Amnesty Politics.
Jan. 26th, 2018 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThese are excludable - block out the tag "political links" and you will not have to see them.
Good morning. Let's begin with a beautiful example of a biased survey, courtesy of the Republican Party.
Remember that people are being detained for peaceful protests in public. Even as they design even better ways to get their point across.
The United Kingdom is considering making it easier to legally change gender.
Elsewhere, before they passed the tax bill that gutted the Affordable Care Act and gave a giant tax break to the very richest, the one that had handwritten edits being put in the bill text a very short time before it was voted on, at least one supporter of the Republican Party sue the government for not having delivered on that promise fast enough. Even as Senators who understand the need for good health care asked the Republicans not to screw with things.
It makes Senator McCain's speech to the Senate about returning to regular deliberative order ring extremely hollow. But, then again, any week in the current administration achieves six impossible things before breakfast. And focuses on the things that appear less important while not appearing to give a fig about impending disasters. Disasters that resemble ones that have hit the area before, and that doesn't have a regulatory infrastructure that would keep the truly dangerous things away from the populated areas. And it's not like there isn't a historical record of what can go wrong if things start blowing up and there becomes a need for a lot of trained specialists to help people with newly-obtained disabilities.
Even though they had prisoners escape, the UK's response to a hurricane in Carribean territories far outstrips the United States' similar response. (And that's without the Pizza Hut managers threatening disciplinary actio for mainland people choosing to evacuate in front of the hurricane.
Staffing problems have plagued the Current Administration. Mr. Bannon has been gone from the White House for a while, although whether that means his influence has gone up or down is still unclear, given that the belief system that brought him into power still seems to have sway. An entire committee resigned themselves over a woefully inadequate response to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Here's the full text as an image and the text in actual text form.) The Governor of Massachusetts denounced the attack and the Administrator's response, while members of the state took stronger stands than the Administrator, physically stopping a person who vandalized a Holocaust memorial. If people want to donate to relief or combative efforts against the anti-Semitic forms of White Supremacy, making donations in multiples of $18 has numerological significance, in the same way that many of the sybols of that supremacy use their own numerologies.
Said rally had all sorts of far-right militiamen with weapons, and followed on from a rally on a campus where plenty were displaying white supremacist salutes. One of the counter-protesters was killed when a car deliberately drove into a group of them. And yet, the administration seemed to please the base by not actually condemning anything.
Have a list of racists and other people for whom the AP discourages the use of the words "alt-right" to describe, because "alt-right" is a euphemism that hides horrible people doing horrible things. Instead, draw inspiration and courage from those around you, including in your fandoms, to fight awful people. Like throwing down monuments to racism in the public space (most of them aren't particularly sturdy anyway) or transforming them into objects of ridicule.
Or have your elected officials remove the statues themselves and explain why they have to go (video, a transcript of the remarks is also available.)
Prominent white supremacist sites find themselves being banned from the places and services much of the rest of the Internet has, but that won't stop them from promoting whatever message they think will give them leigitmacy. Including thorooughly debunked ones about Irish slavery.
There's plenty of racism to go around in this administration, and that's before the DACA program got destroyed.
Much of the outrageous material is a screen to hide the real damage being done by the erosion of trust and the acceptance of positions that should be antithetical. The real damage comes from deliberately gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by putting a proven incompetent in charge.
Attempting to ban transgender servicemembers brought lawsuits the first time it was tried. The Administration continued to make that their directive. A court order told them they could not discriminate in such a way, and the Administration chose not to appeal the court order.
Might be worth looking at this statement by various evangelical figures saying that it's sinful to be L, G, or T and see if someone you respect or follow is on that list. Otherwise, it's very much a group of people entirely convinced they have the single true interpretation of the Writings, and there's actually plenty in the Writings about that idea. And other interpretations, as when a bisexual Eastern Orthodox worshiper talks about love for the Being Represented By The Tetrgrammaton as eros, instead of another kind of love.
Remember those that have fallen in their quest for equity and equality.
Seemingly simple things men can do to support women, beyond y'know, not sexually harassing them. Sometimes things you say to preschoolers work equally well for supposed grownups.
A town in Texas tried to create itself as the libertarian paradise. It has not managed to create its desired result. Or a result that has any sort of functional government. Other people are so wealthy that people are complaining that the rich are throwing too much money at sub-par material. The right complaint is how much ground was lost by people who wanted to ahve a house when the market crashed -- even now, there are plenty of nonwhite families who are jsut getting back to in the neighborhood of what they were doing ten years ago.
New York City school students will get lunch. Every day they're in school. For free.
A man used an armory and a high-rise hotel room to fire bullets into a crowd of concergoers, killing 58 people and wounding plenty more. One might think this would help spur on reasonable legislation to curtail the purchase and use of weapons that could cause mass fatalities, but this is a Republican administration, and therefore, no, nothing will be done.
