education – My Fellow Travelers

When the Pepper Spray Hits Your Face

First, there is a moment of confusion as your body decides what just happened and how to respond. It fails to come to a decision and falls back on the most instinctive of responses: Pain.

The skin of your face burns, your pulse rises, your fight or flight instinct engages fully as your body thinks it is on fire.

When it hits your eyes, you are blinded. The first instinct is to close your eyes tightly and keep them closed, but even if you can keep them open, the fire is hard to focus through. You have to depend on your hands and ears to maneuver, and your most recent memory of what was going on around you.

If you have had training, you vaguely remember that you are supposed to blink. Blink as much as you can so that your body can make tears to wash it away. After all, the fire isn’t real. There aren’t any burns. That knowledge might help a bit. Remember that.

You are vulnerable. You are scared. You have to pull yourself under control.

Your eyes burn and itch. That is the worst part. The skin sucks, but the eyes hurt the most and short circuit everything else.

And the grittiness. Odds are no one ever warned you about that. It’s the reason, though, that you DON’T wear contacts to a protest. It will scratch your eyes, and burn like hell, and haunt you for a week, but unless you are wearing contacts it’s not likely to do permanent damage. Remember that.

At this point, it is important to regain focus. Every bit of knowledge and training that you remember is an anchor to pull yourself out of the mess.

Fresh water, milk, baby shampoo, and a number of other “wives remedies” will get your eyes and skin clean. If you don’t have something on you, one of the more experienced protesters may. Do whatever you can to clear your eyes on site. The police are most likely already kettling, and you probably aren’t going to get proper medical treatment before the next day.

