#'yeah; but you think that social welfare programs are good and that's government'

[medicinemane]

I don't know... just the utter insanity of being like "I don't trust the government" only to put your full faith in the government cause you've decided that this punitive law is one you like and could totally never be used in an inappropriate way

Never trust the government man

Government needs to be forced to have full transparency and accountability and have a boot kept on it's neck at all times to make sure it's doing what we need it to... and we're not there yet, not even close. DOD can't even pass an audit man, and so many of the governmental systems as so clearly just kind of broken

So why on earth would you ever trust some new law to only be used in positive ways and not as a tool of suppression?

And part of it is about looking at laws, looking at what they say and do, looking at their scope. Like yeah, I'm pro right to repair laws because they mostly say companies can't stop me from fixing my own shit and need to make parts available (which they demonstrably don't do otherwise, which is the only reason I even want a law about it)

But like... there's a bit of a difference between the scope of a right to repair bill vs something on surveillance, or banning something like tiktok, or making it so police can arrest you for something new... never trust that stuff's going to be applied how they say it will, assume they've slipped massive overreach in the fine print, and assume that even if it's technically the most restrained bill that the feds might ignore that and use it as an excuse to trample all over your rights despite technically not being allowed to

Doesn't matter if the cop technically isn't supposed to arrest you for it, we see cases all the time where cops do shit they're not supposed to do and go after people not doing anything wrong

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

I feel like Kerry was doing pretty well until he got swiftboated and then everybody pretty much fell for it?

But I mean, politics isn't a reality tv show. It's not supposed to be "exciting" or "dramatic" outside of acute crises. A big part of the current problem has been caused by the media's addiction to the political horse race--no matter how wildly unequal two candidates are, they're going to give the impression that they're neck and neck the whole way in order to drive viewer engagement.

You, as one of the poor bastards who's not a multimedia conglomerate and actually has to live with the outcome, do not want a presidential candidate who's a hot mess, or who thinks they're hosting a roast every time they get on camera. The two presidents in living memory who were very good at being entertaining--Trump and Reagan--were unmitigated human rights disasters with shit policies across the board.

You remember Trump's Muslim ban? The federal goon squads deployed to cities he didn't think were handling the police-brutality protests harshly enough? The medical gear and supplies that got distributed as a reward for state governors' loyalty during the worst of the pandemic? I mean, yeah, it made for some real crackerjack headlines, but it was fucking terrifying to live through. And that's if you did, in fact, live through it. Not everybody did.

Ideally you want a candidate who's a good, engaging public speaker and fairly charismatic, but podium-thumping demagogues and rabble-rousing activists tend not to be great at the long-term, consistent, broad-spectrum political work that most elected officials need to do. Even municipal-level politicians tend to have terms of at least 2 years, and even the ones who run on single issues still have to deal competently with a whole bunch of shit they don't personally care about all the time. They have to be able to stay focused and not burn out.

I don't even know if "take over the DNC, kids" is what will do it, since it seems like it takes about three years for leftists to turn on even the younger, more progressive and nominally "exciting" politicians like Ocasio-Cortez over the compromises made to keep the government functioning.

The kids most likely to wind up taking over the DNC are still going to be unsexy nerds more interested in diverting bloated police budgets to a slew of community initiatives, or reinstating building codes that kept unethical developers from building low-income housing on flood plains, or introducing data-driven benefits programs pegged to cost of living indices than in shaking their asses on social media, passing ideological purity tests, or giving barn-burner speeches.

They're occasionally going to have to vote for bills with shitty riders, have a shitty opinion, or endorse a shitty colleague. They're going to have to be at least palatable to a voting majority of their constituency, which means they're probably not going to be able to run on "defund the police" or "expand welfare access" or "fuck your real estate prices" at any level higher than the House, and even then only if it's a small and very liberal seat. The ones who wind up with a reasonable shot at the presidency are unlikely to be radicals or ideologues simply by virtue of needing to appeal to a majority of voters.

Like, I don't know what to tell you. The right can put up whatever clown they want so long as he solemnly swears to keep undermining the government's ability to rein in corporate malfeasance, and the superPAC money will come pouring in. They are actively trying to break anything they can't burn to the ground. There's no drawback for that guy to run around yelling "Cry harder, libs!" and being a bozo. The people he's aiming for actively want a dysfunctional government that harms its citizens through inaction, and the spectacle also serves to disengage people who don't want that but are also too terrified of socialized medicine, immigrants, and the poors to reliably vote blue.

