums are also bad" - so it muddies the waters, and ends up condemning the people who are outraged by injustice. MLK also talked about the danger of white people being more interested in order and civility, than in justice...

But if you think about it, it's really like saying "I had my leg chopped off by a combine harvester and it hurt, and I stubbed my toe and it also hurt." Sure, they both hurt, but one of them IS THE FUCKING STORY, the other is a distraction.

Then over the next year or so, while the general public is clutching their pearls over whether protesters were NICE or not, the activists who organized and led the protests are quietly murdered and found burned to death in their cars, like all the Ferguson activists and many other activists who have protested against police brutality in the past, and just about every witness who has testified against cops (remember that when Eric Garner was strangled to death on camera for allegedly selling loose cigarettes which is apparently a crime, by a cop using a specifically blatantly illegal choke hold, the only person who went to jail was the dude who recorded the video, and just recently when that cop went into Botham Jean's house where he was minding his own business and shot him dead, his neighbor who testified against the cop also ended up murdered).

So, in Minneapolis that one murderer cop got arrested. We'll see if he actually goes to jail for any length of time, and then we'll see if anything else happens (AT LEAST the three other cops who were helping him also going to jail), like the kind of massive systemic reform of the entire policing and justice system that we need, or it just goes back to the status quo.

The status quo sucks for basically everybody. Changes are needed. Unfortunately, Mr. Looter-Shooter Trump isn't going to change shit, and Uncle Touchy Joe Biden won't either. I hope these protests make a difference, I hope the Power of the People finally forces some shit to happen.

There are police organizations out there trying to reform the police from within, with de-escalation training, racial bias training, community involvement and relationship building, etc. and the places that actually use that form of training have GREAT police-community relations... but those organizations are fighting against an entrenched system that is really bad, and that politicians and the public really don't want to change.

People say "it's just a few bad apples!" - the saying though, is that bad apples spoil the bunch. It sure looks like a spoiled bunch.

Why don't they ever say "it's just a few bad apples" about the protesters? Where's the "good people on both sides!" comment?

I sure hope none of you guys are racist (EDIT: I guess I will go on to debunk standard racist talking points, here, so if you are racist, listen up). I hope none of you believe it when you see racists try to derail discussions about police corruption violence and racial bias by going like "what about all the murders in Chicago!" --- irrelevant and also Chicago isn't even in the top 20 U.S. cities for murder rate, they just have a high NUMBER of crimes, because they have a large population, the amount of crime per capita is not unusually high,

or "what about black-on-black crime!" --- irrelevant to punishing police for police crimes but also, most crime by a HUGE margin is committed by someone the same race as the victim, so since over 70% of the country is white, white-on-white crime accounts for most crime),

or "black people commit most crimes!" --- that's just false, the damn lies and statistics they use to justify that statement show the number of people who are LOCKED UP, not the number of people who are guilty of actually doing crimes - everybody knows black people are more likely to be locked up - the Justice Department ADMITTED IT PUBLICLY. Several years ago after a massive internal study, the Justice Department was basically like "Yeah, it's true, we're pretty fucking racist, we treat black people like shit" and black people around the country went "SEE?? We've been telling you!" and white people around the country went "NO, the system works, the police and courts are honorable and fair, it's black people who are bad!" Also, the FBI told us years ago that white supremacist hate groups like the KKK and Neo-Nazis were infiltrating the police in large numbers, and most people haven't heard of that or don't believe it.

The fact is, WE DON'T KNOW WHO COMMITS MOST CRIMES. At all. There's no strong basis to make an assumption about the skin color of the perpetrators. Most crimes are unreported (about two-thirds according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics), and of the ones that are reported many are unsolved (something like half). But studies on unreported and unsolved crimes from surveys of victims supports the massive amount of crime committed by perpetrators of the same race as the victim.

Assuming guilt of all the people who are in prison is also a leap of the imagination. Over 90% of people in our prisons didn't get a trial, didn't get a chance to introduce evidence in their defense. Police and prosecutors are legally allowed to lie, cajole, threaten, and basically fucking hypnotize people to get a "confession", and mostly poor (black, white, and every other kind of people, but especially black people) get told "if you take the deal, you get 5 years, with good behavior you're home in 2 years, but if you take this to trial we're going to give you 15 years in prison and our district attorney has a 97% conviction rate, and our public defender is a burnt out drunk, so... do you want to take the deal?" They're legally allowed to lie about how much evidence they have against you - they can say your fingerprints match the ones found at the scene, someone identified you in a lineup - whatever they have to say to get you to take the deal. That's illegal in a lot of other countries, by the way.

That's how people get locked up in the U.S. That's why we have the largest prison population in the world. I mean, that and the fact that the police unions, and elected prosecutors' and judges' political campaigns receive millions of dollars from for-profit prison companies who are ONLY interested in locking up as many people as possible and not at all in justice. Combine that with the fact that cops are almost never punished (police unions require that cops get a paid vacation when they're being investigated for murdering someone) and prosecutors and judges are basically never punished at all, and what's the incentive for them to ever work for justice, instead of just locking up whoever they want?

When legal advocates take cases of incarcerated people and actually introduce evidence in their defense, or introduce evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, they get people exonerated pretty often. And two-thirds of the people who get exonerated are black - that literally means that black people in jail are about twice as likely to actually be innocent as every other ethnic group combined - although that kind of legal advocacy is sadly too rare to make that kind of sweeping statement.

The one thing we know pretty accurately, as far as "criminality by race", is about drugs. We know black people are about five times as likely to be stopped and searched for drugs, and we also know that white people are about five times as likely to actually be carrying drugs when they are searched. That alone should show that police profiling is bullshit, and that the reason more black people are locked up is because they're TARGETED by police, and that there is no real significant difference in criminality by race.

But racists won't believe it. They'll just say "go live in a black neighborhood then and see how you like it" - well I did. I used to live in a majority black, relatively poor neighborhood for YEARS. Nothing happened to me. But it's where I learned that the cops in my city were absolute shitbird racists who got away with criminal shit, and literally rounded up black people in my neighborhood in a van at the end of every month to fill a quota they had set for themselves of arresting black people -- not SUSPECTS OF A CRIME, just black people. Arrested for being black. That was their quota, black arrests. It was their official policy. They NEVER got in trouble for it (they also murdered some people, and other stuff, and never got in trouble for that either, but I don't want to get into those stories right now).

Racism is just a big bunch of lies. The only reason any institutional statistical data supports any racist assumptions is because those institutions were founded by and often continue to be operated by shitbird racists.

Jeez you guys. People are just people. And people deserve justice. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, no matter what infographics they copy-pasted off Facebook (or Stormfront).

I'm just pissed off about all this stuff, and how easy it is for people to just not believe it or not even care. I mean, it barely affects my life, personally, I don't live in the city anymore, and I'm white, my life is fine. But like Ben Franklin said, "Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."

I think everybody should be outraged, and probably should have been outraged for decades. I mean, if you're not outraged, I won't judge, but I hope at the very least, you won't condemn the people who are.

If you have a chance to support activists in this milieu, please do. If you have a chance to support police orgs working to reform policing, please do. If you have the luxury of forgetting about all this stuff and having some cupcakes, go enjoy some cupcakes I guess?

I mean, do what you want, I ain't yer mama. But be safe, and be well. <3

(forgive me for doing such a MASSIVE stream-of-consciousness post with very little editing, I hope it all made some kind of sense!) >_<