Remember your mission, your purpose. Remember why you are there. Push through as best you can until you can focus enough to function again. Keep moving if you can. The people who sprayed you didn’t do so for your own good.

~~~~~

So, I wanted to talk a bit today about pepper spray. A lot of the same concepts apply to tear gas as well.

If you are going to get involved in direct action, this is part of why we mask up. A mask dampened mask will help keep gas away from your lungs, at least a bit. A proper mask works even better and is actually available these days on Amazon.

Eye protection, if it is available, can be good as well, but again NO CONTACTS. I don’t care if you don’t expect police involvement, never wear contacts to a protest/demonstration/direct action event.

If you decide to get active with your local IWW, Socialist, Anarchist, Social Democrat groups, get used to the idea of wearing your regular glasses (if you need them) to meetings and not contact lenses. Yes, meetings are probably safe, but building proper habits are important, and if you wear contact lenses you already have a really bad one to combat.

What I described above is not an exaggeration or an educated guess. It’s from first-hand experience. The first time you get hit, there very may well be a moment when your brain just throws off a bright flash of light while it processes what the fuck just happened. After that, you need to depend on instinct and training to keep yourself focused.

Gas can be worse though. It’s less painful, but on top of getting in your eyes, it will basically push your sinuses out through your face. Ok, THAT is an exaggeration, but that’s what it feels like when your nose starts running along with your eyes.

If anyone reading this has been exposed recently to tear gas, feel free to do a writeup on it, and I will add it as well. Last time I went through it in any real sort of way was over a decade ago, so it is not near as fresh as the most recent pepper spray incident.

Again, if you DO expect police involvement, stay close to the more experienced guys. This means communicating with your group. Find the military/ex-military guys and the experienced protesters that have been in jail a few times. They will be the ones to stay close to if you have to get the hell out of dodge with your eyes on fire.

Preparing for Direct Action

So, this rolled across my screen in the memories section. I wrote the bottom half but not the top, but it is still all good information to remember if you are preparing to attend a protest or any kind of direct action.

When I saw this today, my first thought was that it was good timing. People have been in the streets all along over the last decade or two, but it is starting to get attention again. When these things get attention, they tend to grow, and tend to get more police attention as well. So, I am cleaning this post up a bit and reposting it.

So, here is a list of pointers for attending protests and direct actions. The original list (items 1 – 10) was distributed with the request that everyone distribute it as a copy and paste (as opposed to a share) without attribution. Feel free to do that now with this version.

The significance of copy and pasting rather than just hitting share (or your platforms equivalent) is twofold. First, it potentially helps to mask the source. Second, and perhaps more importantly, if an account gets taken down or a post gets deleted, and you hit the share button, then on most platforms that means your share of it disappears as well. By copying it to a new post, it makes it harder to erase the data. This is important, pass it on.

Water makes pepper spray worse. Use milk or liquid antacid and water. Don’t wear contacts.
If you get tear gassed, when you get home, put the contaminated clothes in a plastic bag for later decontamination and shower with cold water to avoid opening your pores.
Come with friends and don’t get separated. Avoid leaving the crowd and watch out for police snatch squads.
Beware undercovers, but beware snitchjacketing and collaborator ‘peace police’ even more.
The far right is very good at combing through pictures and doxxing people. Mask up.
Write any necessary phone numbers you may need directly on your skin in sharpie.
Have an offsite plan for emergencies if you have not been heard from by X time coordinated with someone offsite.
Make sure all mobile devices are charged!!
If you plan on going to jail, plan it: bail, lawyer, time off from work, witnesses i.e.: a cadre. Don’t just go to jail without training.
Beware folks inciting violence. Most of them are police/ feds. Watch out for hook ups for the same reason. Get to know the crowd. They will set you up.

Please don’t share this status. Copy paste it without attribution.

My personal addendum (feel free to copy this as well)

If you’ve got friends that are ex-military or have done security work, or have just been sprayed a time or two before, stay close. They will respond differently than someone being sprayed for the first time.

Also, to reiterate item 1: DON’T WEAR CONTACTS.

DO NOT WEAR CONTACTS.

Pepper spray has a chance of getting in your eyes.

CS gas, if they use grenades WILL get in you’re eyes.

If you are wearing contacts, there is no guarantee doctors can save your eye. There is no guarantee that you will be allowed near a doctor before it’s too late.

Get some good springy glasses that will cling to your face and not break easy. If you can afford a gas mask, try to get some that will fit in the mask.

It’s better though to go without than to wear contacts.

This goes for journalists too. CS doesn’t discriminate, and these days neither do the police.

This is Not Satire

Ok..

People need to learn what Satire is…

And no, in this case I am NOT talking about the people who spread satirical posts thinking they are real.

Dictionary.com defines satire like this:

1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