Unless what you want is that, only the bozo is running around yelling "Nationalize your mom!", then there's a certain level of bland, workhorse dependability that you have to make peace with in a presidential candidate. So long as more than 35% of the electorate is afraid that you are, in fact, going to nationalize their mom, the Dems aren't putting up anyone without a known anti-mom-nationalizing platform.

Are their policies good? Will they work with your down-ticket radicals and reformers to move the country in the right direction, or at least stay out of the way? Do they have experts and cabinet members picked out who are going to run their agencies well? Will they get you closer to your goals than the guy whose last cabinet was primarily white supremacists? Will all that let you pressure your representatives and senators to work with progressive elements to get more progressive laws passed? Yeah? Okay, then.

We have lived through this before.

People said Gore wasn't good enough, that he was Bland and uninteresting and middle of the road and something had to change. So they voted third party or they didn't vote at all. And the Democratic party didn't wake up, and we got George W Bush and all the absolute hot garbage that came with him.

And they said Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate, that she was middle of the road at best and conservative for the Democrats at worst, that she was entitled and they were going to vote for a third party or they didn't vote at all or worse yet, they voted for the other candidate as a joke because it's not like those votes change things, you know? And the Democratic party didn't magically wake up, they didn't majorly change, and we are still dealing with the fallout from that.

And that's not only twice in my lifetime, but twice in my voting lifetime. One of the important things you learn in therapy is that you cannot change other people, and you cannot set your expectations based on how you think they ought to react to certain things.

If you are refusing to vote, or voting third-party because of what you think it's going to make someone else do, please reconsider.

If you want to make the liberals or the centrists or whatever you want to call them wake up, you're going to need to do something that hasn't already been done twice in the last 20 years.

[qqueenofhades]

I've just watched Purple Heart on Netflix (don't, it's a waste of time for more reasons than fits in this ask box) but it reminded me once again that it took me some time when I was younger to understand why having a severe health issue would lead to financial ruin and debt in several American movies (I'm French). Some things would be tough in France, like being able to afford a really good wheelchair (more expensive than SS price cap), but not diabetes like the girl in the movie, or cancer. 1/2

2/2 I don't understand how people who would have all reasons to be in favour of a state-subsidised, paid-by-social-contirbution (it's cotisation sociale in French, not quite like a tax in its principle) health care system. We do also have discrepancies between rich and poor and our hospital is on the brink of collapse but that's under investment, not the the solidarity system.

Sorry I think I forgot a bit. I don't understand why people who would benefit form such a system are so resolutely against it. Just because of ideology?

As I have written about in various posts before, it is impossible to overstate the damage that forty years of hard-right messaging, starting with Reagan and continued in some shape or form by almost all his successors, has done on the American psyche. Until the 1980s, taxes were high, the welfare net was robust, things like college, health care, house buying, etc were either readily affordable or heavily subsidised, and somehow this was not viewed as Socialism, even in the middle of the Cold War. But then when Reagan and company got in there and revamped the entire economic system to chiefly and only favor rich people, they had to come up with a way to sell it to everyone else. Thus the Myth of the Free Market became America's guiding philosophy, and it worked. Oh boy, did it work. It still works now. You should reject any benefit or system introduced by the government because blah blah bad (as if the chaotic for-profit privatised broken mess we have now works so well, but shh, don't criticise the capitalism. That is, as we all know, Socialism!)

Anyway... yeah. I feel it important to note, however, that despite the stereotypes, the core base of Trump/MAGA/Republican supporters actually are not poor. They do fit some of the expected demographics: largely white, male, straight, and don't have a college degree -- but they often make $50k or more a year, which is definitely not poverty level. We are often sold the "Economic Anxiety" canard about Trump voters (ignoring the fact that voting for a Republican to fix the mess created by Republican policies is, uh, confusing), but the people at the Capitol on January 6 had enough money to leave their jobs, arrange travel and hotel in DC, and buy Trump merch and weapons and God knows what else. Some of them even flew there by private jet. So on the one hand, yes, there are plenty of poor and working-class white people who have been so brainwashed by Reagonomics that they reject even those reforms/programs that would help them (and also don't want those programs to help non-white people). But a lot of the MAGA support is exactly what it looks like: well-off white people for whom this unfair economic system is working pretty damn well, who do not want to be forced by the Evil Government to redistribute any of it, and are eager to embrace fascist and fascist-adjacent social and cultural policies as a result.