In fact, they're quite good at destroying the sources of data that we use (or could use) to make definitive conclusions about how wrong they are.
The Current Administration seeemed like a lame duck before they even got started.
The ACLU of West Virginia had a field day with an amicus in relation to someone trying to sue a humorist for saying something not nice about coal on a program.
Giving someone the power to destroy the world without a check on that decision seems much less like a good idea in the Current Administration, even though it was still a horrible idea in the first place.
The Current Administrator granted pardon to a racist Sheriff who was brought up on charges of ignoring a federal court order.
The Republicans ran a candidate in Alabama who believes that many of the additional amendments to the Constitution have created problems. The election had accusations of voter suppression of minorities leveled against it. Roy Moore had several allegations leveled against him over sexual assault while he was a prosecutor, in addition to the litany of other things that should have made him unelectable in a secular democracy. And even then, he still almost won.
Mr. Silver said very early on that the base of support for the Current Administrator was small and shrinking. I don't think Mr. Silver understood at the time that the Administrator doesn't need much of a base of support, so losing most of it isn't going to get in the way much. Which is not to say that the Administration won't try to dispute the idea, just that if they lose most of the people, that's fine, so long as they don't lose the wealthy. And they don't have to work that hard to keep the wealthy with the increasingly bifurcatred nature of life between the rich and the rest.
Nonviolence requires the commitment to showing up and having violence done to you, or a willingness to accept that you are asking others to commit violence on your behalf for your safety. Protesting anything requires thought and planning.
Unsurprisingly, those algorithms that are getting good at bubbling us are being used to do that for political purposes as well.
How nice it would be if we could find ways of making our invisible systems more visible, so that we might appreciate more the things that tax monies pay for. Like making sure the Internet was a place where all traffic was equal.
Mockery for the Current Administrator on a Hawaiian trip, referencing his position that the previous President was born in Kenya despite his documentation proving he was born in Hawai'i.
The Cards Against Humanity people bought some land adjacent to the border with Mexico so they could make it as difficult as possible for the Current Administrator to build the promised wall.
The reason people don't talk about black on black crime is the same reason they don't talk about white on white crime - there's already plenty talking going on.
Hillary Clinton refuses to just go away, and her persistence is a good thing. Because women who are "failures" always get told to go away, while men who are failures get told to keep trying and get some spin. We could fix that - treat every professional encounter with a woman as one might treat an encounter with Dwayne Johnson, and there could be a lot more respect involved. Stop being those guys that women are afraid of, because you believe, deep down, that you're entitled to women. Yes, even the ones who proclaim they're the nice ones. More often than not, they're a missing stair that everyone knows about but nobody has confronted or held accountable. Because there's a lot of educating that happens to women that men may never see, that is intended to give them the very best chance at surviving men.
It often isn't enough, because there are more than enough men with seniority or power that others are willing to make excuses for them. What we need are men willing to tell other men their behavior is awful.
And that could easily start at the top, except that the Current Administrator has absolutely no interest in behaving like a human being with the slightest bit of regard for others who aren't like him.
Playing the devil's advocate on matters of race is counterproductive and demeaning to the person of color that is nearly always the target of such a thing.
Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may be changing the nutritional content of our food, making it less nutrient-filled as plants rush to do something with the elevated carbon dioxide. Human health and longevity more than make up for money spent on subsidizing renewable health sources.
Remember when the FCC ignored a giant public backlash and rescinded net neutrality rules? Yeah - a significant number of the comments on that proposal used false identities to make a position seem stronger than it was.
The CDC was told specifically that it could not use words like "fetus", "transgender", or "diversity" in any of its work by the Current Administrator, presumably at the behest of the people baying about their fidelity to Writings that do not take a particularly good view of them.
Last for tonight, making the argument that California should be an independent country. (After all, they have a state dinosaur.) And one unit of big hope - all the victories that came in special, local, and statewide elections that suggest perhaps there are enough people getting motivated to vote, at least for now.
a request to make sure there will be action and protest immediately across the nation should the special counsel be fired before his investigation is complete. Because no one person, not even the President, should be above the law's requirements.
And The 65, who provide a weekly call to action for Congresscritters and 5calls, which ask you to make five calls to Congresscritters and other elected officials. Perhaps queue up some feminist protest music while you do so.
And also, of course, take everything you read with the necessary salt to not react strongly to untrue stories. And understand that change often happens when you're busy with something else. Or when it's no longer possible to look your party in the eye and believe they're doing the best thing for the country. There are guides on how to help do the actual work.
Remember to take a break and recharge yourself, even if that means putting reality on hold for a moment or a chapter. Because the people who take a good look at the Writings realize where favor rests.