There is another aspect of satire that is quite often forgotten these days. Satire is honest. It is honest to the point of drawing blood. It is a look at society at a level that makes us uncomfortable, because it charges the status quo like a lance. I choose a lance, and not some other weapon for a reason. A lance risks its own destruction as it plunges into the armor of an enemy of equal or greater power. And they do all this in the light of day, where everyone can see their success, but also their failures.

Satire is commentary on the powerful. It is a direct attack on the status quo. It is meant to teach, to goad, to coerce.

Satirists mock, taunt, and deride the powerful and influential.

They target those who are in position to make policy, or who have the ear of those who make policy.

They make mock those who are in a place to right their position and make amends.

They go after those who have willfully put themselves in the wrong.

They do not make fun of the weak. They do not taunt and torment those bellow them. They do not bully those who cannot defend themselves or who cannot change that which they are targeting them for.

That is not satire, that nothing more than playground bullying taken before a wider audience.

Please, keep this in mind when you re-share links and images from “Satire” sites.

A few good examples:

The Onion: They are open and up front about what they are. They proudly announce that they are a satire site. And, while they skirt the boundaries on occasion, their targets are almost always those in power.

The Daily Currant: You have to dig, and dig hard to find that they are a satire site. No one is safe from their attacks, not even the innocent. As long as they can get a laugh, they don’t care if they actually have a message.

You may wonder what brought on this rant. The answer to that is simple. I have seen too many people posting utter bullshit, taken from sites that paint themselves up to be “news,” while attacking people who just don’t agree with them, with flat out lies, and calling it “satire.”

The direct trigger in this case is a flood of posts from a website called ChristWire (http://www.christwire.com/). Not only do they not have the site marked anywhere as a satire site, but they have multiple posts arguing that they are not satire.

The site pretends to be a news blog. It posts the most nonsensical stories possible, insisting that they are real news, with real facts, and real implications, and that the author of the articles is an Evangelical Christian.

Instead the blog is filled with “news” that is made up of fake “facts” about everything from claims that Pokemon is encouraging demon worship, to Obama is infecting Christians with Ebola. They back up their stories with references to fake news reports, “first-hand knowledge,” and badly done Photoshoped pictures.

They are presenting this as what the Rank and File Christian believes.

While they do have stories that deal somewhat with the day to day news, they are presented in the form of “This is the paranoid delusional idea that these people believe.”

They do not target the powerful. They do not target the influential or the famous. They target the rank and file Christian.

They paint a picture of idiocy and say “Look at the nonsense these people believe.”

That is not satire.

That is the sort of bullying that most of us were taught to avoid as children.

They are not attacking the leadership of any organization. They are not attacking the Vatican, or the SBC. They are attacking our neighbors, and using lies to do it.

Satire is about presenting the truth in a way to teach. Satirists choose to be the “fool,” not the bully.

These people are the thugs of the internet, and they hide behind the label of “satire” because they figure people are too dumb to get what they are doing.

Common Core, and Punching at Shadows

I am seeing a lot of posts lately about Common Core. Yes, Common Core is so much bullshit, but so are most of the posts.

If you see some obscenely politically biased piece of tripe posted as an example of what common core is, recognize it for what it is.

It is a teacher, a school district, or a private company that wrote the curriculum the school is using taking advantage of your children and blaming it on a standard that doesn’t even cover most of the issues that are being blamed on it.

Common core has its issues, I am not a supporter of it. What I am a supporter of though is reality. There is a lot of BS going on out there, and they are using common core as a scapegoat to get away with it.

If you want to know what is in the Common Core, go look at it. It is easy to find. Google and Bing will bring it up real quick. I am including a link though, just in case.

It deals with mathematics and language skills. That is pretty much it. It deals with foundational educational stuff. My objections to it stem from the fact that it is very much biased towards improving things in wealthy areas, while telling pretty much everyone else they can fuck off. That is totally ignoring the fact that it is biased entirely against anyone who is not “normal.”

The worst part though is that it is a standard designed to create the workforce of the twenty first century, and not well rounded students. We don’t need more cogs. We need people.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to dislike common core, but it designed as an economic tool to feed the corporate state capitalistic machine, and is not some liberal ploy to poison the minds of our children.

Common Core holds no political bias, but the bastards that are producing these worksheets we keep seeing on the web sure as hell do.

Yes, fight against Common Core, but also fight against the assholes who are using it as a cudgel to hammer their world views into our children’s heads. It doesn’t matter if they are left leaning or right leaning. Schools should teach children how to think, not what to think.

Home

We are Freaking Out Over Nonsense

So… I see a trend, and it is not just on the right.

People are picking up on “scandals” and “outrages” that are being fed to them by their respective “wings” of the media.

People are getting all worked up on little things that are at most slights, and offenses.

