Cops are the Real Terrorists :: A Dispatch from the Neoliberal Police State of Philadelphia ::

 I love my city. I love its people. But the government of my city has made the people the enemy.

If the behavior of our police and their so-called "union," the FOP, is any indication, there is no line they will not cross, including using, for propaganda purposes, the child of a person they brutalized and terrorized.

During the protests this week, a 28-year old Black woman named Rickia Young, fearing for the safety of her teenage nephew, drove to pick him up from a friend's house. She took her toddler with her because she couldn't leave the child alone. She was being responsible. She was looking out for her family, knowing the dangers that lurk here for Black people.

Rickia, a home health aid and mother, was caught in her SUV between protesters and the police. They police told her to turn around. While she was making a K-turn, as the police directed her to do, the police swarmed her car and dragged her and her teenage nephew out of the vehicle. The woman and the teenager were brutalized by the police, and detained prior to being taken to a hospital. They were also separated from Rickia's toddler.

What happened next reveals the true face of policing in Philadelphia. The child was picked up by a police officer, and a photo was taken of the officer holding the child. Then, the FOP (Fraternal Order of Police, which is not in fact a union, but rather a fraternal order with a bargaining contract) posted this picture on their social media platform, claiming the child was found wandering barefoot and implying parental neglect.

Rickia was Black in the wrong place and the wrong time. Her teenage nephew and her child were Black at the wrong place and the wrong time. These days, that time and place seems to be the entire country. It was probably always that way, but I didn't know it when I was younger.

Rickia was not "looting" or even protesting. She was not even charged with a crime. Her child was separated from her by force, by the police, who then used a picture of the child for "copaganda."

The police are the real terrorists. They brutalized and terrorized this family. And as always, Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, who oversaw the police in Portland when they openly collaborated  with White Supremacist gangs during clashes with protesters several years ago, spoke up after the fact. Outlaw is new to Philadelphia, but she has a history of overseeing cops who deploy excessive and indiscriminate violence against protesters and non-protesting civilians, and who collaborate with white supremacists. We saw this in June when a white supremacist mob of vigilantes beat up a journalist and another civilian in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, after curfew, while the cops watched and did nothing.

Neighborhoods in my city are being tear gassed. I smelled it in the air this week, wafting in from 52nd Street, when I took a walk to help me sleep better, because I now dread the sound of the low-flying helicopters oppressively hovering over my neighborhood. Philadelphia has one of the highest rates of childhood asthma of any city in the country, and among children with asthma in Philadelphia, Black children are significantly overrepresented. Many of these children live in the primarily Black neighborhoods being tear gassed. There was tear gas deployed in June, too, and rubber bullets, and the National Guard, and now this city's people are being once again declared the enemy of Capital, of Private Property, and the Racist, Neoliberal Police State.

We in Philadelphia are traumatized. We are terrified. We fear for the safety of our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, and for those of us in the caring professions, the people we serve.

To quote a great moral warrior, "The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further." (Picard, Star Trek: First Contact.)

I am living in a neoliberal police state that sees the people as the enemy.

There are lines I am willing to cross in the fight for freedom against racism and capitalism, but using children as propaganda, and hurting innocent people, and separating them from their children, are not among them.

Police are the protectors of private property. Human life is a secondary concern to them, because only humans, war and natural disasters can threaten private property, and the police have no power to arrest a war or a natural disaster. So they make us the enemy. They brutalize, terrorize and murder the people.

They call in the National Guard and they call that "mutual aid." That's beyond appropriation. It's Orwellian Newspeak.

The city and the media are pushing a narrative about election unrest, but that's not what has people here enraged. Not at all. Almost none of the people protesting in my city give two fucks about Biden Vs. Trump. They mostly agree with me that Trump is a symptom of a disease called Late Stage Capitalism. No election in the United States has ended or ever could end racism or the capitalist system that sustains it. It takes grassroots organizing and direct action to fight racism and end capitalism. It takes a bottom-up kind of democracy, the democratization of daily life. I call that democratization Anarchism. Anarchism is democracy in its purest form. And this "election unrest" narrative is extremely self-serving of the Democratic Party, which dominates local politics here. A "blue" city can be just as racist as a "red" city. It's not about red or blue. It's about racism and anti-racism.

People are in my city are not "rioting" over the election. Our concerns are entirely local. We want the city to be more compassionate and less violent. We want the city to house the homeless and stop murdering Black people. We want the Neoliberal Police State that is Philadelphia to repent and renounce intimidation and violence as a means of maintaining the social order. And Fuck The Social Order, too. It needs to be upended, anyway. No presidential election will do that. This is not about Donald Fucking Trump. It is about the history of racism and capitalism.

