“I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.”
― Huey P. Newton :huey-wut:
Huey Newton, born on the 17th of february in 1942, was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who, along with fellow Merritt College student Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party (1966 - 1982). Together with Seale, Newton created a ten-point program which laid out guidelines for how the African-American community could achieve liberation. In the 1960s, under Newton’s leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, HIV support groups, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing co-ops, and their own ambulance service.
The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service which became one of America’s most widely distributed African-American newspapers. In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of the police officer John Frey. Although arrested for the murder of Frey, the charges were eventually dismissed.
In 1970, after his release from prison, Newton received an invitation to visit the People’s Republic of China. Newton made the trip in late September 1971 with fellow Panthers, Elaine Brown and Robert Bay, and stayed for 10 days. At every Chinese airport he landed in, Newton was greeted by thousands of people waving copies of the “Little Red Book” and displaying signs that said “we support the Black Panther Party, down with US imperialism” or “we support the American people but the Nixon imperialist regime must be overthrown.”
By mid-decade, Newton faced more criminal charges when he was accused of murdering a 17-year-old sex worker and assaulting a tailor. To avoid prosecution, he fled to Cuba in 1974, but returned to the U.S. three years later. The murder case was eventually dismissed after two trials ended with deadlocked juries, while the tailor refused to testify in court in relation to assault charges.
Despite graduating from high school not knowing how to read, he taught himself literacy by reading Plato’s Republic and earned a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness program in 1980. In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide :huey-wut:
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Black against Empire The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Waldo Martin (no black panther party emote :angery: )
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Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War by Sean L. Malloy
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
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Fucking hate being treated as a “drug addict” by doctors
I keep making the mistake of being honest with them and telling them I have used drugs for fun in the past which means my soul is permanently tainted to them
drug use
In general, most doctors just don’t understand why people become addicted to or even use drugs like this in the first place
Usually, the cause is a personal failing to them, maybe with a side of an extremely reductive and mechanistic understanding of neurobiology obtained by animal torturers who inject methamphetamine directly into the brains of monkeys raised by wire mothers or something and think this serves as an accurate model of the drug use of people
The cause is primarily systemic and so is the solution
Also not well understood is that most people who use whatever drugs do so without problems. They just dont tell their doctors about it.
I do not agree that the cause of drug use is systemic. I think people have always and will always use drugs.
Right? “Your adhd medicine is habit forming” bro do you want me to take my prescribed medication every day at the same time as prescribed or not you’re giving me mixed messages here?
I blew up at a doctor after a surgery over this. I hadn’t been on any opioid pain killers in decades. The prescription said “take two every four hours”. They gave me ten pills. That, to my ignorant ass, was 20 hours of pain management after an invasive surgery.
What everyone else understood, apparently, was that one of those pills would obliterate you for most of the day if you were totally opioid naive. If I’d actually taken them as prescribed i would have been drolling and incoherent. And it turned out that the minimally invasive laposcopic surgery really did need minimal pain management after a few days. But i was livid bc i always take my meds as prescribed and what they’d prescribed made no sense to me.
sounds like the label should have read “take 1-2 every four hours as needed for pain”? and with a max total daily dosage like “do not exceed 6 pills in 24 hours”. or whatever.
its important to tell people what to expect in terms of pain because way more pain than anticipated could mean there is a problem. some procedures are expected to cause a lot pain while for others it would be a big red flag warning sign. also discussing the anticipated discomforts is part of obtaining informed consent. including anticipated side effects of medications. i am guessing if you were prescribed a strong opioid and had taken the whole bottle quickly like you understood you’d have had other problems like constipation.
True!
Sorry, just to be clear I meant the cause of drug abuse is primarily systemic (as in: conditions of late stage capitalism drive people to abuse drugs to cope). Drug use isn’t necessarily harmful.
thanks; clarified.
to elaborate on that. it isn’t just “systemic” because of the miseries of capitalism broadly. it’s also enforced in the particulars of anti-drug policies. the rules and enforcement advocated by anti-drug people have the effect of incentivizing stronger, more concentrated versions and those which evade detection.
In a world where racist anti-drug hysteria never became the primary directing force in the drug trade, everyone would probably still be smoking opium out of hookas. you can also use the more popularly-understood story of alcohol prohibition leading to increased availability of strong liquors.
if we are talking to/about doctors, there is also the role of deprescribing in many recent fent deaths. the combination of crimilization and deprescribing leads directly to the situation and doctors as a group have been complicit or active in this. even though they might have thought they were doing a good thing at the time. they should have some courage and admit they were wrong just like when they thought the nazi drug thalidomide would be helpful.
Which is funny because i suspect the cocaine use rate by med school students is like 100%
I think Drs retreat in to calvinist “you’re having trouble bc god hates you” bullshit bc their prestige in our culture is based on the idea that they have vast esoteric knowledge and understand everything. So a lot of them, when confronted with a systemic problem that doesn’t have an insurance billing code, retreat in to blaming individuals bc they have no other control over the situation and their job is to have control. Like how as a profession they have an unscientific, counter-productive, dangerous and harmful fixation on body fat percentage that often blinds individual doctors to any other diagnosis or explanation, or how many of them persist in refusing to understand pain, whether it’s chronic pain or period pain, despite having been full and enthusiastic co-conspirators in the opiod crisis/grand evil profiteering scheme for decades.
“Drug seeker!” Like their profession wasn’t handing out ounces of pharma grade morphine to everyopne for decades.