[communistkenobi]

hey, how would you explain neoliberalism to a baby poli sci major? i’ve always struggled with understanding the term because i haven’t been assigned anything to read about it yet

yeah no worries it’s a complicated concept! when people use the word they’re generally referring to one of two things - the process of neoliberalism itself, or the cultural/societal response to, and reinforcement of, neoliberalism as a way of thinking about the world. Sorry this is gonna be long lol but neoliberalism is a weird term that describes a bunch of complicated things that I think are best explained with examples and a bit of history.

the most useful definition of neoliberalism I’ve heard is that it’s an economic process whereby you privatise the public sphere; the free market is offered as the solution to various social problems. Before I describe it more in detail there is a bit of policy history that is important to know. It obviously didn’t arise out of nowhere; neoliberalism is a response to the post-WWII social welfare policies (sometimes referred to as the Keynesian welfare state) where a lot of stuff was nationalised, meaning that that service is now administered by the national (or sometimes regional) government. I’m Canadian so I’m not as familiar with US policy history, but this is when Canada nationalised its healthcare system for example, and iirc this is also around the same time when we got a national pension fund. Social housing (ie housing that isn’t sold on a market) and other social goods were also offered to people at low or no cost (payment for these services coming from taxes). Basically think of like, what if education, healthcare, and housing were offered to you as a public utility and not a product that is bought and sold to each individual person on a private market. This wasn’t universal by any means, like private housing and other privatised services were still dominant, but (again, at least in Canada) things like social housing were much more normalised and weren’t considered to be “housing for poor people” like it is now.

so that’s the policy stage on which neoliberalism arrives. the neoliberal “turn” in western states happened sometime between the late 1960s-90s depending on what country you’re looking at. This meant that a lot of things became privatised again. The process of doing this is usually to first decentralise or “download” the service to smaller regional or local governments (this is why today, cities each have things like their own separate housing policies), reducing federal/national funding streams to those social programs, and then finally defunding them completely. This is also coupled with lowering taxes and flattening progressive tax rates (im not a tax person so this is very simplified, but this means everyone pays similar amounts of taxes as opposed to being taxed relative to your income - this had the almost immediate effect of widening economic inequality). Because cities and states/provinces have less money than the national government, and because they were now receiving even less money due to lower taxes and reduced national funding, it’s a lot harder to run these programs, and so usually they eventually stop paying for them too, or they’ll partner with non-profits or charities who then administer those services (or they’ll sell them to private companies to run). This is why today, non-profits and other charitable organisations have such a large presence in providing services like homeless shelters, addiction recovery, mental health services, disability services, social services for other marginalised groups, etc. they effectively replace “the public realm” by administering basic social utilities to people, except now they’re not run by a single government, they’re run by individual charities with their own funding streams, standards of care, and policies.

And this had a huge effect on the way people think about themselves and other people! More and more aspects of your life were now framed as products you could choose to either buy or not buy. Social services are very often discussed as parts of the government that aren’t “profitable”, the obvious implication being that profit is the primary motive to offering, like, public transit, as opposed it being a public good that helps society function better by letting people move around more freely. You’ll also see these services framed as “handouts” for lazy people who don’t work hard - again, framing basic aspects of everyday life as things you must earn by constant participation in the market, first as a worker and then as a consumer. This is partially a neoliberal conception of public life.

I’ve seen it argued (by Greg Suttor if you want a specific citation lol) that ideologically, neoliberalism is about hiding the presence of the state from people. Society needs things like roads and water and housing and food and education and medical care to run effectively, but running them as a utility is expensive, and it’s basically become a unanimous agreement between all major political parties that spending money on government services is bad (for lots of complicated reasons, one of them being that capitalist interests are fundamentally opposed to paying for services that don’t generate profit), so instead you hand the responsibility off to private companies to do it, who then run it not as a utility for the benefit of the public but as a way for them to make money, turning the utility into a product. This doesn’t make the problem of, say, every person in your country needing a house go away, but now the burden is on each individual to access or not access that via the private market, and that access is dictated by the amount of money you have. It’s a way of de-collectivising mass social needs, and as a consequence it encourages people to think of themselves as individuals disconnected from a larger whole.