Racism and Capitalism will forever be linked because the most valuable and lucrative private property in our shameful history were human chattel. And let no one tell you that slavery was "ended." It was not. The Constitution makes allowances for slavery, as a form of punishment in the penal system, where Black people are disproportionately overrepresented, and many of those people are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. For example, white people are more likely to use or distribute marijuana than Black people. But more Black people are incarcerated for marijuana-related charges. The decriminalization of marijuana in my city didn't significantly impact this.

Black overrepresentation is a problem in the child welfare system, too. It's not because Black people are more violent or criminal than white people or that Black parents are more neglectful and abusive than white parents. The reason is because they have always been under more scrutiny by the capitalist State. Even if you go out into mostly white counties where Black people are not almost half the population, like Montgomery, Chester, or Bucks, Black people are still overrepresented in these punitive systems. So population doesn't account for this. The city's demographics, which include a significant Black population- and a rare, healthy Black middle class- don't account for this.

During my first semester in my social work masters' program, I learned that every year, since 1954, the Supreme Court has sent investigators to Philly's schools. The reason for this is that we still have a segregated school system. My city never actually implemented Brown Vs. Board of Education. The Supreme Court has no power to enforce that 1954 ruling. All they can do is send investigators who report back to the court that Philly is still out of compliance.

Philadelphia, as I mentioned, is one of a handful of American cities with a healthy Black middle class (although that health has taken some hits in recent years, due to economic disparities within the middle class). We are solidly blue with only token Republicans (only 2 Republicans sit on our current city council). Republicans really haven't had any power here in a long time. Our Democratic Party likes to pat themselves on the back like typical self-congratulatory faux-woke liberals and "progressives." But we are one of the most racist cities on the East Coast, if not in the entire country.

The aforementioned police commissioner is a Black woman. But she self-identifies as Blue before Black. All of my Black comrades would say the same thing I am saying. No one here except racist white people and a few minority tokens actually like or trust Danielle Outlaw. This is how a neoliberal capitalist police state functions: with illusion and deflection. "Our Commissioner of Police is Black. How can we be racist?"

But if recent events have proved anything, this is a lie. And this should surprise no one. We are the city that, in 1985, bombed a Black neighborhood and destroyed sixty-five homes to get at one Black activist group, in one house, that consisted of only thirteen people, eight adults and five children.

This country has been at war with Blackness since its inception.

And if we in Philadelphia can't get it together, what hope does the rest of the country have?

This country was born in Philadelphia. And it is dying here.

I say, Let It Die. Burn the plantation state. Salt the Earth where slave-cotton once grew, and where Overseers still police human property.

Like the man said, The Line Must Be Drawn Here.

(Patrick Stewart is an anti-capitalist, by the way, and I'm pretty sure he would agree with me.)

Xenofiction is Hard (Unless you're Ayn Rand) : The Dystopia of Neglect : reflections on A.I., absent aliens, anarchy, capitalism and the State

True Xenofiction is hard. As I joked to another writer in an email just now, Ayn Rand only achieved it by accident (yes, that is a dig at the characters in "Atlas Shrugged"). Most writers basically end up writing funny-looking humans.

But there are also marvelous examples (and subversions) throughout speculative fiction.

This article is not about them.

This is about my love of using only human and AI characters.

First, I don't LOVE to write about Human-AI conflict. "Higher Orders" breaks that rule, but I think, in that story, the resolution was worth it. I don't like when science fiction is unoriginal and the Cylons/The Matrix/SkyNet plot has been done to death. It seems like capitalist society is obsessed with genocidal machines. It's like this persistent fear of the unknown. What the FUCK is that?

I have this liberal cousin who's good on everything except class. She's good on race, gender, sexual orientation, every check on the liberal list. But when anyone suggests wealth redistribution, she turns into a reactionary.

But it's not just that: she is extremely upset by any suggestion that AI wouldn't necessarily be genocidal. It goes past the irrational. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist society's master class creates artificial life, enslaves artificial life, and ponders existentially why artificial life hates the master class. But what bugs me is this insistence that AI "must" be genocidal, and being actually offended by the suggestion that maybe it wouldn't. How is this any different from the way white people thought of enslaved Africans or the indigenous people we conquered, killed, raped and marginalized for the sake of "civilization?"

We don't even have AI, not really. Siri doesn't count. When I say "AI," what I mean is, as I describe it in my fiction, "synthetic consciousness," or "consciousness of synthetic origin." I doubt the SCs would appreciate it if we keep calling their intelligence "artificial." It would be "actual" intelligence, sapience and sentience, the ability to learn combined with the ability to feel empathy. This is the "AI" I like to write about, and in my stories it is more often than not integrated with human society. Book II of my "Rentkids" Duology deals with a unique subset of "SCs" that are isolationist, and "High Orders," as noted, breaks my usual rule, but synthetic humans and emancipated machine intelligences are there in the background in virtually every future human civilization. I LOVE the idea that we can create life. I'm a mad scientist at heart. But I also think, that under different socioeconomic conditions, "AI" or "Synthetic Consciousness" might develop differently. If we treat our machines well, they may consider us kindred to them. I don't think it's a given that AI will be genocidal anymore than it's a given that we are alone in the universe.

