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377 words by attila written on 2022-02-11, last edit: 2025-03-17, tags: blm, ftp, pigs ⋔ Previous post: Heavy Seas ⋔ Next post: 08m45s
Black Lives Matter. You cannot be anti-fascist and support the police. You cannot be progressive without at least understanding and sitting with abolitionist thinking and the true history of the evil thing called Amerika. Defund the police is not just a slogan, it is an acknowledgement of where the real problems in our society are: money and power. White supremacy is a strategic and foundational element that pervades both of those dimensions.
When I originally wrote this post Tyre Nichols' murder was the latest outrage committed by the police, and it remains absolutely outrageous. But then when you look at a list of all the unarmed Black people killed by "the law" in the US the outrage becomes unbearable. None of this is by accident. Black and non-white people and other marginalized groups bear the brunt of police brutality, and the brutal nature of it is by design: it's not something we can reform.
The police exist solely to protect the property of the rich, and in some cases their persons as well. They do not solve the vast majority of crimes, they do not protect ordinary people, they are thugs and agents of a thuggish, kleptocratic state.
That's the whole thing.
Check this out, donate where it makes the most sense.
I wrote this post originally in an attempt to admonish my fellow open-source hackers to do better and stand up for Black people and BLM, to put BLM support statements directly on their home pages, but I see now how pointless this was. What we call open source is largely racist to its core, with some admitted bright spots. If you understand the real history of open source, and who the people are and were who could even afford to consider donating their time and energy to it, you'll understand everything.
Open source should rightly had been considered a socialist project from the beginning, but this is far from the case. Apolitical white dudes cannot be trusted to do anything but come up with structures that keep them on top.
So I give up on appealing to open source's conscience (looking at you, OpenBSD). The time for that passed us by a while ago, while I was sleeping.