A good example to illustrate the cultural effects of neoliberalism is the rise of the concept of self-care, which is essentially pathologising and marketising leisure time - you work hard, you have a bad mental health day, you deserve to treat yourself by buying an expensive coffee, or a new hat, or going to the movies after work. The act of self care allows you to “responsibly” spend your money on things that aren’t absolutely necessary (like food, rent, and clothing) by framing those purchases as a mental health support. And I’m not criticising this rationalisation people do btw, I also do this lol, but this example illustrates that people have such deep anxiety on spending money on “frivolous” things that you need to justify a starbucks latte as a thing that will improve your mental health (+ therefore make you more productive at work).

Anyway this has gotten away from me a bit but I hope that’s helpful lol. I’m not a political theory person so this explanation is policy heavy, not because that’s the only thing that is important but because that is the part I’m most familiar with. Neoliberalism is something that has been happening for decades by now and is very mature. It’s a particular way of conceptualising state responsibility as limited and narrow - public needs are to be handled by the market, and the state handles things like police and border security (notably the only two ‘public services’ that have seen any substantial increase in funding). It’s also a way of understanding the world as a series of private individual interactions between a consumer and the market, often framed as democratic (“the freer the market, the freer the people”, “vote with your dollar”, etc), but what’s on the market are basic necessities you need to stay alive, so “not voting” is not really an option.

[thisiswhatwereupagainst]

Sebastian Shaw textually represents American values, politics, and ways of thinking, or at least used to. Not subtextually, but textually. But he hasn’t been written as such in years. And I think partly that’s because in 2009, a change was made to his history that made him have been Emma Frost’s former abusive lover, and writers prefer to focus on that---Emma is a far more popular character, and it’s a PERSONAL story rather than a political one---and because, if they go with this criticism as hard as some former writers did, they risk alienating a good chunk of their audience. Because while lots of people will agree with the message of “oh yeah don’t be mean to minorities” in a bland general way, Shaw represents a criticism of something FAR more specific, and far more culturally beloved. The American dream. I’m not reaching with this either, this is not simply my opinion, this is stated in the text itself: ”By the age of 30, Shaw had earned his first million. By 40, his first billion. He wasn’t just living the American dream, Sebastian Shaw was the American dream.” - X- Men: Hellfire Club #4” So, what does that mean, the American dream? The American dream is the ideal that anyone can make it if they work for it. That it doesn’t matter who you are, what you are, or where you come from, you can do it if you believe. And Shaw does]. Shaw is smart, he’s determined, he believes in himself, he never gives up, and he becomes a multi-billionaire for it. That’s lovely. It’s also the cherry on top of a stew of very dangerous boot-strapping ideas that blames people for their own poverty and the suffering that comes with it----suffering that ironically Shaw himself has been through. He grew up a deeply impoverished child and his mutation manifested due to literal class violence; a group of preppy college guys beat him up for being a poor kid on scholarship, for basically getting out of his place. More on that HERE. And yet despite this history, when Shaw himself becomes rich he espouses these views: “Our costumes signify our abandonment of the modern age–with its cloying ethics and bourgeois mercantile principles, where society is bent on protecting people from themselves at an cost—for a far simpler one…where a man was limited solely by the scope of his imagination, his ambition, his daring. And bound only by his own personal sense of honor. Society—the common herd–means nothing. The individual is all.” - New Mutants #22 “He [Shaw] will tolerate no inefficiency, no waste, no weak-minded liberalism.” —X-Men:The Legacy Quest Trilogy, Book Three, by Steve Lyons Bishop: “Out of the goodness of your heart?” Shaw: “Enlightened self-interest.” -  Uncanny X-Men #453 These are quotes that reflect very real-world libertarian and Objectivist politics. Shaw’s not a conservative, I should stress---as much as one might WANT to label him such, his investment in individual rights, individual self-interest, individual achievements, and personal freedoms above all else, including disdain for common morality and belief that one should set one’s own personal code of honor (which he did, very early in his writing, believe it or not), is much more Libertarian. Shaw is Black King of the Hellfire Club, I can’t really see him getting fussed over same-sex marriage or abortion the way conservatives do. His use of the phrase “enlightened self-interest” is also a real-world term in the philosophy of ethics. These quotes represent a lot of ideas that many people do find appealing---the values of individualism, of people choosing their own codes of honor rather than having them enforced by society and the government, of not being controlled by silly government things like safety regulations, the idea everyone should earn everything they have, that the government should not be trying to protect people from themselves (the term “nanny state” is often used by libertarians)---and there is even merit in them. There are good ideas here. But it’s coming from a villain. Sebastian Shaw is a bad guy. We are not supposed to agree with him. We are meant to see his point and his point of view (back when he was allowed to have one; he’s really not now) but at the end of the day, probably not to think he’s right. So, this man is textually referred to as The American Dream, he says these quotes, and he is the bad guy. A bigger criticism of these deeply held American values around “hard work” and “no big government” and individualism---for America is a deeply individualist country---would be hard to come by. Shaw also provides a comment both on how people from an underclass will turn on their own and how in fact our culture trains us to do so, and on America’s history with Communism, the antithesis of the ideals Shaw represents, and how that’s affected us to this day. Again, Shaw grew up very poor. He’s a self-made man, and very proud of that, and that is indeed the American ideal. And I think he represents very well both how people are ready to step on others once they themselves become successful enough to do so, but also how well Americans as a people are trained to RESIST what’s good for us. After all, the biggest haters of welfare here in the South (where I live) are the same poor white people who are on it. We’re a people who will vote to take away social programs and healthcare not just from others, but OURSELVES, because we are just that indoctrinated against anything that we think smells even close to socialism or Communism-----and Shaw was indoctrinated too, to a much more EXTREME degree than we are today. He’s in his 40s when he first shows up in the 80s, which means he was born in the late 30s, so he would have been growing up during the era of McCarthyism and the second Red Scare, when the American nation was actively terrified of Communism on mass scale and it was a HUGE impact on the culture. Combine that with being born in terrible poverty, and no wonder this guy grew up to embody all the worst excesses of capitalist greed and cruelty! Which is not to say he has an excuse to be the way he is, but just that, like most villains, he has a reason, and it’s actually more interesting than just “well he’s greedy” as it’s often boiled down to. But writers like to boil it down to that. It’s simple to understand...and it doesn’t take risks. You don’t risk pissing anyone off with another “greedy rich guy” cliché villain. That’s a very safe villain, very shallow, very easy to hate. You also don’t take risk with the “Emma’s evil ex” stories. That’s also a very safe villain, very easy for readers to hate and root against, and personal rather than political. But if writers today started having Shaw espouse the politics he previously did, that would NOT be a “safe” move. They would risk readers being pissed off because their own views are coming from a man who is unquestionably, irredeemably, and unrepentantly the BAD guy. Shaw believes things I suspect a great many X-Men readers believe, and will be angry at seeing critically examined and challenged. It’s easy to agree with stuff like “minorities shouldn’t be murdered” for readers, but Shaw takes on much more specific and deep issues that, while they do move the target away from the mutant minority metaphor, are worth discussing and make him a deeper, far more interesting character than he gets to be anymore….and I would like to see him be again.

