Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Georgia’s 2018 Ballot Questions and Why We Need Ballot Initiatives

Politics, Politics2, Uncategorized

I voted Yes on 1, No on 2, Yes on 3, No on 4 and No on 5. 

I reiterate my gripe that so many states have the chance of improving their state for the better through citizen ballot initiatives, while we don’t. 

We’re out here in GA trying to get a blue wave flowing to the polls, and progressives are fighting to elect a firewall against the specter of a triumphant federal fascist apocalypse, while conservative states with tepid blue ponds like MO and AR are about to raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid and restore voting rights to ex-cons against their conservative legislatures’ and governors’ wishes. 

Think about it: Conservative voters are voting for progressive-minted ballot initiatives AND conservative legislators/governors/congresscritters.

That’s been a joke to me for the last four years. But maybe it shouldn’t be, because during T3 training through the ASDC last year, I remember a former Democratic governor who spoke on the conference call talking about how voters don’t vote for candidates for their stances on issues, but do so based on their values. 

So maybe voters are voting on their values with the candidates, but they’re voting on their issues with the ballot questions.

Red Falcons and the (Y)DSA

Politics, Politics2, Uncategorized, ,

I wonder if anyone from the DSA or YDSA has thought about re-establishing the Red Falcons of America. It was a scout-like organization established in the 1930s by the Socialist Party of America as a member of the German-founded International Falcon Movement, and was expressly purposed to be a non-sectarian, social justice-oriented alternative to both “militaristic” Boy Scouts and “fatalistic” Sunday schools.

This was intended to fill the age gap between the Socialist Sunday schools movement (up to 10yo) and the Young People’s Socialist League (from 14yo up), and to engage children between 8 and 15 years old with athletics, songs, campfires, games, art and study.

Of course, the Red Falcons likely died out between the 1930s and 1940s and the , while the International Falcon Movement’s other member scout-like organizations have expanded their curriculum to include renewable energy and environmental consciousness. Today, the premiere socialist organization in the United States is the DSA, the premiere socialist youth activism organization is YDSA, but what is the premiere socialist youth volunteerism/education organization?

The closest progressive-oriented scout-like organization I’ve encountered is Navigators USA, which was established as an all-gender, secular alternative to BSA which the Unitarian Universalist Association would be okay with recommending (yes, it still exists). But a socialist equivalent to Navigators USA would, IMO, teach what Navigators USA is teaching plus what (Y)DSA is teaching.

Sen. Cory Booker fires up Iowa Democrats: ‘It is a time to get up, to rise up, to speak up’

Uncategorized, Videos

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker repeatedly brought more than 1,100 Iowa Democrats to their feet Saturday night with a rousing call to get their party and country back on track.

Read more coverage on DesMoinesRegister.com:
– From the Associated Press: Democrat Booker, fresh from Kavanaugh vote, makes Iowa debut (https://dmreg.co/2QCqTcb)
– From the Register’s Tony Leys: Sen. Cory Booker fires up Iowa Democrats: ‘It is a time to get up, to rise up, to speak up’ (https://dmreg.co/2Pirakb)

🎥: Rodney White (on Twitter at @rodneywhite and Instagram at @rodneyawhite)

via YouTube

Open Primaries

Politics, Politics2, Uncategorized

My hot take: Open primaries, contrary to the advocates of independent participation in party primaries, have not helped the Democratic Party in Southern state legislatures at all. Most of the open primary states are states which have been deep red since the 2000s. 

If anything, I’d argue that open primaries help conservative voters more than progressive voters. I wonder if open primaries accommodate voters who own their own homes more than they help those who live in rentals, which should be the opposite of the open primary’s proponents’ arguments that it accommodates more working people than do closed primaries or caucuses.

I see this while canvassing in this state. VoteBuilder is often inaccurate in pinpointing strong or likely Democrats. I’ve been kindly turned away sometimes by Trump supporters who haven’t voted Democrat since the 1970s. But not knowing who is a Democrat outside of voter rolls provided to the DPG by the SOS office is frustrating, as I’m trying not to talk to Trump voters who don’t give a shit about what I stand for anyway. 

But this is because Georgia is an open primary state with nonpartisan voter registration. In other words, an existentially-shitty state to be a Democrat, and a great state for the “nonpartisan”, “independent”, “unaffiliated” fraud who votes Republican all day, everyday.

How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus | Kurt Andersen

Uncategorized, Videos

Americans are inherently a little crazy. But now the crazy is being enabled by politicians in the White House and by the internet. How exactly did it get so bad?

Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2xrf4v9

Follow Big Think here:
YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5
Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink

Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue. We were started by the Puritans in New England who wanted to create and did create a Christian utopia and theocracy as they waited for the eminent second coming of Christ and the end of days. And in the south by a bunch of people who were convinced, absolutely convinced that this place they’d never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia and they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced the facts and the evidence and decided that they weren’t going to get rich overnight there. So that was the beginning. And then we’ve had centuries of buyer-beware charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical quackery to an extreme degree and increasingly exotic extravagant implausible religions over and over again from Mormonism to Christian Science to Scientology in the last century.

And we’ve had this antiestablishment “I’m not going to trust the experts, I’m not going to trust the elite” from our character from the beginning. Now all those things came together and were super-charged in the 1960s when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. Then a generation later when the Internet came along, giving each of those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure. We had entertainment, again for the last couple hundred years, but especially in the last 50 years permeating all the rest of life, including Presidential politics from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Ragan to Bill Clinton. So the thing was set up for Donald Trump to exploit all these various American threads and astonishingly become president, but then you look at this history and it’s like no we should have seen this coming.

The idea of America from the beginning was that you could come here, reinvent yourself, be anybody you want, live any way you wanted, believe any thing you wanted. For the first few hundred years, like everywhere else in the world, celebrity and fame were a result of some kind of accomplishment or achievement, sometimes not a great accomplishment or achievement, but you did something in the world to earn renown. America really was the key place that invented the modern celebrity culture, which was, beginning a century ago, more and more not necessarily about having won a war or led a people or written a great book or painted a great painting, but about being famous, fame for its own sake. We created that, we created Hollywood, we created the whole culture industry and that then became what I call the fantasy industrial complex where, certainly in the last few decades more than ever more than anybody thought possible before, fame itself, however you’ve got it, was a primary goal for people. And again, as so many of the things I talk about in Fantasyland, not uniquely to America but more here than anywhere. And then you get reality television, which was this unholy hybrid of the fictional and the real for the last now generation where that blur between what’s real and what’s not is pumped into our media stream willy-nilly. There are now more reality shows on television than there were shows on television 20 years ago. And that’s another way for nobodies to become famous overnight. YouTube, another way for nobodies to become a famous overnight for doing almost nothing or nothing.

via YouTube