Good morning. Let's begin with a beautiful example of a biased survey, courtesy of the Republican Party.
Remember that people are being detained for peaceful protests in public. Even as they design even better ways to get their point across.
The United Kingdom is considering making it easier to legally change gender.
Elsewhere, before they passed the tax bill that gutted the Affordable Care Act and gave a giant tax break to the very richest, the one that had handwritten edits being put in the bill text a very short time before it was voted on, at least one supporter of the Republican Party sue the government for not having delivered on that promise fast enough. Even as Senators who understand the need for good health care asked the Republicans not to screw with things.
It makes Senator McCain's speech to the Senate about returning to regular deliberative order ring extremely hollow. But, then again, any week in the current administration achieves six impossible things before breakfast. And focuses on the things that appear less important while not appearing to give a fig about impending disasters. Disasters that resemble ones that have hit the area before, and that doesn't have a regulatory infrastructure that would keep the truly dangerous things away from the populated areas. And it's not like there isn't a historical record of what can go wrong if things start blowing up and there becomes a need for a lot of trained specialists to help people with newly-obtained disabilities.
Even though they had prisoners escape, the UK's response to a hurricane in Carribean territories far outstrips the United States' similar response. (And that's without the Pizza Hut managers threatening disciplinary actio for mainland people choosing to evacuate in front of the hurricane.
Staffing problems have plagued the Current Administration. Mr. Bannon has been gone from the White House for a while, although whether that means his influence has gone up or down is still unclear, given that the belief system that brought him into power still seems to have sway. An entire committee resigned themselves over a woefully inadequate response to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Here's the full text as an image and the text in actual text form.) The Governor of Massachusetts denounced the attack and the Administrator's response, while members of the state took stronger stands than the Administrator, physically stopping a person who vandalized a Holocaust memorial. If people want to donate to relief or combative efforts against the anti-Semitic forms of White Supremacy, making donations in multiples of $18 has numerological significance, in the same way that many of the sybols of that supremacy use their own numerologies.
Said rally had all sorts of far-right militiamen with weapons, and followed on from a rally on a campus where plenty were displaying white supremacist salutes. One of the counter-protesters was killed when a car deliberately drove into a group of them. And yet, the administration seemed to please the base by not actually condemning anything.
Have a list of racists and other people for whom the AP discourages the use of the words "alt-right" to describe, because "alt-right" is a euphemism that hides horrible people doing horrible things. Instead, draw inspiration and courage from those around you, including in your fandoms, to fight awful people. Like throwing down monuments to racism in the public space (most of them aren't particularly sturdy anyway) or transforming them into objects of ridicule.
Or have your elected officials remove the statues themselves and explain why they have to go (video, a transcript of the remarks is also available.)
Prominent white supremacist sites find themselves being banned from the places and services much of the rest of the Internet has, but that won't stop them from promoting whatever message they think will give them leigitmacy. Including thorooughly debunked ones about Irish slavery.
There's plenty of racism to go around in this administration, and that's before the DACA program got destroyed.
Much of the outrageous material is a screen to hide the real damage being done by the erosion of trust and the acceptance of positions that should be antithetical. The real damage comes from deliberately gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by putting a proven incompetent in charge.
Attempting to ban transgender servicemembers brought lawsuits the first time it was tried. The Administration continued to make that their directive. A court order told them they could not discriminate in such a way, and the Administration chose not to appeal the court order.
Might be worth looking at this statement by various evangelical figures saying that it's sinful to be L, G, or T and see if someone you respect or follow is on that list. Otherwise, it's very much a group of people entirely convinced they have the single true interpretation of the Writings, and there's actually plenty in the Writings about that idea. And other interpretations, as when a bisexual Eastern Orthodox worshiper talks about love for the Being Represented By The Tetrgrammaton as eros, instead of another kind of love.
Remember those that have fallen in their quest for equity and equality.
Seemingly simple things men can do to support women, beyond y'know, not sexually harassing them. Sometimes things you say to preschoolers work equally well for supposed grownups.
A town in Texas tried to create itself as the libertarian paradise. It has not managed to create its desired result. Or a result that has any sort of functional government. Other people are so wealthy that people are complaining that the rich are throwing too much money at sub-par material. The right complaint is how much ground was lost by people who wanted to ahve a house when the market crashed -- even now, there are plenty of nonwhite families who are jsut getting back to in the neighborhood of what they were doing ten years ago.
New York City school students will get lunch. Every day they're in school. For free.
A man used an armory and a high-rise hotel room to fire bullets into a crowd of concergoers, killing 58 people and wounding plenty more. One might think this would help spur on reasonable legislation to curtail the purchase and use of weapons that could cause mass fatalities, but this is a Republican administration, and therefore, no, nothing will be done.