[dragonfire535]

5 “Socialist” Programs You Can’t Live Without

Conservatives like to hate on Bernie for his “socialist” (really Social Democracy) agenda, but the point they often fail to be able to counter is just how much of the current policies in this country are “socialist”. Here’s the best results of the socialist boogieman. God this sounds like a Buzzfeed article.

1) Public Roads. Yeah, I’m not kidding you. Want to have to pay to drive on every road as if it were private property? Really hope someone doesn’t decide to suddenly block off their road, preventing you from going to work.

2) Public Schooling. Good luck paying not only for college, but for K-12 as well. You think they already make you pay enough just for your supplies? Imagine a competitive schooling market. Shudders.

3) Social Security. This one is a little more hit or miss, but it’s worth bringing up. While it’s easily replaceable with, well, saving your own retirement money, it has its uses as a safety net for people who aren’t very good at saving. I’d rather not work until I die just because 16 year old me was an idiot, thanks.

4) Welfare/Medicaid. You know, for a group who hates socialism, there sure are a lot of conservatives on Welfare and Medicaid. I wonder why they’re so scared of medicare for all when most of them are already on government healthcare? Bunch of hypocrites, I say.

5) Food Stamps. Similar to point 4, Food Stamps are one of the things conservatives are hypocrites about. Poor people who can’t afford food should apparently just starve, according to them.

Next time you run into someone blabbing on and on about how socialism is bad, bring up one of these. While it won’t change their mind, you might be able to shut them up, or better yet, change the minds of the people they’ve influenced.

[dearmrsbitch]

September 29, 2019 - By Remembering That Humans Matter?

