Is the US a dystopia?

NEW: Unhoused people in north LA County have faced a major police crackdown, banning them from camping + pushing them to live in the Mojave Desert, miles from running water, in severe heat. Data shows people are dying there.

🧵on folks I met in the deserthttps://t.co/7HbbnnWH7Y

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) July 18, 2022

The beef this has generated 👍

to be honest americans laughing at europe atop their 1.5-2x per capita gdp, multiple times higher carbon emissions, and genocide-cleared land as thousands die of heat exhaustion is fairly uncool imo

— joolsd (@joolsd) July 18, 2022

What "laughing" is that referring to?

P sure Europe has some genocide cleared land here and there as well fwiw.

love to compare genocides but it's really no contest

I've seen a post or two making fun of the air conditioning disparity. xp

If you include European colonial genocide I'm pretty sure Europe comes out ahead. And technically that includes any genocide in the Americas at least through the Revolutionary War.

the thing with (territorial) european genocides is that there were so many, overlapping the same bits of land, over so many centuries, that it’s kind of hard to keep track

looks like chancery… bold

this is a truly dismal debate, lads

xpost

If we’re really going to do the Oppression Olympics, on numbers alone the Holocaust would seem to be the record holder.

lol sorry wrong thread for my lame mac font joke

spiderman.jpg

europe and america are co-constitutive so the entire debate is moot there's plenty of blood to go around

iirc the Hitler picked up a lot of his tactics from the good ol USA, praising our racial conception of citizenship (not to mention the horrors meted out on native americans, etc). so yeah, seems like it’s been a fairly symbiotic exchange of ideas

anyway it’s real fucked up what’s happening in LA County!

left otm

re LA county — I wonder if there’s anything the president or the governor could do? like, that’s a genuine question. maybe LASD pulls rank? idk.

both are likely contenders to run in 2024. seems like a place to really show some leadership

this is the future though, unfortunately. all the people in charge seem to agree. speaking of genocide.

if it's poor people though it isn't genocide, it's their fault. much tidier.

love to compare genocides but it's really no contest

So this was just bait to stir up some drama, subject to goalpost shifting at a moment’s notice? More fool me.

u.s. settlers literally eradicated hundreds of distinct peoples.

1) i already said "left otm" so do keep up. 2) you've demonstrated that you aren't worth engaging with so this is definitely the last time.

I wonder if there’s anything the president or the governor could do

Newsom vetoed a bill decriminalizing jaywalking, whatever he could do he wouldn't.

“I wonder if there’s anything the president could do” is a gift to usilx, you don’t need to go looking for cute titles for the next 27 threads

I've seen a post or two making fun of the air conditioning disparity. xp

― peace, man, Wednesday, 20 July 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Massively weird posting.

Lol what a dick

Feel like Spain got a little too good at building trains and started going for some routes to places where nobody lives. pic.twitter.com/7RLP5idJ6f

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 2, 2022

That's what happens when your life is run by a spreadsheet.

interesting use of the concept of "nobody"

“When I saw a 6.6 year decline over two years, my jaw dropped. … I made my staff re-run the numbers to make sure.” https://t.co/JR4rXLRWc3 by @sheridan_kate pic.twitter.com/nqHbXrP398

— J Emory Parker 🏳️‍🌈 Subscribe to STAT+ (@jaspar) August 31, 2022

American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu, said Robert Anderson, the chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...This year’s life expectancy figure is 0.9 years lower than last year’s. Covid-19 accounted for about half of the decline, and a category encompassing accidents and unintentional injuries is responsible for another 16%. That category includes overdoses; in fact, about half of the unintentional injury deaths in this analysis were due to overdoses.

“We think that the increase in drug overdoses during the pandemic is partly due to the pandemic, but probably not wholly due to the pandemic,” he said. “It'll be interesting to see [what happens] as the pandemic abates — assuming that it does, hopefully it will.”