In fact, they're quite good at destroying the sources of data that we use (or could use) to make definitive conclusions about how wrong they are.
The Current Administration seeemed like a lame duck before they even got started.
The ACLU of West Virginia had a field day with an amicus in relation to someone trying to sue a humorist for saying something not nice about coal on a program.
Giving someone the power to destroy the world without a check on that decision seems much less like a good idea in the Current Administration, even though it was still a horrible idea in the first place.
The Current Administrator granted pardon to a racist Sheriff who was brought up on charges of ignoring a federal court order.
The Republicans ran a candidate in Alabama who believes that many of the additional amendments to the Constitution have created problems. The election had accusations of voter suppression of minorities leveled against it. Roy Moore had several allegations leveled against him over sexual assault while he was a prosecutor, in addition to the litany of other things that should have made him unelectable in a secular democracy. And even then, he still almost won.
Mr. Silver said very early on that the base of support for the Current Administrator was small and shrinking. I don't think Mr. Silver understood at the time that the Administrator doesn't need much of a base of support, so losing most of it isn't going to get in the way much. Which is not to say that the Administration won't try to dispute the idea, just that if they lose most of the people, that's fine, so long as they don't lose the wealthy. And they don't have to work that hard to keep the wealthy with the increasingly bifurcatred nature of life between the rich and the rest.
Nonviolence requires the commitment to showing up and having violence done to you, or a willingness to accept that you are asking others to commit violence on your behalf for your safety. Protesting anything requires thought and planning.
Unsurprisingly, those algorithms that are getting good at bubbling us are being used to do that for political purposes as well.
How nice it would be if we could find ways of making our invisible systems more visible, so that we might appreciate more the things that tax monies pay for. Like making sure the Internet was a place where all traffic was equal.
Mockery for the Current Administrator on a Hawaiian trip, referencing his position that the previous President was born in Kenya despite his documentation proving he was born in Hawai'i.
The Cards Against Humanity people bought some land adjacent to the border with Mexico so they could make it as difficult as possible for the Current Administrator to build the promised wall.
The reason people don't talk about black on black crime is the same reason they don't talk about white on white crime - there's already plenty talking going on.
Hillary Clinton refuses to just go away, and her persistence is a good thing. Because women who are "failures" always get told to go away, while men who are failures get told to keep trying and get some spin. We could fix that - treat every professional encounter with a woman as one might treat an encounter with Dwayne Johnson, and there could be a lot more respect involved. Stop being those guys that women are afraid of, because you believe, deep down, that you're entitled to women. Yes, even the ones who proclaim they're the nice ones. More often than not, they're a missing stair that everyone knows about but nobody has confronted or held accountable. Because there's a lot of educating that happens to women that men may never see, that is intended to give them the very best chance at surviving men.
It often isn't enough, because there are more than enough men with seniority or power that others are willing to make excuses for them. What we need are men willing to tell other men their behavior is awful.
And that could easily start at the top, except that the Current Administrator has absolutely no interest in behaving like a human being with the slightest bit of regard for others who aren't like him.
Playing the devil's advocate on matters of race is counterproductive and demeaning to the person of color that is nearly always the target of such a thing.
Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may be changing the nutritional content of our food, making it less nutrient-filled as plants rush to do something with the elevated carbon dioxide. Human health and longevity more than make up for money spent on subsidizing renewable health sources.
Remember when the FCC ignored a giant public backlash and rescinded net neutrality rules? Yeah - a significant number of the comments on that proposal used false identities to make a position seem stronger than it was.
The CDC was told specifically that it could not use words like "fetus", "transgender", or "diversity" in any of its work by the Current Administrator, presumably at the behest of the people baying about their fidelity to Writings that do not take a particularly good view of them.
Last for tonight, making the argument that California should be an independent country. (After all, they have a state dinosaur.) And one unit of big hope - all the victories that came in special, local, and statewide elections that suggest perhaps there are enough people getting motivated to vote, at least for now.
a request to make sure there will be action and protest immediately across the nation should the special counsel be fired before his investigation is complete. Because no one person, not even the President, should be above the law's requirements.
And The 65, who provide a weekly call to action for Congresscritters and 5calls, which ask you to make five calls to Congresscritters and other elected officials. Perhaps queue up some feminist protest music while you do so.
And also, of course, take everything you read with the necessary salt to not react strongly to untrue stories. And understand that change often happens when you're busy with something else. Or when it's no longer possible to look your party in the eye and believe they're doing the best thing for the country. There are guides on how to help do the actual work.
Remember to take a break and recharge yourself, even if that means putting reality on hold for a moment or a chapter. Because the people who take a good look at the Writings realize where favor rests.
