Redefine “taxpayer”.
Plutocrats have set taxpayer against taxpayer, taxpayer against beneficiary, taxpayer against public sector worker, taxpayer against climate and environment, taxpayer against government.
I wonder when the taxpayer will be turned against the military and police, just to complete the full number of demographics and institutions the “hard-working taxpayer” hates their “hard-earned money” going to, just so that we’ll get on with Civil War II.
I’m watching #Twilight for the first time. This movie is awkward!
My takeaway:
*Breathe…..*
Everyone was jumping out to help her! Everyone was a robot! Exposition overload! Edward had a hard time with words! Carlisle is a mannequin! Jasper is Justin Timberlake circa 1999! Waylon was a weird uncle dude! James barely had any eyebrows! Werewolf dude’s father spoke only in cliches and dad jokes! I don’t know if I want someone to look at me like Edward was looking at Bella in chemistry because his head was shifting wayyyyyyyyyy too much!
*Breathe*
Thought:
As non-electoral movements, Occupy and Indivisible may be years apart in age, but I think they compliment each other.
Occupy was (and in some areas, still is) the urban tent revival which sought revival in the face of persistent economic inequality. Indivisible is the direct district-by-district action against politicians (mostly at the federal level) who seek to further multiple inequalities.
Occupy was limited by being an urban movement which centered their actions in urban spaces and needs, but it also pushed mightily for income inequality to be considered a massive political crisis. Indivisible is still unfolding as a political force, but it is centered around influencing legislators and their often rural-spread districts.
Indivisible may go to places where Occupy largely could not.
Mitch Landrieu’s speech is the sort of conversation that more Southern White working class men need to have with each other, especially if they’re descendants of Confederate soldiers.
They need to question who this war benefitted, because it wasn’t their farmer ancestors who gained anything beyond death, destruction and deprivation. What class did the framers of the Confederate government come from? Why did these aristocrats prize their way of life as the “Southern” way of life, and not that of the majority of White men who didn’t own slaves?
Why did so many working class White men go along to war and not resist the Confederate draft? Why didn’t more men desert the ranks like Newton Knight did?
The severe class divide between the Dixie aristocracy and the soldiers sent to die in Gettysburg and Antietam is embarrassing. White men who are descended from those soldiers should ask themselves and each other if the fight was worth it or if they got played like an Appalachian fiddle.
Twitter/Medium/Blogger co-founder Evan Williams told NYT that he’s sorry if Trump wouldn’t be president without having a Twitter account. His profile in the NYT dwells a lot on how the promise of mass media freedom offered by the largest corporate-owned social media/microblogging sites turned quickly into the toxicity we now know of.
I don’t know if the tech is to blame, since there are an insane number of factors which play roles in how this transition happened. I can cite how the ability to share posts allows users to irresponsibly traffic content which appeal to our base emotions. I can cite how corporate, centralized social networks – driven by advertisement-based profit motives – are the primary couriers of such disinformation and misinformation. I can cite how privacy and self-protection tools have not caught up with the exponential growth of these services.
The opinion from Cliff Watson in the article that these micro/blogging tools, even Williams’s current venture Medium, are relics from the apex of the Obama era, and are not ready for the post-Obama world, is a sign of the transition from the content freedom which was embraced for the last decade to an era of content responsibility to protect ourselves from psyops and abuse.
We hate our criminals more than we hate bad laws and bad conditions.
We’d rather dispose of convicts than rehabilitate them. We’d rather force them to work in chain gangs for government property. We’d rather put them in solitary confinement torture. We’d rather force jailed suspects to pay tens of thousands in bail cash. We ritually kill people who are already serving their life in prison.
Oh, and all of this is a “favor” to convicts.
We have an unforgiving, tyrannical criminal justice system. Even if PoC weren’t present in this country, even if this country and its criminal justice system were exclusively populated by White European Americans, it would still be just as terrible and tyrannical compared to other European-majority countries.