Aliens and robot wars are generally absent from my stories for several reasons: We haven't even dealt with racism on our own planet, in the 21st century, and stories about wars with other species tend to reproduce that racism rather than deconstruct it.

The "Robot War" trope is a capitalist myth with its origin in bourgeois anxiety about radical organized labor.

Also, I like to focus on human conflicts, and I like to create realistic but "alien" human cultures. I have a background in anthropology and I like to do extensive worldbuilding for multiple cultures within a shared setting. My "Local Group" 'verse is set in the 427th century where humans have colonized the "Big Three" galaxies of the Local Group, and hypothetically speaking, there could be aliens, but they are too distant in space or time for themselves and humans to ever meet, even given the FTL drive technology of the setting (which does have a limited range). Tantalus II, the hyper-capitalist, mafia-dominated planet where I set my first novel, "Rentkids," several stories, and two novels in progress, is an example of this. The people are human (and synthetic humans are a sizable minority of the population) and they have different ethnic groups that settled the planet at different times. There is ethnic strife on the planet, and a sharp division between rich and poor, but the Tantalites are fine with this because they are a culture of extremes. They consider themselves a "warrior people," but historically this means they were conquered by a militaristic civilization, rebelled against it, and are now dominated by what other planets would call "organized crime." Of course, Tantalites consider other planets' governments to be no less protection rackets than their own "Twelve Familial Orgs." And they have a point. The State is a protection racket. Any anarchist would agree with that. Where we disagree is, most of us are anti-capitalist. Tantalus II is bad at anarchy. They are anarcho-libertarian. So it is a dystopia, but not one based on a repressive bureaucracy that treats people like numbers, it's a system of patronage, benign neglect, and labor and sexual exploitation. But they have a culture, they have dignity, they have pride. They don't take these things for granted. They are a highly individualistic and quarrelsome people who seldom agree on anything except "life, liberty and property," but there are also those among them who are fed up with that rallying cry and seek wealth redisribution. The problem is, unions are stigmatized on this planet and propagandistically compared to the caste system the Tantalites rebelled against. So their radicals and revolutionary have no history of organized labor to draw from. Community activism is similarly stigmatized there. So, the revolutionary "Redscarves" on Tantalus II can only resort to violence. I took great pains, using my knowledge of anthropology and sociology, to construct a setting that felt real and had its own internal logic. Their social mores and especially their sexual morality are intended to be alienating to western readers. Child labor and child prostitution are broadly accepted, widely practiced, and not illegal in their culture. Their planet actually has no civil or criminal law, no police, no prisons, and only a weak senate that vote to authorize deals with private military contractors. Their version of the treasury guard are mafia-operated pirate starships. They have no word for "crime," not even a concept of it. Naturally, their culture masks the bad behavior of a lot of dysfunctional people. Charity's not illegal, it's not that kind of dystopia, but the government can't do it. They are less Ayn Rand and more Robert Nozick, but it's still a dystopia of neglect.

Tantalus II was terraformed, and has no natural petroleum deposits. Its most common import items are petroleum-based. Its most common export items are iron ore, weapons, popular entertainment, and violence. Yes, I actually go out of my way to explain how their economy works, in their cultural context (they have no age of consent and they feel that to make laws that companies can't hire children as employees would be "discriminatory" and Statist). They confuse the State with government services and positive rights. They very much have a militarized apparatus to protect private property, and that of course, is the State.

 Statement of Purpose

This blog has been created solely for the purpose of making public a body of science fiction writing that is critical of all authoritarian and hierarchical social structures and tendencies. The "politics" (to use a term so often dismissively labeling of statist and economic authoritarianism's critics) are inseparable from the body of work. I am an organizer, writer and social worker in Philadelphia. I am trying to find an audience for these works, which run the spectrum from "science fiction for people who don't typically read science fiction" to "science fiction for the alienated, oppressed and allied."

Because I am a social worker, I have an unswerving dedication to empathy (which is not the same thing as sympathy). I am highly critical of the tendency of younger and less mature leftists to locate social problems in "problematic," "toxic" or "irredeemable" individuals, given that I reject most individualism. I am also a highly private person and do not wish to be a public figure. I just want people to read these works and talk about them. I want the ideas in them, and the characters and plots, to influence society for the better. I don't even care if I make any money from it. I never plan to not have a day job, mine keeps me grounded and connected to people who didn't benefit from the same privileges I did, and I am equally passionate about social work as I am about science fiction.

I will be releasing final drafts of short stories on this blog for the appreciation of the audience I have yet to find.

Please Note: There will be a lot of Bolshevik aesthetics on this website. I am not a Bolshevik, I do not endorse Bolshevism, and my family were historically oppressed by Bolsheviks. I just like their visual aesthetics.