Month: December 2024

Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 2)

Posted on by Scott

This will wrap up my annual charitable giving post that I began on Christmas Eve with a Part 1.

Other Charitable Giving (continued)

Additional charitable giving recipients not listed previously include the following:

Other Giving

In addition to giving for charitable purpose that are tax-deductible, I’ll highlight a few tip jars, Patreon memberships, and other avenues I’ve taken to support people and causes that I find worthwhile.

  • The Contraband Wagon
    I initially met him through Twitter, and he’s taken on the exceedingly difficult challenge of creating constructive conversations on the issue of race. I had the honor of being a panelist for one of the live conversations he moderated on the issue of race in the tech industry. You can find clips of his conversations on YouTube and join his Patreon to get the full-length conversations.
  • Mastodon
    I began supporting the Mastodon project through Patreon in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over Twitter. As we’ve watched Musk turn Twitter into a propaganda and disinformation platform to (unfortunately successfully) elect Donald Trump, those of us with the means putting money behind efforts to help decentralized social media networks succeed will only grow more important. They recently began selling merchandise which also helps support their operations, which gave me an excuse to buy a stuffed version of their mascot.
  • Hachyderm
    Hachyderm.io is the Mastodon server I moved to in 2023 after initially joining the much larger mastodon.cloud. I began sponsoring them this year with a small monthly contribution via GitHub.
  • emptywheel
    The blog of independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, she’s effectively become the ombudsman of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. She doesn’t just call out shortcomings and failings in their coverage, she clarifies issues that might otherwise be confusing. She’s one of just two journalists I value enough to support directly.
  • Blacksky
    Created and maintained by Rudy Fraser, it is effectively its own social media network for black folks on Bluesky that leverages the AT Protocol. I began contributing to his work this month via Open Source Collective, a fiscal host for numerous open source projects I used back when I was still writing software full time including webpack, vue, ESLint, and thousands of others.

Giving Plans for 2025

I don’t anticipate any changes in my financial giving plans next year beyond possibly giving a bit more to charities I already donate to, and to my church. Once I’ve completed a leadership training program I’m currently taking (in June 2025), I will look for an opportunity to regularly donate my time and expertise to a cause that needs them.

Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 1)

Posted on by Scott

My final post of last year talked about charitable giving, but this I’m starting a bit earlier. This annual post is as much of a self-reminder to donate to worthy causes as it is to encourage those who read them to do the same.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

In addition to donating to my home church and my high school alma mater, I gave a bit to the Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington. If you’re in the DC/Metro area and are looking for a cause that helps families in need, consider them as a recipient for your year-end giving.

Other Charitable Giving

Last year’s merger between CIR/Reveal and Mother Jones didn’t change how they accepted donations. Researching this post gave me the opportunity to restart monthly donations to them which had lapsed. 2024 turned out to be a year of mainstream media taking a step backward in quality and/or being acquired by right-wing ideologues. January brought the purchase of The Baltimore Sun by the owner of Sinclair Broadcasting. So the advice I gave last year to find and consider supporting a local non-profit newsroom was advice I had to follow quite quickly myself. The Baltimore Banner covers what happens at Maryland’s state capitol quite well. It’s now my only written local news source since I dropped my Washington Post subscription after they got scooped on Justice Alito’s insurrectionist flag-flying despite having a multi-year head start.

HBO/Max opted to cancel their deal with Sesame Workshop for new episodes so they’re seeking a new partner. Since then, Sesame Workshop has become very active online seeking donations, and I responded. Sesame Street was a substantial part of the TV programming I consumed as a kid (because it was on PBS), and my children have too.

Another new recipient of charitable giving this year was the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I visited in-person during the week of Thanksgiving to see the Code Switch exhibit before it closed, and bought a bunch of books in their bookstore before I left (all purchase proceeds support the center itself). You can also give directly to the New York Public Library system.

Other charitable giving recipients so far this year included the following (in no particular order):

A follow-up post after Christmas will cover the rest of my charitable giving for the year and plans for 2025.

The Return of White Impunity for Black Death

Posted on by Scott

Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their acquittal of Daniel Penny on the charge of criminally-negligent homicide in his killing of Jordan Neely, impunity is what the jury granted him. Jordan Neely was lynched for having a mental health crisis while black, poor, and homeless. A jury of Daniel Penny’s peers showed him the mercy that he didn’t show Jordan Neely. It didn’t matter that that Penny’s Marine instructor testified that he executed the hold incorrectly. It didn’t matter that at least one passenger is on video warning Penny that his chokehold was going to kill Neely. It didn’t matter that Neely had no weapon and didn’t harm anyone on the train before Penny literally choked the life out of him. The video of Neely being asphyxiated is a modern-day lynching postcard now.

I’m old enough to remember watching video footage of Rodney King being beaten within an inch of his life on video. I remember watching broadcasts of the destruction that resulted from people enraged by the verdict (and some opportunists too). Fast-forward almost 30 years and one of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynchers leaked the video of his crime thinking it would help him. He and his co-conspirators will likely spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. Video of George Floyd’s excruciating death under the knee of Derek Chauvin will keep the man in prison for nearly 2 decades from now. But just 4 year later, a vigilante can strangle a man to death with impunity.

My cynical mind wonders how the jurors who acquitted Daniel Penny responded to the broad daylight murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Perhaps the response to his murder (which has included very dark jokes and applause on social media) and the response to Neely’s lynching are two sides of the same coin.

Either way, we are (and have been for far too long) a nation too comfortable with violence, too numb to the suffering of those who are most often its victims. This puts everyone in a marginalized community at greater risk—not just from police (who will operate with even greater impunity than they already had once the second Trump administration begins), but now apparently from white vigilantes also.

A Nation Without Mercy, Revisited

Posted on by Scott

Yesterday, a mutual on Bluesky shared this news:

How can you be deadlocked when HIS HAIR PROBABLY SPEAKS AFRIKAANS BY ITSELF?!!

[image or embed]

— Ash Higgins (@ashhiggins.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 3:48 PM

It reminded me a post I wrote last year about just how broken this allegedly Christian nation’s understanding of the parable of the good Samaritan is. “He had to die, just in case” may yet spare Daniel Penny up to 15 years in prison that a manslaughter conviction could yield as a sentence. Like the trial of those who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason there was a trial at all was some public outcry that Penny was initially released without charges after he was first questioned by police. While Penny is also charged with criminally negligent homicide, the maximum sentence for a conviction on that charge is just 4 years. It’s also possible (if not probably) that the jury will will show Penny the mercy he lacked for Jordan Neely and find him not guilty–despite video evidence of him slowly but surely squeezing that man’s life out of him.

In the time since I first wrote A Nation Without Mercy, the “active and ongoing dehumanization and criminalization of the poor and mentally-ill” has continued. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public–even if the cities offer no alternative shelter. In a country where homelessness is rising, a housing shortage persists, and Trump is returning to the White House with a government unified under GOP control, the likelihood of homeless people ending up with fines, criminal records, and even prison terms seems uncomfortably high.