Weird thing is pandemic didn't hit us until 2020, but there's a massive decline between 2019-2020. Maybe I'm misreading the graph?

drug overdose deaths were already having negative effects on life expectancy iirc

if it ain't one thing it's another

It'd be interesting to see the gender breakdown

Gen X men are particularly prone to booze, drugs, suicide... I'm enjoying some booze right now

It'd be interesting to see the gender breakdown

Gen X men are particularly prone to booze, drugs, suicide... I'm enjoying some booze right now

― Andy the Grasshopper

also completely coincidentally gen x is demographically the most transphobic age cohort, with the number of out trans people in gen x dwarfed by even the number of trans millennials, let alone trans zoomers.

see the gender breakdown? yeah, gen x is a good place to go to see the gender breakdown

I saw someone point out that any significant rise in infant mortality brings the figures way down because you throw a bunch of 0's into the math.

Police in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed an unarmed black man who was laying in bed today. They shot him within one second of opening the bedroom door. His name Donovan Lewis.

— Erick Bellomy 🏳️‍🌈 (@erickbellomy) August 31, 2022

yes yes it is a dystopia

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/pieper-lewis-sex-trafficking-iowa.html

On Tuesday, Judge David M. Porter, of the Polk County District Court, sentenced Ms. Lewis, now 17, to five years of probation without early release, and ordered her to be placed at the Fresh Start Women’s Center in Des Moines, a residential facility, where she will wear a GPS tracking device, which the judge said was done out of concern that she might fall “back into the lifestyle that you thus far left.”

Judge Porter also ordered her to pay $150,000 in restitution to the family of the man she killed, and required her to perform 200 hours of community service each year for three years.

fuckin hell

this looks legit - https://www.gofundme.com/f/vxgt7q

fyi from the gofundme, it sounds like the judge's ruling was close to as sympathetic and lenient as possible. the $150K is required by state law:

Today, my former student, Pieper Lewis bravely took the microphone during her sentencing hearing and told the courtroom that her voice mattered. I was incredibly proud of her. She was powerful, and she brought me to tears. The judge then studied all the evidence in Pieper Lewis’ case carefully and decided that she did not deserve to spend time in an adult prison. Instead, he gave her five years of probation. He decided that 834 days she spent in juvenile detention awaiting her sentencing was enough “punishment” for a then fifteen-year-old girl who had been kicked out of her home and found herself sleeping in the stairwell of one of the most dangerous apartment complexes in Des Moines; a girl that was ultimately preyed upon by men twice her age who traded her body for drugs. These men physically asualted, raped, and sex trafficked Pieper on multiple occasions. On June 1st, 2020, Pieper snapped and killed one of the men who exploited and raped her, stabbing him to death.

Today, the judge recognized that Pieper was a victim and a child. He, like almost everyone who knows the details of Pieper’s case, empathized with a girl with no violent history before or after this incident, who saw killing a man as the only way out of a truly horrific situation. He granted her probation and a deferred judgement—meaning if she meets the conditions of her parole, she will have the felony removed from her record. This is a compassionate outcome.

Yet, Pieper only found herself in this situation because she was initially charged as an adult with 1st degree murder. DMPD and the Polk County prosecutor’s office saw Pieper immediately as a grown, violent, adult, murderer, and they charged her as such. Only because a team of amazing people came to Pieper’s side, was her story truly heard and understood. However, with the risk of life in prison looming, Pieper pled guilty to charges of manslaughter and willful injury. This was to avoid a risky trial where her team feared an Iowa jury may implicitly struggle to see a young black girl as the victim of sex trafficking that she was.

Today, it appears that the decision to put Pieper’s fate in the hands of a judge, as opposed to a jury, was a good one. Pieper will avoid prison, and she will have access to some of the services she needs to continue healing. However, in Iowa, there is a law that states that anyone who is convicted of killing a person, regardless of circumstances, must pay that individual’s family 150,000 dollars. This law is intended to provide justice to families who lost their loved ones. However, in the case of Pieper, it will require her to pay 150,000 dollars to the family of a man who purchased Pieper’s fifteen-year-old body from a sex trafficker, gave her drugs and alcohol, and then raped her repeatedly.

