Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or informative.
- Author Kimberly Jones provides some crucial perspective that ought to put anyone tut-tutting about looters in their place. Too many of us know too little about racist atrocities like Tulsa and Rosewood, and it shows. (Meanwhile, while we’re talking about looting…)
- In the meantime, we shouldn’t be afraid to call racism what it is, rather than “racially-tinged” and other such euphemisms that rhetorically smooth it over.
- Amazingly, the Minneapolis City Council is now planning to dismantle the city’s police department, marking an amazing achievement by activists who have been advancing the idea for years. It should only be that this becomes even more mainstream going forward — the person who responds to someone having a mental health emergency doesn’t need to be an armed thug; the person who gets called about petty theft doesn’t need to be an armed thug.
- Artist Adrian Brandon is the creator of Stolen, a series of portraits of black people murdered by cops, sketched but only partially filled in as he spends one minute coloring each portrait for each year his subject lived.
- This Week in Bad Apples: One feeble excuse for police brutality is that it’s not a systematic crime against humanity, but merely the acts of “a few bad apples” who can be nudged with paid leave or reassignment, or otherwise fired and/or prosecuted (no matter how rarely the perpretators are actually charged by a grand jury, let alone convicted). Even if this explanation makes sense to you, Florida police departments are now actively recruiting any bad apples who want to join their bushels.
- RIP Tiffany Eubanks, who died suspiciously soon after being detained by cops.
- RIP Sarah Grossman, dead two days after being gassed by cops.
- Last week we noted in awe how the K-pop fandom stonewalled a police snitching app that it got shut down entirely. Incredibly, the fandom is back at it, this time targeting 4chan neo-Nazis and QAnon cultists. Welcome to the revolution, K-pop stans.
- Cops is canceled. Good fucking riddance. This is truly cancel culture at its finest.
- I’ve been watching a whole hell of a lot of the Bon Appetit YouTube channel, as I’ve found it to be both great background noise when I’m working and a welcome dose of wholesomeness in these terrible times. However, like literally everything else, it seems the Bon Appetit YouTube channel is pretty deeply racist, as it seems the nonwhite staffers aren’t actually paid for their video appearances, and the dude who runs it has brownface photos currently making the rounds. Also, it took me embarrassingly long to realize that I don’t actually recall seeing any black people on the channel.
- This Week in Radical Recontextualization: We’ve listened to a lot of genre-bending covers here at the ol’ Walk, with no insignificant time spent on retro covers of modern songs. Let us go, then, you and I, more retro than we’ve ever gone before — all the way back to Haddaway by way of the middle ages. This blessed channel doesn’t yet have many songs, but every one is a certified bop.
- TheKnob is a volume control peripheral for your computer that combines the best in functionality with the wonderful tactile sensations of concrete. Plus RGB lighting, obviously.
- One intrepid woman is officially suing every gay person. As her petition to the court names only “homosexuals,” I’m pretty sure that my pansexuality protects me from any potential cash settlement that may be agreed to by the defendants, but my fiance faces certain risk.
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