Thinking out loud:
Try thinking about law as the “source code” of an app called “government”.
It’s difficult to make a “hard fork” of the source code or write a new app from scratch that does “the same thing but better” with similar resources, but if the source code is a mess, the app is not going to work for all, or even most users.
The background, intention, language and timing of a contribution of source code and its contributor matters greatly in how that piece of source code is written and how it functions in the app. Trash in, trash out.
If one doesn’t plan out the goal or vision for the app and program the app with this vision in mind, you get an app that is messy and resource-intensive.
Just because the app presently attracts a commanding number of users doesn’t mean that the app is still the best in it’s class, only that it attracted its greatest number of users when it was the most viable compared to the other options. Now, most may only use it because it is what most of their friends and family may use or have used for a long time.
That app can always fail its users in some way, even if it’s a one-time massive screw-up. And if another app offers a better system at that moment, the formerly-dominant app will lose users and market share to the newer, better-featured app.
From Digg to Reddit. From Friendster to Myspace to Facebook. From IE to Chrome. From this government order to the next constitutional order.
A bit of a background: there’s a city council special election in LA today, pitting a biking rights activist, Josef Bray-Ali, against incumbent Gil Cedillo. It came out today that Bray-Ali, who has touted his progressive bonafides in the run-up to the election, has been a frequent poster to far-right and racist forums on Voat and the misogynist “Red Pill” forum on Reddit.
But this article from an activist in this council district talks about his past problematic behavior, both online and offline, against those who advocate for intersectional justice in biking rights advocacy.
Vent:
I wish White conservatives and libertarians could understand that African-Americans are perhaps most skeptical to this constant tug of war between federal and state governments.
We don’t really see state governments as the arbiter of liberty against the federal monster that they’re made out to be by White conservatives and White libertarians.
People like us have never been in the position of a majority clinging jealously, desperately to their corner of regional power against federal will.
I wish they could explain to us why state government autonomy should be as important and obsessive to us as it is to them, even at the expense of healthcare and other human services which are taken for granted elsewhere but which horrify the sensibilities of federalist ideologues in this country.
We can understand the role of cities, counties and federal governments. You have Black mayors, aldermen/councilmembers and county execs and commissioners all over the country within the limit of your typical majority-Black municipality. We have Black congressmembers from numerous regions of mostly-urban and some rural import.
But states? Governors? States usually do their damnedest to screw us over. States have never been the friend of Black people in this country. States don’t have much of a purpose to us except as a double-enforcer of government violence, as an expression of suburban and rural anxiety about the “crime-infested” urban locales, as a burdensome middleman between us and the federal government. States lease the majority of prisons in this country to the highest bidder and execute the vast majority of death row inmates.
If all states were abolished tomorrow and this country became a centralized, unitary republic, Black Americans wouldn’t miss the states nor their power over our lives. Not Georgia, not Alabama, not California, not Illinois. No more Electoral College to placate the rural areas.
We’d have to deal with a much closer relationship between the federal government and cities, between feds and counties. Mayors wouldn’t have to go through the state to receive federal help, nor would feds have to go through states to intervene in municipal affairs.
this may yield some unintended consequences, but I think I can live with those better than this terrible system we have now.
But in the meantime, I simply can’t sympathize with, nor understand, this constant need for distance between state and federal government when it comes to the governance of individual citizens. It’s harming the American working class as a whole, and minority suspect classes (like those of us who did not “immigrate” to this country) in greater intensity. It is harming the accountability of this federal government to the citizenry while hiding the hand of state-level fiefdoms in depriving the citizenry of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
You know what I saw a lack of last year?
1-on-1 video debates/discussions between the most hardcore of both Hillary supporters and Bernie supporters.
We continue to litigate last year in remote textual debates, but not in person, not in real time.
We’re talking about impeachment when we don’t even have fully-acceptable candidates to lead Dems to a majority in Congress.
Get your shit together, progressives and liberals. talk to each other! Reach out!
