Factual Dispatch #20
8chan, Prison Gerrymandering, and the RAVE Act
2003 saw the momentous creation of 4chan by Christopher Poole (now at Google). After a decade in operation, the running joke on /b/ (the "random" board) was: if you were banned on 4chan for being any flavor of garbage person, you could find a home on 7chan or 8chan. 8chan can be thought of almost like reddit, where infinite sub-boards can be created by members, but it’s cleaved to the usual chan-board structure.
Over time, many an oldfag turned off by the civil wars waged on 4chan (Lol Boxxy) migrated to 7chan or 8chan. 7chan was always a bit too small to foment hatred, but 8chan’s /pol/ has become one of the most important breeding grounds of identitarianism, antisemitism, networked nationalism, and straight up Nazi shit. While 4chan birthed the QAnon movement, the mass casualty events at the Poway Synagoguge & Christchurch have thrust 8chan into the light, much to the chagrin of its denizens and owner/funder.
The lack of spotlight or consequences has spiraled into their community posting about how to produce misinformation in real-time during the fire at Notre Dame, on Instagram, or messing with social media during mass shootings caused by members of the alt right (though, social media doesn’t really need any more help on that). If you don’t believe me, check out this post detailing how to mitigate heat and discussion from liberals and “normies:”
Even after these terrorist attacks, the rhetoric on 8chan has not skipped a beat. A senior researcher at the ADL calls 8chan a “laboratory of hate” because of how quickly xenophobia, racism, and calls to commit violence on behalf of the alt right can bubble up and radicalize even kids who start off patronizing these sites “ironically.” Someone found the Poway Synagogue shooter’s manifesto, posted minutes before the carnage started, and alerted the authorities. Afterwards, their community disavowed the person, and claimed they deleted the post immediately upon discovering it. If this sounds familiar, it should because this was the same bullshit they fed reporters after Christchurch. And, if you go back far enough, you can even trace the threads to Gamergate. Unfortunately, because our security personnel think 8chan is an unfathomable black box, we may be on our own fighting them.
Many Americans are familiar with Gerrymandering and its effects on our democratic process, but only a handful are aware of/currently fighting a weird nexus of gerrymandering, the census, and the private prison industry in this country. Prison Gerrymandering is the deployment of incarceration facilities to to affect the population of a given community, usually to affect local legislature numbers.
Because the Census Bureau counts incarcerated citizens as residents of the towns the prison is located in, this can wildly distort the population totals of certain areas of the country. This wasn’t a problem when population levels were only used to determine House member numbers, but Census data is now used for redistricting at the state and even local levels. Combining this with the exponential increase in prison populations over the last few decades (Thank Joe Biden’s crime bill!), this allows for a tremendous amount of bad behavior. To quote the Prison Policy Initiative:
“Because prisons are disproportionately built in rural areas but most incarcerated people call urban areas home, counting prisoners in the wrong place results in a systematic transfer of population and political clout from urban to rural areas.
When districts with prisons receive enhanced representation, every other district in the state without a prison sees its votes diluted. And this vote dilution is even larger in the districts with the highest incarceration rates. Thus, the communities that bear the most direct costs of crime are therefore the communities that are the biggest victims of prison-based gerrymandering.”
As you can imagine, this has led to some terrible urban vs. rural population imbalances, like how 60% of Illinois' prisoners are from Cook County (Chicago), yet 99% of them are counted outside the county. Or what’s happening in New York State, where seven State Senate Districts only have enough people in them to earn representation because of prisoners from downstate.
While the impacts of this practice are still being studied, we do know that it is getting better out there, at least in the places detailed above. Here’s to hoping we can fix it fast because the fake Census shenanigans out there are getting worse.
Better men than I have dug into Biden’s devastating crime bill, but I wanted to detail another one of his greatest hits. The one that blew a hole in the burgeoning rave movement of the 2000s, shuttered hundreds of clubs, bars, and lounges across the country, and remains one of the structural reasons harm reduction may never come to music festivals: The RAVE Act.
