Politics:
The horror of this:
Tamir Elijah Rice was boisterous and sweet, a boy in perpetual motion. At school, he liked to pass out papers or help teachers erase the chalkboard. At home, he liked to cook ramen noodles and watch Curious George. On the basketball court, he liked to smile as he talked trash, launching 3-pointers over other boys his age, delighting in the fact that, even in the sixth grade, he was strong enough to shoot from long range. He liked to play soccer and the drums, to swim and to dance. He was still figuring himself out. Says Samaria: “He had only been 12 for five months.”
The Ringer: We Are All Witnesses, July 21, 2016
But police officers are not held to the same standards as civilians, nor should they be. They are expected to insert themselves into potentially volatile situations, to confront bad guys with weapons, to stand between chaos and public order. They will at times, even if only for a heartbeat, genuinely fear for their lives or the lives of others. There is a library of case law giving officers wide leeway on the use of deadly force. But these two guys drove up and shot a kid. And it’s on video. “What we have is objective evidence that they summarily executed this child as fast as humanly possible,” says Jonathan S. Abady, one of the attorneys representing Tamir’s estate, mother, and sister. “There is nothing Tamir could have done to not get shot that day.”
The slave patrols that originated in the seventeenth century would be largely made up of poor whites—paterollers, the members of the patrols were called. To stop, harass, whip, injure, or kill black people was both their duty and their reward, their understanding of themselves as white people, something they shared with their social betters. Of course their real purpose was to monitor and suppress the capacity for slave rebellion.
The New York Review of Books: Black Lives and the Police, August edition
On Europe:
Austria's Presidential election as the outline of populist right-wing movements around the world (but with a good overview of the specific historical roots).
A brief history of Fortress Europe (and what a European migration policy may look like after the crisis)-
A significant offshoot of this dismantling of internal European borders was the creation of a new single external EU border, stretching from the Western Mediterranean coasts of the Iberian Peninsula all the way up to the Baltic States and Finland. The provisions of the Schengen system dictated that the removal of internal barriers to free movement be accompanied with a tightening of controls at this new shared external border. In practice, this effectively meant that freedom of movement beyond the EU would need to be restricted as a condition of its enhancement for EU citizens. An incentive among EU policy-makers was thus created to pool and strengthen resources devoted to the task of tackling irregular migration, a task given high priority due to the negative perception of immigration that had come to predominate within a majority of Member States. Its intellectual elite is often wont to theorize the EU as a bulwark against what it views as petty retrograde nationalisms. In reality, however, the structure of the EU, and in particular that of the Justice and Home Affairs pillar established following the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, provided a channel through which already heightened national concerns around immigration would filter upward and inform policy formation at the European level.
Jadaliyya: A brief history of Fortress Europe, July 18, 2016
Children and teenagers, most of them of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, are being tortured in Northern Territory detention centres.
Pop Culture:
Zomby and Burial have released a collaborative track called Sweetz.
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