Don't do this, Mike...

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New York cops can't hide their records now.

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Opinion | Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws - The New York Times : "New York took a step toward reform with the repeal Tuesday evening of a state law known as 50-a, a decades-old measure that has allowed the police to keep the disciplinary and personnel records of officers secret. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is expected to sign the bill. "New York’s 50-a is one of the strongest police secrecy laws in the country, the spoils of the unfettered political power New York police unions have enjoyed. "For generations, the law has been used to keep officers accused of misconduct, as well as the departments they work for, from public scrutiny. "Activists and police reformers have fought to repeal the law for years. Just a year ago, those efforts went nowhere. The State Legislature, even under a new Democratic majority, declined to change or repeal it. Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose administration has interpreted 50-a more strictly than his predecessors, sa...
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"If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy."

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Michelle Alexander in the New York Times -- "America, This is Your Chance" : "We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. Donald Trump would not be the president and George Floyd would not be dead if, after the Civil War, our nation had committed itself to reparations, reconciliation and atonement for the land and people that colonizers stole, sold and plundered. Instead, white people who enslaved blacks were granted reparations for the loss of their 'property' while formerly enslaved blacks were given nothing — not even the 40 acres and a mule they were promised. Ever since, our nation has been trapped in a cycle of intermittent racial progress followed by fierce backlash and the emergence of new and 'improved' systems of racial and social control. These cycles have been punctuated by various movements, uprisings and riots, but one thing has remained constant: A majority of whites persistently deny the scale and severity of racial injustice that pe...
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Linear progress – turns out it's not a thing...

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We Are Drowning in a Devolved World: An Open Letter from Devo - VICE : "As I started working with my Kent State poet friend, Bob Lewis, a philosophy emerged, fueled by the revelations that linear progress in a consumer society was a lie. Things were not getting better. There were no flying cars and domed cities, as promised in Popular Science; rather, there was a dumbing down of the population engineered by right-wing politicians, televangelists, and Madison Avenue. I called what we saw 'De-evolution,' based upon the tendency toward entropy across all human endeavors. . . . "Then, and in the decades to follow, we witnessed an America where the capacity for critical thought and reasoning were eroding fast. People mindlessly repeating slogans from political propaganda and ad campaigns: 'America, Love It or leave It'; 'Don’t Ask Why, Drink Bud Dry'; 'You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby'; even risk-free, feel-good slogans like 'Give Peace a Chance....
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