Well, this is thematically coherent and strategically batshit
Like, “a social license to operate from Vox-reading types” is antifa’s biggest asset right now, “a unified high-low, streets-suites coalition based in gentrifying major cities” is the only thing checking the right at all right now
Hotel personnel notified the police on Saturday morning as hundreds of leaflets were flying from the hotel room window of 26-year-old Morius Sebastian Enden, who was staying near Taksim’s Gezi Park.
After determining the source of the flying leaflets, police entered Enden’s room and discovered an automated machine combined with a printer that automatically received commands online to print leaflets, and launched them from the window to the street.
Police said the whole system was controlled by a specially built remote control…
The leaflets, which claimed that the protest was financed by the German Federal Government and the State of Bavaria, called on people to riot against “dictatorship.”
It was later revealed that the leaflets and the mechanism were prepared by an activist group called “Center for Political Beauty” (Zentrum für Politische Schönheit). The group also prepared a website, which faked support from a non-existing “Education, Culture and Democracy” ministry of the State of Bavaria with a fake letter of endorsement from Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann.
On Sunday Preston Page and his fiancée, Jessica Faraday, found their house and car covered in graffiti, and the car was also keyed. The gold paint messages included “CALI - surfs up” and “get California out of Portland.
discovering the we rate dogs twitter is the creation of a soulless capitalist rich kid and every single thing about it is a carefully calculated marketing ploy is like peak 2017
Online neural network Pix2Pix webtoy appears to visually translate your drawings into style of portrait images (I’m guessing here, as sources and documentation are not apparent).
Right-militant symbolism encountered in the last two months playing the Battlefield franchise of online shooters:
One Nazi flag profile image, all colors and proportions on-model
A wide variety of South American users and private servers with 4-letter clan tags and logos (frequently in quartered unit patch format with skulls and lightning bolts as prominent elements) that map to local paramilitaries
A few Rising Sun flags and uyoku dantai slogans
(just now) one profile tag consisting of a large silver police shield bearing an image of a modern rifle above the large numbers “88″ in blue
Left-militant symbolism:
One profile image of a red flag with yellow hammer and sickle flapping in the wind
A swastika made of right-facing handgun stamps that was actually the most novel take on the subject I’ve seen in a while
A LOT of Blue Lives Matter iconography - the American flag (often subdued color) with one blue stripe, the Punisher skull, often with “first responder” subculture signifiers like the numbers 5.11, etc.
in a pinball bar, overhearing a girl talking about her coworker got her to mask up and go to some thing, probably May Day but coulda been the 82nd street “free speech” thing after the civic holiday march was called off or something else
from the sound of it more than she bargained for, and she pins blame not on “the anarchists” - her coworker’s one, she says (by name, and workplace), he was mostly peaceful (but apparently still in trouble somehow) - but neither the cops, rather the black bloc vanguard for starting it
so if we’re going to extrapolate from that one data point, now that the cops are cracking down (I know, I know, but by Portland standards. Just like Berkeley cracked down by Berkeley standards) some of the soft support’s dissipating
So since 2017 is being written by a neural network trained on the last decade, Ja Rule and a few Instagram influencers just brought us the Coachella version of DashCon in the outlying islands of the Bahamas
I spoke to a woman who had paid 10k for a VIP Villa Package - she was promised an exclusive villa, VIP access, and an upgraded culinary experience - instead she got a partially constructed tent and all of the stuff she put inside it was stolen.
A source told Page Six, “It feels like [the event’s organizers] have good intentions, but are out of their league … Several companies bailed on working with them because they were very disorganized. They don’t return calls.”
So this morning at 3am Texas – which for all its recent rock-ribbed Republicanism had been pretty loosey-goosey here – passed legislation against “sanctuary” policies.
Doesn’t affirmatively compel local agencies to crack down and I’m not sure they could, bar direct state takeover (which can happen - unlike federal/state dual sovereignty, American local government has no authority beyond what states allow it). What it does do is prohibit - on threat of criminal penalties and removal from office - any formal policy or unspoken “pattern or practice” of resistance to, or less than full cooperation with anyone – ICE, your own officers – who wants to crack down.
Haven’t seen much in the national press, maybe missed deadlines for today’s news cycles, but that’s something. Represents a shift from “suit” to “camo” Republicanism, the oilman/developer/rancher types held this stuff back before.
I am interested the extent to which this’ll allow frontline and ranking career cops to shuck their elected or politically appointed chiefs so long as they can frame it as anti-immigration. God knows in this Which Lives Matter age cops have been chafing under Democratic leadership; “unleash blue city cops to the extent they remake themselves as illegal-hunters” is an idea that could change a lot of things right quick
An interesting note, as presented by the majority GOP the bill was softer – the relatively moderate House didn’t want to bar policies against investigating status of people detained but not arrested. But the Democrats piled on hundreds of doomed amendments for a chance to perform #resistance, put GOP “no"s on record, and generally burn time.
(The Texas legislature holds session only 140 days every other year – and only takes up policy in the last third or so –with the effect and for the purpose of throttling its output. This was also behind the 2013 Wendy Davis “pink shoes” filibuster - burning a whole legislative day is a bigger deal in Texas, especially with the end of session looming.)
And the Republicans were like “ok no, we’ll give you some time to grandstand, but if you want to play cute we’ll enter our own amendment that’ll actually pass and you’ll get the mean version.” And the Dems played cute, so party-line vote after party-line vote and at 3am they threw in the towel and got the mean version.
