When is emoji not really emoji? When it’s a trojan horse to fix a 14 year old bug.

Meanwhile, I want to observe how very strange it is to see a magazine that takes a pride in pissing people off, that is meant to be blasphemous and offensive and provocative and unsettling—a magazine whose entire reason for existing is supposed to be that it is irreverently outside the mainstream—be transformed into something which one feels compelled to regard with reverence, a thing in whose name assembled heads of state will pretend to march. This is something to which PEN America has contributed, by giving them an award for courage. They have made it even harder to not praise Charlie Hebdo.

Even if we lived in a post-racial society (lol), we still have to grapple with and undo centuries of discriminatory and oppressive practices. This is what racism looks like. It’s not angry white men screaming the n-word; it’s historical redlining turning into modern-day predatory lending, all of which results in a large number of minority Americans concentrated in poverty-stricken areas. Areas which are more heavily monitored by police who view everyone with suspicion.

You don’t even necessarily need police officers to hate them; they just need to dehumanize them enough so they don’t care about their victims pain when their spine snaps.

This is how White Supremacy perpetuates itself. It’s just as much in things you see as in things you don’t.

“People are shocked by all these shootings,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. “But they’ve always been there.”

THAT’S THE PROBLEM!

This is not the first article I’ve read that suggested the unrest in Baltimore is more of a class issue than a race one, given the diversity of the police force and government officials there. I can’t say I’m entirely convinced, even just given the anecdote provided in this story, but it’s certainly not the same situation as Ferguson, which had a mostly white police force extracting revenue from a largely black community.

Sometimes, all it takes is football. Other times, all it takes is one of your brothers getting his neck snapped.

I mean this question both sarcastically and seriously: Is this really new? As if advertisers have never tried to pressure news organizations to kill a story. As if they’ve never succeeded. As if journalism used to live in a glorious past where all was objectivity and editorial independence and this young upstart is heralding a new “era of brand driven censorship.”

Admittedly, I don’t know my history, which is why this is partially a serious question, but my spidey senses are tingling…

Today, I’m starting a new experiment; I’ve been working on a plugin called WordPress-GitHub Sync, which exports my WordPress posts to markdown on GitHub, as well as imports those posts if I make changes there. You can see the plugin at the link below.

It’s probably ready for production, but I’m running it as a beta on my site over the next week to make sure. Definitely interested in getting some feedback, and it’ll probably be going up on WordPress.org next weekend.

This also means you can fork and open pull requests against my writing. See a typo? Find a sentence that doesn’t make a lot of sense? Got an idea you’d like to expand on? I’d love to get your input!