ICE hacked its algorithmic risk-assessment tool so it recommended detention for everyone

[Wanderfound]

@gracchus

Americans, including our progressives, tend to lack imagination in this area and need models for success. They also have short memories and little appreciation for history so charts and lectures won’t do – they need to see current examples in action getting results, preferably done by white English speaking people in prosperous countries.

The best recent examples aren’t from anglophone nations, but they do exist.

Singing Revolution

2001 The Day that Changed Argentine History   The Argentina Independent

@gracchus

What’s been most effective in effecting non-violent revolution against the Australian governments that set up and maintained the prison-industrial complex of various immigration detention centres that the current regime in the U.S. is now emulating in terms of scale and detainee? Or have you all made the choice to wait until the next election is called to kick Turnbull and his party out of majority?

There are substantial differences between the US and Oz situations.

Most obviously, scale. Only a few thousand people seeking asylum arrive in Australia each year. We currently have about two thousand people in detention.

However, there are also commonalities. Like the USA, the Australian detention program began with an attempt by the establishment centre-left to triangulate on racism. Then, predictably, the right took that weapon and ran with it.

The activist left in Australia besieged the camps until they moved them into the desert to avoid us. So then we chased them into the desert and did it all again. Repeatedly.

Woomera 2002 Breakout .Pt One of 5

Then they shifted the camps onto remote Pacific islands, and bribed the governments of those nations into refusing entry to any Australian dissidents.

So, yeah. We haven’t shut down the camps entirely. But we prevented the government from normalising them, and forced them into great expense and international embarrassment through the offshore “solution”.

The Oz left is currently working on getting other nations to sanction Australia, BDS-style.

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In terms of electoral politics, there are also significant differences.

In the US, the major problem is that the electoral system is wildly corrupt and unrepresentative of the population. Hence the need for revolution.

Australia does not have that problem. Instead, our political problems have three main causes:

1. Like the USA, we’re a white supremacist settler state founded upon genocide. Racism and xenophobia are strongly present in Australian culture; a large percentage of the Australian electorate are bigoted arseholes.

2. Murdoch owns most of our media, and leverages that power heavily for political ends. Any government that offends Uncle Rupert is almost certain to lose office at the next election.

3. Australia is functionally a US colony. Any government that offends Uncle Sam will face economic punishment, and in extreme circumstances will be overthrown.

This is what the Australian party that I support (and used to campaign for, when I was healthier) had to say about the situation, in both Oz and the US:

Nick McKim

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Booting Turnbull is useless; both Australian major parties are committed to maintaining the camps. The Greens and the left faction of the ALP are opposed, but everyone to the right of that supports the detention system.

Regrettably, malice against immigrants does have majority support in Australia. There was a hefty level of ambient bigotry to start with, and Murdoch and the right-wing parties have been deliberately feeding it for thirty years.

@gracchus

Short of violent revolution (which 99% of people don’t want) or death from natural causes (fingers crossed by at least 50% of American) we’re stuck with Il Douche in the Oval Office until Inauguration Day 2021 (not longer, we hope).

Nope.

Revolutions do not have to be violent. The point of the other thread I linked to is that non-violent revolutions are more likely to succeed than the violent kind.

@gracchus

That doesn’t and shouldn’t preclude acts of civil disobedience to slow the wheels of the ICE machine or demand justice in the interim, but actual non-violent revolution is a grinding process that takes more than two years and also often leaves the same authoritarians in power despite significant change.

See the Argentina example. Things can move quickly once the people are mobilised.

@gracchus

The Civil Rights movement in the U.S. was truly revolutionary in its results, destroying Jim Crow and the institutional structures of the Southern police state.

Not really.

The most prominent leaders of the Civil Rights movement were all murdered, the Civil Rights Act was just a repeat of the late 19th century status quo, and the condition of Black America has in many ways worsened since the 1960s. The Klan still control the police across the South (and much of the North as well).

Housing and education are just as segregated as always, the GFC annihilated the wealth of the Black middle class, and mass incarceration has boosted the number of enslaved Americans back to levels reminiscent of the antebellum era.

See this thread:

https://twitter.com/alwaystheself/status/973412740126605318?s=21