Tag Archives: politics

I don’t believe that political calculation is wrong.

If you change your position in your campaign for political office, you better hope that it’s the better one. Because it will be the job of the activist to either hold you to it or bring you down on it.

I don’t think Trump is wrong to change his opinion from last year on Canada’s single-payer healthcare. I think he’s grievously wrong for having the wrong position on it, and for flat-out lying about Canada in the process.

I don’t think Clinton is wrong to change her position on fracking. I think it’s good that she has changed it to a nuanced opposition, but she may have been misinformed about its supposed benefits in the first place.

I disagree a bit with the Republican “line” being drawn at white women (see Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis). His base is not abandoning him over this insult to White female autonomy, only the other party members with clout outside of his campaign.

No, this has to go deeper for a nuclear apocalypse to happen within his base. He has to be shown smearing some unforgivable crap over the wrong Anglo-American, able-bodied male, the avatar in which most of his base perceive and vaunt themselves. Whatever will destroy him will have to show him, “the Donald”, to be the Emmanuel Goldstein-like “cuck” which they train themselves to most grievously despise.

According to Trump insiders like Hugh Hewett, another shoe is to drop momentarily. It’s supposed to be worse than the “grab them by the pussy” tape.

Diane Abbott Makes History

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

So this is huge: in the UK, Diane Abbott MP has been selected by Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary.

She’s only the fourth woman and the first black British person to hold this position in a shadow cabinet. If Corbyn were to win the next parliamentary election and bring in this shadow cabinet as his frontbench, Abbott as Home Secretary would have powers over immigration, citizenship, national security, intelligence (including MI-5), and criminal justice. It is one of the four most powerful cabinet positions in the UK, including the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Abbott would also be the fourth woman and first black British person to be Home Secretary. Former Home Secretary Theresa May is the current Prime Minister.

EDIT: So I got a *lot* of Facebook comments from pissed-off British commenters in my earlier post about #DianeAbbott. Apparently, she’s had a lot of gaffes since taking office as MP in 1987.

Folks, I wasn’t praising her. I was only *stating* that she’s *the first* black British (or, in British terms, BAME) person and *fourth* woman to serve as Shadow Home Secretary, and that this position is of critical importance to British politics.

And yes, I’m a USian. Hi!

Does this make any sense?

“I’m going to vote for Trump! I think he’s a destabilizing force. I’m skeptical of him, too, and who exactly is behind Trump. But given that there’s eternal dissent in the Republican Party, that leads me to believe that whatever he represents might be a destabilizing force. And he’s made a lot of overtures to Russia and China, which in some ways could be thought of as an encouraging thing. I don’t support or endorse any of Trump’s policies. I just think it’ll escalate the problem, which is the best we can hope for. I hope at the very least he’d turn the White House into a reality show. America would tune in, right? And then he could do something nice, like give the money to the National Park Service, because they’re trying to defund it.”

Source: American History XXX – Office Magazine

This is heightening the contradictions. Does he want to heighten the contradictions?

Lineage-based Fraternal Societies

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

Reading about Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race oldest daughter of Strom Thurmond who he never publicly recognized in his 100-year life. I noticed that she tried unsuccessfully to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy through her father’s descent from Confederate soldiers, but emphasized the need for African-Americans to join more lineage-based fraternal societies in order to forge closer ties to the earlier United States. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has also joined the Sons of the American Revolution by way of a free man of color who fought for Continental forces in the Revolutionary War.

This led me to the list of lineage-based fraternal societies in the United States, most of which are either based on participation in war, settlement of a state or region at a particular time, ethnicity, service in some military branch.

Most of these tend to be of the accidental, circumstantial type that would involve some catechism of honor to esteem the “honorable ancestors”, the sort of unchangeable accident of history involving some distant soldier guy (or nurse woman) who, if you were not reminded of it or cognizant of research, you would totally forget or ignore. Similar to this practice is the war or period reenactment culture (like RenFaire and Civil War reenactment).

The only African-American-oriented genealogical [NOT lineage] society which I can find right now is the AAHGS-Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, Inc. and their state chapters, which exist to “share resources and methodology for pursuing historical and genealogical research” and “to trace the historical ties that bind us one to another, mold the present, and shape the future.”

So it’s not exactly “Sons/Daughters of [whatever]”.

It seems to predominantly be a Euro-American thing. It’s hard for us to squeeze into most of these organizations.

 

It Isn’t Good That Police Shoot Twice as Many Unarmed White Civilians as Black Civilians

Politics, Uncategorized, , , ,

If police kill twice as many unarmed European-Americans as they do African-Americans, isn’t that a problem with police, too? Shouldn’t the police be fixed to stop killing so many people across the country?

Why do you think there are so many White sovereign citizens who proclaim themselves to not be subject to American law? Why do you think that anarchist/libertarian White guys run Cop Block and Photography Is Not A Crime! in direct and sustained critique of police behavior?

Don’t be so cluelessly self-absorbed as to think that only Black, or only liberal, or only “SJW” people are raging against law enforcement abuse.

It’s not just #BlackLivesMatter. It’s not just #Kaepernick.

It’s also #StopKillingUs.

René Préval

Politics, Uncategorized,

René Préval, who served as President of Haiti from 1996-2001 and 2006-2011, is perhaps the greatest democratic survivor of Haitian politics. He managed to both receive and turn over presidential powers peacefully and democratically, twice over.

He weathered food riots, a dysfunctional government, frequent turnover of prime ministers, and the Haitian earthquake of 2010 where his own presidential residence was destroyed and left his family homeless. Yet, he never led or encountered a coup, unlike his democratic predecessor Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who suffered two coups. He did not have his own death squad, did not exceed his own presidential mandate.

Since independence in 1804, Préval is only the first elected Haitian president to serve his full term and voluntarily retire (and only the second overall after Nissage Saget, who had taken power by coup in 1867 but left office voluntarily after five years), and the first to be elected in non-consecutive terms. No other head of state in Haiti’s history can claim to have had a similar experience as René Préval.

“We are twice as likely to have a firearm in our homes as black Americans and Hispanics, yet significantly less of us die by gunshot. White people represent 65 percent of the population but just 25 percent of gun homicides. Black people represent 13 percent of the population yet a disturbing 55 percent of gun homicides.

Our gun obsession is simply fueled by the fact that the odds are in our favor. Black and brown kids in Chicago, Baltimore and Miami die by bullets at a much greater rate than our children in Montana, Idaho and Wisconsin.

The color of our skin makes up most of the Republican Party, a party twice as likely to own guns at home than the Democratic Party.

People who look like me are ultimately responsible that a third of all Americans with children under 18 at home have a gun in their household, including 34 percent of families with children younger than 12.

We make up 80 percent of Congress. The majority of white lawmakers refuse to make it legally harder to buy firearms, even AR-15 assault rifles that no respectable hunter would ever use to bag a 12-point buck.”

Source: America’s nostalgic gun culture defies logic and common sense – The Undefeated