Good afternoon. This is a day to remember all those poor White Christian men who were lied and drafted into an unsuccessful war by rich White Christian men to keep enslaved Black people from being as free as themselves.

As per N Michel Ivey, this is also a day to remember the 12mil+ victims of White Christian people who bought so many lies about their own inverted superiority over Jews, Poles, LGBT, neurodiverse and other ethnic, religious minorities in their midst that they attempted to exterminate them from the face of the earth.

Two grandiose, bloody, traumatic experiments in human stupidity whose intended victims (and their descendants) suffer generational, cultural trauma to this day. No honor in any of this, just anger and injustice.

#YomHaShoah #ConfederateStupidity

After offensive comment, Miami state senator fends off calls for resignation, condemnation

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

WTF

TALLAHASSEE — A Miami state senator is fending off calls for his resignation, a possible Florida Senate complaint and the condemnation of fellow Republicans after he oddly referred to six white colleagues as the N-word during a heated discussion with a black lawmaker, one of whom who he called a “bitch.”

As pressure mounts, state Sen. Frank Artiles plans to formally apologize to the entire Florida Senate on Wednesday and ask for forgiveness. He apologized Tuesday evening — after his alcohol-fueled racist language the night before was reported to Republican leadership, and the Miami Herald and Florida Times-Union began asking questions.

Artiles insists he is not a bigot and noted that he used the phrase to refer to white GOP senators, not blacks.

via After offensive comment, Miami state senator fends off calls for resignation, condemnation

It’s a trap.

Sullivan’s piece, rife with generalizations about a group as vastly diverse as Asian-Americans, rightfully raised hackles. Not only inaccurate, his piece spreads the idea that Asian-Americans as a group are monolithic, even though parsing data by ethnicity reveals a host of disparities; for example, Bhutanese-Americans have far higher rates of poverty than other Asian populations, like Japanese-Americans. And at the root of Sullivan’s pernicious argument is the idea that black failure and Asian success cannot be explained by inequities and racism, and that they are one and the same; this allows a segment of white America to avoid any responsibility for addressing racism or the damage it continues to inflict.

via ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks : Code Switch : NPR

Good article on the alphabet soup of Democratic Party organizations

Politics, Uncategorized,

It’s not unusual to see confusion about the roles that various Democratic Party campaign committees play, though it seems to have peaked recently following Democrat James Thompson’s unexpectedly close loss in the special House election in Kansas’ dark-red 4th Congressional District, based around Wichita. What I’m talking about, more than anything, is cries of “WHY DIDN’T THE DNC DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS RACE?!?”

That’s kind of like coming across the scene of a bus accident, and asking “WHY ISN’T THE COAST GUARD COMING TO THE RESCUE?!?” There are certainly valid reasons to critique the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the ways it does business, but the committee’s non-involvement in a House race isn’t one of them. It isn’t their jurisdiction—that’s simply something they don’t, by definition, do.

If you’re interested in having your comments about dysfunction by Democratic organizations taken seriously, it helps to at least have some knowledge of where to correctly point your finger. With that in mind, let’s take a few minutes to review the alphabet soup of organizations in Washington that raise money for, and spend money on, Democratic candidates.

via DNC, DCCC, DSCC: How to decipher the alphabet soup of Democratic Party organizations

A Forgotten Piece Of African-American History In The Former Town Of Dearfield On The Great Plains : The Salt : NPR

Uncategorized,

Movies could be made about this.

Abandoned towns from the early 20th century are far from unique on this stretch of the Great Plains. Withered storefronts and collapsed homes are common. Boom and bust economics and harsh weather made it tough for turn of the century settlers to succeed long-term.

Few ghost towns, however, have all the elements that make Dearfield’s story so compelling: larger than life characters, struggles to live off the land, tales of racial integration at the height of the Jim Crow era.

via A Forgotten Piece Of African-American History In The Former Town Of Dearfield On The Great Plains : The Salt : NPR

Mastodon

Uncategorized, ,

Reading on Mashable about a new free and open-source social networking platform called Mastodon.

There are quite a few platforms like this: Diaspora, Friendica, GNU social, Hubzilla. They are software which you can install to host your own social network server but also allow you to connect, share, mention and tag other users on other servers.

This would make social networking more like how email works: Gmail, AOL, OutlookDOTcom/Hotmail, and Yahoo users can all email each other without having to be on the same host.

This is the opposite of how Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn​ don’t connect to each other. I imagine federated social networks becoming much more used if the big proprietary networks bottom out.