People are freaking out over things that are flat out not true and have been debunked a thousand times over, because their favorite pundit is still pushing the issue.

You know what else is happening as a result?

It is a heck of a lot easier for the media to conveniently overlook some pretty heinous stuff. It is a heck of a lot easier for the media to run horse and pony shows while the real news is overlooked, ignored, or worst yet, flat out changed.

Stephen Colbert has a slogan for his show: “When news breaks, we fix it.” There is a reason for this. He is a satirist, and that is how he sees the real “news” media most of the time.

If we are taking the horse and pony show, and seeing it as real news; If we are accepting all the little nit picking details as controversy; then it is a hell of a lot easier for the media outlets to feed us the party line. It is a lot easier for them to make out normal people as criminals and heroes as villains.

We have wars going on that are not legal under international law. These wars are only called wars when it is convenient, such as when they want to invoke the espionage act.

We have secret laws: you know the thing that once sent famous politicians into a frenzy because they were introduced in other countries. These secret laws are being used to clamp down on first, fourth, and fifth amendments.

We have journalists under investigation by the FBI and CIA for… Yeah, journalism. Peaceful activists are on FBI watch lists, and potential whistle blowers dare not speak up without fleeing the country first (or at least preparing to do so).

Let me ask you this: What is a bigger issue, protecting your already existing right to say “Merry Christmas” that no one is trying to take away, or the fact that pretty much all of our online communications and the meta-data on all of our phone calls is being stored away in a massive database out in the desert? Now, which one have you heard more about on the news?

Labels, the Current System, and Third Party Votes

I have noticed that a lot of people are not educated on just what the words “socialist,” “socialism,” and “socialistic” mean.

You can talk about their views and political ideas. You can go item by item. Every response matches up with the concepts and ideals of socialism. Ask them if they are socialist though, and their reaction varies from simple denial, to violent rage.

It is no wonder the liberals of the country have trouble electing officials that represent what they believe. They don’t even know what the normal label is for their views.

All it takes is for a republican to scream socialist, and the candidate is suddenly outcast and a pariah.

And for those candidates that liberals do get into office, they are educated and do know what words mean. The message to them is loud and clear “be as liberal as you dare, but socialism will get you voted out or worse.”

The result is that the mainstream “left wing” of American politics is way to the right of most countries center line. It is to the right of most countries right wing.

People need to learn what words mean. They need to learn how to call what they believe. They need to learn how to speak up and voice their views to their politicians. They need to remember that their vote does have power, and they must act as a united people to insure that the politicians in charge remember this.

A European friend of mine recently said “You guys have the government you deserve,” and he is right. We voted them all in, Republican and Democrat. Worse than that, we show ever indication that as long as they maintain the status quo, we will continue to vote for them. I say that needs to change.

If you are a far right winger, vote libertarian not republican. If you are a far left winger, vote green party. If you are a constitutionalist, vote Constitutional Party. I say start now with the upcoming elections in September.

Voting for a third party candidate is NOT throwing your vote away. It sends a message to the election officials that these people are potentially electable in future elections. It also sends a message to whichever candidate wins. It tells them that if they do just maintain the status quo, it may not work out for them.

I see that what was intended to be a one or two paragraph comment turned into a full on rant. I will leave it here. Take it as you will.

vi And vim

I keep seeing a comment pop up here and there on the web that is starting to anoy me just a little. Long time vim (vi) users seem to be constantly explaining how wonderful their favorite editor is and then say that there is a steep learning curve to using vim.

Quite frankly, that is a load of bull.

In their defense, for many of them it has been many years since they used anything but a full featured text editor.

They forget that their target audience is used to notepad and the like where simple things like search and replace are still new and shiny toys.

I say this because most of these speaches at least indicate that they are targeted at relative newbies.

A word of advice, it takes less than five minutes to learn enough about vim to do everything you can do in notepad or nano.

Unless you are using something similar to emacs, or one of he vi offshoots it will take you less than a day to get up to the same level of productivity in vi that you are at in your current editor.

At that point you can learn all the scary bits that everyone talks about at your leisure.

Don’t be scared. Give it a try. Worst thing that can happen is that you don’t like it and go back to whatever you are already using.

And for those who have found the ideal text editor for use on their local machine, vim is still worth playing with. It truely excels at editing files on a remote server.

If you have shell access to the machine, then there is a good chance that vi is already installed or that your admin will be willing to install it for you.

If you are the admin, there us a version of vim for pretty much every OS. 🙂

Vim is not a pretty editor, but what it lacks in beauty it makes up for in style.