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silveradeptYour political race likely has white supremacists trying to stoke fear and racial hatred in it. And not in obvious ways, either - they might be opposing amendments to restore voting rights to felons that have served their sentences, or engaging in massive, yet strangely targeted voter suppression or only rejecting applications to vote from places that might have a lot of people ideologically opposed to themselves.
Even in places that are so ideologically transformed that it's nearly mathematically impossible to win, and with no support from the national organizations, there are still people running for office. With platforms that give control of pegnancies to women and supporting sensible restrictions on firearm ownership. In Texas. Which is the sort fo place that would definitely benefit from a service where a pregnany woman can get medication to abort through the mail, which is a spin-off of a wider service that has been working well and without major complications everywhere else in the world for a significant time now.
Terrorists are succeeding at murdering the people around you because they believe the country shouldn't have anything other than white men like themselves. And they're armed with guns and other weapons.
Terrorists are sending bombs and explosives to partisan opponents of the Current Administrator, inflamed by the rhetoric of that same Administrator. He'll deny that he had anything to do with it, of course, because there's no "direct" linkage between his words and the actions of someone else. Even when those actions keep happening because of those words and the accompanying belief that the Current Administrator is on the side of the terrorists.
The Hidden Tribes Report suggests the United States divides itself into seven segments, many of which do not follow the traditional left/right divide, and then goes from there to make suggestions about how to achieve unity, or at least majority, in governance. I suggest a closer reading of the report and how it's constructed, as many of the agree/disagree statements about whether hate speech or political correctness are a problem chose not to give any definitions of terms, and so there are likely conflations or conflicting ideas that are being elided in the name of trying to fit their intended narrative. Or the classification of the progressive activists as "angry" and the two conservative groups as "patriotic," for example. Or that the group they brand as "politically disengaged" could equally be branded as "Trying to Survive", based on the demographics that suggest they don't have the privilege or means to get politically engaged, because they're far too worried about the next meal or paycheck. And it's probably worth noting that the two most conservative segments are both the ones that see themselves in media and the ones that are the most well-off financially.
An active media, along with volunteer groups and interested parties involved in crushing fake news, misinformation, and scare tactics helped Ireland have a better debate about their abortion referendum than either the United States or the United Kingdom had about their own elections or referenda.
The suggestion that blaming a loss of manufacturing jobs solely on automation isn't taking into account other complexifying factors, like the changes in international trade memberships.
Individuals can do some small actions to fight climate change, but if you want real movement, it will require the real climate actors to change, and that will take pressure from the public. To exert pressure, though, the public has to avoid falling into feeling like they can't make change, which to some degree, as Rebecca Solnit puts in the article, requires recognizing the achievements that have already happened and to see how far things have come already.
Solnit strikes again in pointing out the world is changing, albeit rather slowly, toward an idea that powerful men do not have a monopoly on what is true anymore, and that this has them terrified and reactionary to the further degradation of that position. The result, as we saw in the shameful appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, is a fundamental desire to not know and to insist that those who do have no powwer, value, importance, or standing to insist on reality if white men say it's not real (also Solnit.) Which points to another reality that they want to acknowledge without fully acknowledging what it means: they're enjoying the cruelty and the feeling that comes from being able to hurt someone, then deny their reality and get away with it. And they're not alone. There's a spirit of evil that they have joined up with, and that spirit says that it's not cruel and evil if you do it to those who don't matter, or that if you do enough good in your life that you can convince yourself you haven't joined an evil zeigeist. Because people who do terrible things and realize it generally stop doing those things. To persist, you have to believe it's not evil. But it is.
Yet another way to make the incarcerated give up money - electronic readers with a limited and censored collection of books at exorbitant prices, rather than, say, a stocked prison library where books are available for free.
Last out, word analysis of Politifact content suggests there's no bias in the coverage that Politifact does of Democrats and Republicans, although I can see plenty of people raising an eyebrow at the close associations of the words Republicans and false and also of Democrats and true, but that might just be a function of the Democrats staying more in the reality-based community.
(It's a short post. And, as I'm sure most of you reading have discerned, there's a lot here that comes from the people on my reading list. You could, if you wanted, subscribe to them and get your content faster.)
Even in places that are so ideologically transformed that it's nearly mathematically impossible to win, and with no support from the national organizations, there are still people running for office. With platforms that give control of pegnancies to women and supporting sensible restrictions on firearm ownership. In Texas. Which is the sort fo place that would definitely benefit from a service where a pregnany woman can get medication to abort through the mail, which is a spin-off of a wider service that has been working well and without major complications everywhere else in the world for a significant time now.
Terrorists are succeeding at murdering the people around you because they believe the country shouldn't have anything other than white men like themselves. And they're armed with guns and other weapons.
