Precious Bodily Fluids
jonny (good kind)You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide
This police state is your police state. This police state stands between you and any brighter future you might imagine. This fight is your fight
Ryan Randall@jonny Furthermore, this particular campus was designed as a series of chokepoints in the wake of 1960s student uprisings.
Its campus design highlights how much of the last 60+ years of American built space is a physical apparatus for the police state & social control.
bdonnelly@ryanrandall @jonny Yeah, I did undergrad at SUNY Purchase which was built in the 70s. The entire campus architecture was built around not allowing the students to seize buildings and creating choke points for students and access points for large groups of riot cops
PedestrianError 
@Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny Not just campus design, the whole US built environment. Every modern suburban neighborhood is designed for limited ways in & out and to virtually require car ownership to access anything. “Urban renewal” projects bulldozed neighborhoods where protesting residents could block off a street and have multiple escape routes for highways and buildings like these campuses.
sidereal@PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny And they built elevated freeways through many of those neighborhoods so the military could deploy through and above them, and control the high ground in riot situations.
Every aspect of American society is about control.
Zagone@sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny
This is an interesting take on the elevated highways.
I've always heard it described as White suburban commuters having no respect for the now Black neighborhoods they fled decades earlier.
@zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny
It's been more than a decade since I've relevant stuff by folks like Mike Davis, Edward Soja, or Samuel Delany, but there's almost certainly multiple people who've written about the material & planning histories of this part of the built environment.
You definitely might look to things on Robert Moses's changes to NYC transportation as a start: https://www.npr.org/2020/07/05/887386869/how-transportation-racism-shaped-america
Folks like Nick Mitchell and others have also done a lot to connect how campuses & suburbs & prisons work as "warehousing" of people treated as surplus.
Here's a conference panel I desperately tried to type notes on: https://www.ryanpatrickrandall.com/our-conference-notes/2015-05-21-cultural-studies-association-2015-opening-plenary-panel/
I've also heard good arguments—again, can't remember exactly from where—that whiteness was reinforced/encouraged by the production of suburbs. Making people isolated & structurally encouraging housing to be treated as an investment reduces social ties and makes it harder to organize unions or other working political groups.
FoolishOwl@ryanrandall @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny It's struck me how most workplaces I've been in are designed as fortresses, with walls and controlled points of entry with guards. And somewhere I read an article about how the "corporate campus" was designed to isolate workers, so they don't leave the work site even for meals.
@foolishowl @zagone @sidereal @PedestrianError @Theblueone @jonny Many workplaces are totally designed as fortresses, self-contained little citadels! Higher education campuses often are, too!
Mike Davis's book _City of Quartz_ talks about the idea of "Fortress LA", which is sort of that same logic but expanded to neighborhood and city-wide scales.
I remember him (or maybe Frederic Jameson?) talking about how common it is for business architecture to have basically 1 or 2 stories of effectively ramparts at ground level in cities, with few or no windows. That might be in Davis's book _Ecology of Fear_?
Davis's writing really sticks with me, so if you like reading, he's a great author to consider. I think he also did a bunch of interviews and podcasts in the last 10 years or so, before he recently passed away.
tonic @Theblueone @ryanrandall @jonny a friend of mine attends purchase rn and she told me it was literally like designed by a prison architect??? which actually doesn't surprise me lmfao
@tonicfunk @ryanrandall @jonny I think that's incorrect. The architect behind the master campus plan was Edward Larrabee Barnes who certainly did some judiciary buildings, but no prisons as far as I can tell...
CobaltRose@ryanrandall @jonny if it’s so untenable as a defensive position, why not spill the protest out into the streets?
@cobaltrose
@ryanrandall
Im not organizing at Irvine, but id guess its hard to sustain a roving encampment and also have impact
@ryanrandall
Im not organizing at Irvine, but id guess its hard to sustain a roving encampment and also have impact
Frank Bennett 🇯🇵@ryanrandall @jonny That's ... interesting. Because the Japanese campus from which I retired a couple of years ago (Nagoya University) had a central quad with planters arranged with exactly that aim, and in response to Vietnam war protests. (They're no ripping it up for a new building.)
OTOH the earlier protests lead to an agreement with the police that they would not enter campus grounds. Unlikely to hold if there were serious protests, but still important symbolism.
Gary Parker@jonny pardon my language, but fuuuuuuck 😱
This is, like, the encyclopaedia definition of “disproportionate response”
Kevin Karhan 
@jonny I wish I could even fake to be surprised, but that's facist Amerikkka for ya...
localzuk@jonny yet Americans keep voting for this sort of policing.
David 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️NB they/them@localzuk @jonny It’s scary how many Americans support this kind of policing. My dad thinks this is a proportionate response to property damage. He was particularly fixated on the horror of desks being broken as a red line for some reason. Decades of being fed network news and his takeaway is "but what about the poor property?" I don’t think he’s alone in his opinion.
