Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Supporting charter schools should get you loving expelled from the org. gently caress.

Lightning Knight posted:

The bit about Momentum opposing the break light clinics made me mad tho, the gently caress is that poo poo.

Slanderer posted:

it's not true

Tricky Dick Nixon posted:

I think people oversimplify the charter schools thing a lot. Not to defend the not endorsing Cat Brooks in this case, but just that it's an issue with a lot of controversy and vitriol. It sounds like she had a political path not unlike someone I work with who was a former director of a local KIPP school and was disillusioned by that process after originally buying into the ideology, and now works with us on our criminal justice stuff through her role as a site manager for the Bail Project. Charter schools have done a great job of representing themselves as the only real choice for a community to get better results in schools. It's hosed up but a lot of people are invested in it, especially because the additional control over hiring means it's easier to have a more diverse faculty, but what ultimately tends to happen is that white administrators and board members direct the policy of these devoted, crusading teachers and burns them out over the next five years and the results regress to the mean, while bleeding money of an already starving district. Articulating that instead of using that history as a "smoking gun" especially since it sounds like she hired a local face and spokesperson for the anti-charter school movement specifically to try and counter the work she did in the path seems like something to encourage people to do.

Slanderer posted:

it's not true

Slanderer posted:

it's not true

Vhak lord of hate posted:

Multiple people who were personally involved with the project (I was physically there) agree that EBDSA momentum fuckers sandbagged the brake light project; what would you, identifiable only as someone who only comes out to be the #1 Jacobin author defender, know about it?

Ace of Baes posted:

https://twitter.com/jergong/status/1075936896788779008?s=19

https://twitter.com/jergong/status/1075936897413787648?s=19

Baby Babbeh posted:

Yes. That's the stuff that we're talking about. As a person peripherally involved in organizing the brake light clinic he is talking about, literally everything Jeremy is saying there is false or highly misleading.

Baby Babbeh posted:

Yes. That's the stuff that we're talking about. As a person peripherally involved in organizing the brake light clinic he is talking about, literally everything Jeremy is saying there is false or highly misleading.

Ace of Baes posted:

https://twitter.com/jergong/status/1075936896788779008?s=19

https://twitter.com/jergong/status/1075936897413787648?s=19

Cocoa Crispies posted:

lmao

gj spending hours on that

Larry Parrish posted:

rotating assignments is cool because sorry folks, despite being a 6 foot male I do not, in fact, want to carry heavy things all the time when I'm off work

Lightning Knight posted:

Could you share your side of the story or would that not be advisable in a public forum?

jarofpiss posted:

are you talking about chairs?

Zesty Mordant posted:

I don't know anything about the brake light stuff but the mayoral endorsement stuff is correct. Brooks basically stormed into the meeting having previously sought endorsement and then ignored the rules of order to make it clear she wasn't looking for cooperation at all with a bunch of 'gentrifiers'. That plus the charter school stuff made for a strong argument against.

Larry Parrish posted:

rotating assignments is cool because sorry folks, despite being a 6 foot male I do not, in fact, want to carry heavy things all the time when I'm off work

rudecyrus posted:

EB and Philly DSA suck, sorry Jeremy Gong defenders

The Ghoul posted:

Sorry buddy, "From each according to his ability..."

Baby Babbeh posted:

Larry Parrish posted:

I'm really good at washing dishes

Tastykake posted:

what is it that sucks about philly dsa because im not reading a whole bunch of twitter drama to figure it out

someone probably explained it but whatever man this shits boring

Baby Babbeh posted:

Without doxxing myself, we were looking to do a brake light clinic in SF (we still have not done one) but we noticed that a lot of people from the surrounding chapters also wanted to do them so we thought it would probably be an easier lift and have a greater impact if we all worked together rather than everybody going off on their own. So we organized a call with the organizers in all the local chapters to discuss it (6 chapters in all). Everyone agreed that working together was a good idea, so we formed a kind of ad hoc cross-chapter coordinating group called the Bay2Brakelight Coalition to raise funds, buy the equipment we needed, etc. The idea was we'd do a rotating clinic in each of our jurisdictions, with the local chapter in charge of finding a venue and doing the day of organizing but every other chapter in the coalition providing volunteers and logistic support. We organized an online fundraiser for the funds to buy supplies, conducted research on the types of lights we would need, made signs and creative for the social media campaign. Because the East Bay organizers were already pretty far along, and because Oakland had an inordinately high number of POC that were stopped for brake lights and other fix it tickets, we decided that it'd be the first one out of the gate, although the local organizers weren't sure how supportive their chapter would be. At that point they'd already got a couple of mechanics who were willing to volunteer their time to train the rest of us on how to fix brakelights, and found a great location on a main thoroughfare in the Deep East, which is one of Oakland's poorest, brownest neighborhoods. We also lined up a partnership with the Anti-Police Terror Project, the local BLM affiliate which was founded by the same Cat Brooks they later snubbed, although this fell through partially because of their bad experiences with EBDSA.

All of which is to say that by the time they approached the chapter, a lot of the logistics had already been figured out and the ask of EBDSA was small (endorse it, and let us put something in the newsletter to attract volunteers). Still the two main organizers in EBDSA put together a very comprehensive proposal laying out everything they were going to do, going so far as to say we'd combine it with M4A canvassing if that's what it took. The response from the leadership was to refuse to agendize the clinic for a vote, disallow them access to the members list or the newsletter to promote it, and to say that they could not identify themselves as EBDSA if they went through with it. Contrary to what Jeremy is saying, they never provided "hours" of help refining the proposal, to the best of my knowledge their interaction with the organizers was a few phone calls during which they were dismissive and insulting. That's where the "white saviorism" comment came up, and it was, ironically, an upper-middle class white lady making it to a working-class organizer who was not white.

Since a lot of organizing work had already been done on this, we went ahead with the clinic anyway. It was a success, we fixed I think about 30 brakelights, and it also drew volunteers from as far away as Fresno and Sacramento who wanted to see how we'd done it and use those learnings to set up their own clinics. It is true that we have not had another clinic in East Bay since. But that was partly by design -- these were supposed to be rotating clinics, and we've done several in San Jose, Palo Alto and Santa Cruz since. A big part of why there hasn't been another East Bay clinic is because the hostility experienced during that first one drove a lot of the people involved to refocus on trying to make EBDSA more democratic, and also because the two central organizers are no longer members of EBDSA.

I'm not going to pretend the brake light clinics have been a complete success. Like I said, we still haven't done one in SF, and we haven't been able to line up a permanent monthly one in the communities where we've done them. There's probably a lot more we could be doing to turn them into an institution that can make a real difference here. But it brought a lot of people together and got them organizing with each other, and I think it's made the Bay Area chapters closer and better able to coordinate with one another, with the exception of East Bay.

I'm proud of what the people working on brake light clinics have done, and it makes me angry to see Jeremy throw comrades under the bus like this to deflect criticism.