Ricardo Dominguez grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada where he first began to sense his political consciousness. After being kicked out of school in Florida he began working in a lesbian bookstore where he learned of cocaine parties attended by people who thought like him. After the crisis of AIDS and many of friends began to get sick he became part of the group ACT UP bringing to the foreground the politics and answering the question is their a cure? After hearing of “The Thing”, Dominguez moved to New York where he survived by selling books he was stealing. After hearing about the Zapatistas in 1994, he joined group that believed in what the Zapatistas were doing and wanted to help them. He would use his techniques of electronic disturbance as forms of nonviolent activism to aid in spreading the word of the Zapatistas and speak out against corporations.
For one I enjoyed the way this reading flowed as a story of a mans journey in pursuit of critical theories and political justice that I could easily envision. Ricardo Dominguez’s idea of electronic disobedience opened my mind to ideas of activism I would not have previously stumbled on. The ideas of phone zapping and fax jamming can be adapted into something on a larger scale today via the internet in order to cause servers to go down as a way to get a message across. What also fascinated me was the mention of the Zapatista “air force” attacking the army, and by this they mean when the Zapatista women took multicolored paper with messages, folded them into planes and threw them over the barricades.
“The history of police reform teaches us that making the police more legitimate means making them more powerful. And that power will bring no justice-and no peace”
Carmona looks at the history of police reform and how it has aided in police brutality over the years. The police are meant to protect the law however for those without a voice the police have made it apparent they ARE the law. For many minorities the police have been the deciding factor of whether they may live or not, and for many the police have taken it into their own hands to decide the latter. Increasing the legitimacy of the police and handing over more power to them will surely lead to more civil unrest and mistreatment of power as history has shown time and time again.