Jennifer
Bishop6 (Ed Alan T.)@jonny And typical American goes, "If they didn't want to face the Nazi stormtroopers, they should have not been so anti-semetic, right?"
Tom Bellin 
@jonny I believe it because the goal is to break up the protests without killing the students who are peaceful.
The key to not killing the peaceful students is that the cops have to not be scared.
The key to making sure the cops aren't scared is to have 10 cops for every student.
decapitae@jonny The end of The United States is when it turns on itself to enact the exact same conditions that caused it to form in the first place. Police are the tools of dictators, brainwashing is the recruitment process for tools.
Remember when you assert your freedoms, not to treat the oppressor violently as they have treated you. That's what small petty insecure humans do. Try to be the better person, and rehabilitate them, don't use them as slaves, as an ideally free society has none.
Remember when you assert your freedoms, not to treat the oppressor violently as they have treated you. That's what small petty insecure humans do. Try to be the better person, and rehabilitate them, don't use them as slaves, as an ideally free society has none.
🌲🧿 "Max"t💽d🏵️n 🔎🍄@jonny Don't worry. I'm told if we vote for Biden he'll stop the fascism.
Wait...
This is the whole "Lesser Evil" problem -- which I'm not of a mind to rehash here at length.
If we don't vote for Biden, is there enough force and power ready to Rock on the side of the Left to deal with the imminent fascist right-wing revolution?
We are not, unfortunately, about to have a left-wing revolution (although the students are doing a good job).
They are Biden's (or the local university or town's) fascists.
You have to ask yourself if the progressive left-wing is really in position with the groundswell of support needed to command the sweeping changes needed before the election next fall?
If not, not voting for Biden facilitates the far worse Christi-fascist revolution that IS ready to sweep the USA. That would be Trump & Project 2025.
And yes, Democratic voters need to start caring about youth & minorities.
Dan Neuman 🇨🇦@jonny They could have left the kids alone, but they had all this riot gear just sitting there collecting dust.
@jonny Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’….
Seiðr@jonny This would be the moment to go on a "unvoluntary bank withdrawal of funds" spree all over the city.
gavinisdie 
@jonny things are only gonna get worse
SophieThat is pretty scary. @jonny
Diligence JonesThis is an orgy of power.
Irvine's admin should be absolutely effing ashamed of doing this to their students.
@jonny A society that quibbles about whether it can afford to feed its schoolchildren lunch or build a sidewalk when it builds a street for motorists should not be able to afford this many police even if police were nice public servants who cleaned up trash and proactively fixed quality of life issues instead of just punitively arresting, beating, shooting, and intimidating people.
stux⚡️@jonny WTF..
Are they preparing for war?
(I suggest send them Storm Troopers to Ukraine and fight a real enemy)
Why Not Zoidberg? 🦑@WhyNotZoidberg @jonny It sure looks like that!
Those troopers should be so ashamed of being there with such a force, disgusting
DavidNo doubt they all have bone spurs
@jonny looks like they need more.
axolotl solidario@jonny having gone through Occupy Oakland, I can very much believe the numbers of stormtroopers. There they arrested over 700 people in one night. The response is always the same when social movements gain power and threaten the status-quo.
The more repression, the more you know you're doing the right thing. Keep fighting!
The more repression, the more you know you're doing the right thing. Keep fighting!
Don Pixote
NosirrahSec 🏴☠️ guillotine enthusiast@jonny Someone explain to me why we need that many fat, armed, pigs to assault students for protesting *checks notes* GENOCIDE (again)
Lani@jonny seven police departments is absurd. if i understand what happened correctly, Irvine PD had been called in the past and the Irvine mayor ordered them to stand down, but she can’t do that for other police departments I guess. I don’t have anything nice to say about Irvine PD obviously but OC sheriff department is even worse. Irvine is plenty cursed on its own but there are some even more scarily conservative pockets of OC which makes the neighboring police department concept even more unsettling to me.
Also, as someone who lives in OC, why do *any* of these departments have this gear… not that anyone needs it, but it would be laughable here if it wasn’t being used…
Also, as someone who lives in OC, why do *any* of these departments have this gear… not that anyone needs it, but it would be laughable here if it wasn’t being used…
@jonny total overload for a peaceful protest. The poor souls in Gaza need us to keep highlighting the atrocities. 😢
J.H.Noyes
Lily Star
Old Grumpy Game Guy@jonny damn!! If only the cops at Uvalde had that same level of energy.
Alison Creekside@jonny Popo training exercise
George Baily@jonny when you hit a nerve of the status quo....
@jonny this is so very wrong.
Finerthanfroghair@jonny Think back to Kent State..??
Jon A. Cruz@jonny the architecture and layout are so perfectly designed for dystopian use that you might recognize it from 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
Allie@jonny land of the free ofc
Stephen Hayes@jonny How much disk space will you need to store all that stuff?
Sorry, seems to have got attached to the wrong post. I was commenting on an article that said Microsoft was going to store a screenshot every few second.