In 2002, the bill was presented in committee and originally sponsored by Biden, Grassley, Hatch, Joe Lieberman, Strom Thurmond, and a couple other actual Democrats. It moved to the Senate floor with backing from Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Schumer, and a handful of other Dems in early 2003, where it thankfully did not pass. In response to this failure, they repackaged the bill as the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, as a rider on the PROTECT Act, the law that gave us the Amber Alert system.
The act extends the Controlled Substances Act - Section 416(a), more commonly known as the “Crackhouse statute,” that punishes locations “used to manufacture, distribute or use drugs” to those holding temporary permits or non-owners of said locations. The initial section of the bill, titled “Findings” documented hallmarks of electronic music events, such as providing free water, using glow sticks, having chill out rooms, or even specific of genres of music. These "findings” could be used as guidance by local police departments to find, charge, and punish concert producers/promoters, if drugs were found at their events. And with the penalties set at 2x the gross receipts from the event, that was enough to shutter clubs around the country, force parties underground, and ensure you never saw a chill room or free water ever again.
As you can imagine, this resulted in the deaths of thousands across the rave community in the 2000s. To the point where parents of dead ravers have begged and pleaded with Biden to change the law. No changes have been made, and Biden’s gallivanting around the country gaslighting reporters when they ask him to explain how he’s somehow not responsible for the incarceration of literally millions. And now that the Trump administration is using the crackhouse statute to go after propsed overdose prevention sites in Seattle & Philadelphia, we all know who to thank.
Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: Best set of maps to divide New York State I’ve ever seen.
The long, unreadable line at the last one says: Hot Dogs, Halal Trucks, Chopped Cheese, NY-style Pizza, Jewish Deli Sandwiches, Manhattan Clam Chowder, Reubens, Baked Ziti, General Tso's Chicken, Eggcreams, Ices, Gyros. Also, here’s a weird visualization of all of the times Batman died.
Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: There’s this thing called Selective Empathy, and it’s destroying society.
Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Insurance companies & actuaries joined the US military in flagging climate change as their greatest risk in 2019.
Royal Sampler
Saudi Arabia has always hedged against social progress with its almost ludicrous welfare state. With the tap running dry, the natives are becoming restless. (via Foreign Policy)
Moderation, community management, and general forum administration has been a thorn in the side of news sites for a decade. Audience Voice Reporters aim to fix that. (via Nieman Lab)
Immigrants Built Stonehenge. Did I Stutter? (via BBC News)
Disinformation continue to infect our dialogue. Here’s a booster shot for your Digital Tabloid vaccine. (via The Conversation)
No, you’re not losing your mind, trends do get chewed through in less time these days. Yes, the average attention span across the globe is narrowing. No, you don’t need Adderall. (via The Guardian)
No Democracy is an island. No matter what Trump does, or how ever bad it gets, norms will always matter. (via Foreign Policy)
Is Ambition Overrated? “Toil Glamour” is my new favorite phrase. (via Esquire)
“The key point I make in the book is that all these negative health risks don’t necessarily stem from racist individuals. The health risks rise when the politics of racial resentment shapes the health care policies, the health policies, in your state or community. So it really was the policies themselves that were racially motivated, not the individual people or their psychologies.” (Vox, Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness)
The juemingci, a poetic acknowledgement of finding oneself wanting, insufficient or simply unappreciated, translates roughly to “verses to terminate your life.” This amazing sub-sub niche of Chinese poetry is incredibly important to anyone who does thankless work, or feels they’ve been beaten by life. The article can be listened to as a 20 minute podcast which I highly recommend. (via The Times Literary Supplement)
Dunk of the Week: This week, Brad managed to own himself so badly the internet will record it forever (the self-own was so bad I think his account was suspended)
What do y’all think of the new format/platform? Let me know, tell your friends, and don’t forget to breathe!
T