Pieper does not owe that man’s family justice. Pieper does not deserve to be finically burdened for the rest of her life because the state of Iowa wrote a law that fails to give judges any discretion as to how it is applied. This law doesn’t make sense in many cases, but in this case, it’s morally unjustifiable. A child who was raped, under no circumstances, should owe the rapist’s family money.

Pieper has five years of probation ahead of her; five years that she will be required to be nearly perfect to avoid facing 20 years in prison. She will do hundreds of hours of community service each year. She will be subject to drug testing, required to take classes, and attend therapy. Pieper’s path to true freedom will not be easy, and she is still a teenager that has experienced a lot of trauma.

Pieper wants to go to college, she wants to create art, and she wants to advocate for other girls who find themselves in situations like she endured. She does not deserve a massive debt looming over her, holding her back from pursuing her ambitions.
Our system if broken. It will take decades of advocacy and electing people committed to rethinking and reimagining our criminal justice system, especially our juvenile one, to fix the system. In the meantime, Pieper needs us now. If you are able, please donate to help Pieper!

so... a little less dystopic? :/

sorry to be that guy, but if this is actually the best outcome given a tough situation, and this is the tough situation:

Yet, Pieper only found herself in this situation because she was initially charged as an adult with 1st degree murder. DMPD and the Polk County prosecutor’s office saw Pieper immediately as a grown, violent, adult, murderer, and they charged her as such. Only because a team of amazing people came to Pieper’s side, was her story truly heard and understood. However, with the risk of life in prison looming, Pieper pled guilty to charges of manslaughter and willful injury. This was to avoid a risky trial where her team feared an Iowa jury may implicitly struggle to see a young black girl as the victim of sex trafficking that she was.

then no, that's a little less dystopic, that is actually the heart of dystopia

the word "implicitly" is doing some fine dystopic work in that sentence.

This is the LAPD officer who shot and killed Daniel Hernandez. She not only still has a job but she also has handgun sponsorships. https://t.co/AtRBRmDagm

— Ashley Brim (@apb_710) September 14, 2022

jfc that “saint gates” embroidered patch

https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2022/social-sentinel/

THREAD: The biggest story of my life is finally out. 

Since 2019, I’ve been investigating a monitoring tool called Social Sentinel. They bill it as a way to help save students’ lives. 

I found it had another purpose — surveilling campus protests. https://t.co/I0okAqeRen

— Ari Sen (@ArijitDSen) September 20, 2022

New Investigation: Nonprofit hospitals avoid billions of dollars in taxes. But are they living up to their charitable missions? @jbsgreenberg and I have spent months investigating this question. Today, we're publishing the first two stories in our series. https://t.co/bG0mdCEDYv

— Katie Thomas (@katie_thomas) September 24, 2022

paywall evasion link
https://archive.ph/mwDQK

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeAgfmSXoAY0HdF?format=jpg&name=medium

^ngl what usually happens is bodies end up used for plastic surgery practice so if you don't want to think about your dead dad being used for breast enhancement surgery don't do this

Don’t donate what you should be selling.

I'm kinda surprised selling cadavers is even legal?

Submitting to evidence for

A town in Connecticut voted on and approved a resolution asking their local Starbucks workers to work faster because people didn't like waiting in the drive thru line. We live in an irredeemably stupid and selfish country. pic.twitter.com/aclk3X47F0

— Microplastics Enjoyer (@EclecticHams) November 6, 2022

Interesting that this story was on this thread, as there was an update today: Pieper Lewis, who killed her rapist, has escaped custody.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/06/us/iowa-teen-killed-alleged-rapist-escape/index.html