Terrorists are sending bombs and explosives to partisan opponents of the Current Administrator, inflamed by the rhetoric of that same Administrator. He'll deny that he had anything to do with it, of course, because there's no "direct" linkage between his words and the actions of someone else. Even when those actions keep happening because of those words and the accompanying belief that the Current Administrator is on the side of the terrorists.
The Hidden Tribes Report suggests the United States divides itself into seven segments, many of which do not follow the traditional left/right divide, and then goes from there to make suggestions about how to achieve unity, or at least majority, in governance. I suggest a closer reading of the report and how it's constructed, as many of the agree/disagree statements about whether hate speech or political correctness are a problem chose not to give any definitions of terms, and so there are likely conflations or conflicting ideas that are being elided in the name of trying to fit their intended narrative. Or the classification of the progressive activists as "angry" and the two conservative groups as "patriotic," for example. Or that the group they brand as "politically disengaged" could equally be branded as "Trying to Survive", based on the demographics that suggest they don't have the privilege or means to get politically engaged, because they're far too worried about the next meal or paycheck. And it's probably worth noting that the two most conservative segments are both the ones that see themselves in media and the ones that are the most well-off financially.
An active media, along with volunteer groups and interested parties involved in crushing fake news, misinformation, and scare tactics helped Ireland have a better debate about their abortion referendum than either the United States or the United Kingdom had about their own elections or referenda.
The suggestion that blaming a loss of manufacturing jobs solely on automation isn't taking into account other complexifying factors, like the changes in international trade memberships.
Individuals can do some small actions to fight climate change, but if you want real movement, it will require the real climate actors to change, and that will take pressure from the public. To exert pressure, though, the public has to avoid falling into feeling like they can't make change, which to some degree, as Rebecca Solnit puts in the article, requires recognizing the achievements that have already happened and to see how far things have come already.
Solnit strikes again in pointing out the world is changing, albeit rather slowly, toward an idea that powerful men do not have a monopoly on what is true anymore, and that this has them terrified and reactionary to the further degradation of that position. The result, as we saw in the shameful appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, is a fundamental desire to not know and to insist that those who do have no powwer, value, importance, or standing to insist on reality if white men say it's not real (also Solnit.) Which points to another reality that they want to acknowledge without fully acknowledging what it means: they're enjoying the cruelty and the feeling that comes from being able to hurt someone, then deny their reality and get away with it. And they're not alone. There's a spirit of evil that they have joined up with, and that spirit says that it's not cruel and evil if you do it to those who don't matter, or that if you do enough good in your life that you can convince yourself you haven't joined an evil zeigeist. Because people who do terrible things and realize it generally stop doing those things. To persist, you have to believe it's not evil. But it is.
Yet another way to make the incarcerated give up money - electronic readers with a limited and censored collection of books at exorbitant prices, rather than, say, a stocked prison library where books are available for free.
Last out, word analysis of Politifact content suggests there's no bias in the coverage that Politifact does of Democrats and Republicans, although I can see plenty of people raising an eyebrow at the close associations of the words Republicans and false and also of Democrats and true, but that might just be a function of the Democrats staying more in the reality-based community.
(It's a short post. And, as I'm sure most of you reading have discerned, there's a lot here that comes from the people on my reading list. You could, if you wanted, subscribe to them and get your content faster.)
no subject
Date: 2018-11-01 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-01 05:13 pm (UTC)Then, if you're young and a woman or a minority, you have to deal with structural voter suppression, states that tell you the wrong place or time to vote, that holds your registration for flimsy excuses, that closer down any polling place or time that looks like it might be convenient to you, that set "poll Watchers" to try and intimidate you out of voting, and so on.
They're not absent because of a lack of civic fervor, but because there's not always something there they care about enough to try and overcome all the barriers put in place to stop them from registering and successfully casting ballots, as well as the heavily gerrymandered districts designed to prevent them from having any actual influence.
It's way easier to vote as a middle-aged white dude than as anybody else.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-01 05:22 pm (UTC)It's way easier to vote as a middle-aged white dude than as anybody else.
I can agree with most of that, especially with representation. I don't feel represented by either party, thus I'm registered as independent but tend to vote more for democratic candidates. I fully realize that white male is normally the easy mode of life, though the config file of my game apparently has been corrupted as it certainly hasn't been easy for me for the last decade or so. But it certainly could be worse.
Regardless of feeling that you're not being represented in a two-party system, which I fully appreciate, I think there is clearly a worse party that can be voted against. And while that is far from ideal, it's something.
(email reply squashes formatting worse than I thought!)
no subject
Date: 2018-11-01 06:38 pm (UTC)I wonder whether it would be more effective if voting were encouraged in the same idea as "As you pray, move your feet." Yes, vote, but don't expect voting to be your single solution. Then it might get more young people in by making a vote part of a solution that also involves activism and direct work and the other things younger people are often engaged in.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-01 07:15 pm (UTC)