         Dear Prudence,        

         I work for the state government in the department that involves public assistance. I used to be a true-blue liberal. I supported programs that help people. But I’m seeing a lot of clients who abuse the system or purposely make bad choices. I read evaluations from clients who aren’t really disabled or hear from clients that they don’t want to stop abusing substances. I don’t want to sound like a right-wing blowhard, but I’m afraid I’m turning into one. How can I keep my liberal card in the face of what I see every day?        

         —Turning Into a Public Benefits Skeptic       

Dear Public Benefits,

Genius, by remembering that the other side produced Trump?  Conspiracy theorists who attacked the families of Sandy Hook child victims? Men who think that women shouldn’t have rights? The side that puts CHILDREN IN FUCKING CAGES?

Hey, I worked in the government too, alright?  I saw a lot of abuse.  You know why this happens?

1.  You’re not going to see the success stories, if it works, you don’t see it happen because it goes along okay.

2.  You know why a bunch of programs get abused?  Because conservatives get voted in by small minded people because “less taxes” and “we hate brown people” and then government workers lose their jobs and they can’t monitor and help and do all that they need to do.  When people know the government is lacking in people and such, they take advantage.  Hell, I had a bitch in my office who was getting welfare - WHILE SHE WORKED IN THE FUCKING WELFARE OFFICE.  To clarify, she made bank and was getting child support.  But she knew that they didn’t have enough time and people and funding to really investigate her.  Bad people will always take advantage of bad situations.

But the facts are the facts.  Most people do not take advantage.  Kind of like when Florida wanted to drug test all recipients and they found a miniscule amount of welfare people were on drugs, but the congressman who wanted the testing was a drug addict himself?  Yeah. 

The solution to feeling bad about public benefits is to look at other countries and how they make it work, and seeing that what you’re actually looking at - is the long term conservative starvation of public benefits and cutting the social safety net to bits - leaving the net open to sharks. 

You’re mentally falling prey to the conservative ideology that if a program doesn’t work as you see it - then it must be fucked!  Especially since you’re not on the other side of a welfare program needing it, so you can’t see how bad it’s getting.  I’ve had several friends try to get welfare when they genuinely needed it, when men ran out on child support, etc.  It’s a hellish process to get it, you don’t get alot or nearly enough, and it’s basically been retooled by conservatives to be shameful and nasty every step of the way. 

Unless you get off on people degrading themselves for money?  I don’t. 

What you need to advocate for is more government hiring.  We need people at desks who can look at records and seek out the scammers.

Otherwise, you’re advocating for taking food out of the mouths of innocent people to stop a few assholes.  That’s shameful.  That’s shit.

I would rather my tax dollars feed a few assholes by accident than some child go hungry because I want to save a few bucks in my paycheck. 

Remember, if you truly care about people, you can’t be a conservative.  They’re the money people, they only care about the dollar and to be honest, we need less of them and their bullshit.  You literally can’t be a fiscal conservative and social liberal, because the money for those socially liberal programs, like feeding kids, etc., (and yes, that is partisan now because we are in the darkest timeline) comes out of the same budget.

Maybe you could advocate for less military spending.  I mean, they military is throwing away tanks and planes because they have so much, they have to build and make it to prove they needed their budget, but we can’t fund SNAP? 

Why are you pissed about a guy on drugs, but a field of your abandoned tax dollars being wasted doesn’t make you upset?

Stop internalizing personal grudges and look at the bigger pic, dude.  We are part of a society, and we’re not going to become a good one by letting those among us who are suffering just fuck off and die while the do-nothing schmucks in Washington rake in tons on the backs of the underpaid, uninsured American worker.

Have you thought about who made the damn world where you have to pretend to be disabled to get on welfare?  Hint, it wasn’t the liberals!  Ask any other country.  Other countries are testing out UBI, and it’s working, and you’re considering getting on the opposite side of that?  Look at the world logically - stripping people of support in an unfair world - doesn’t make sense.  It’s no good “teaching a man to fish” as they stupidly spout, if there’s no fucking fish in the river!

Also, people relapse, you have to get over that.  People don’t get clean until they want to, you can’t force it, chemically it’s not possible in their brains.  Trust me, addiction science is very clear that simply sentencing someone to rehab does not fix them until they want to be fixed.  Some of them will continue to use and die, that is hard truth, but it doesn’t mean we need to throw away all rehab programs.  Maybe we should fix the rehab programs we have? 

There’s a fucking idea, so grow a fucking heart with a new spine and get back on the train, we’re not going to fix the issues you’re upset about with whining about how being upset is making you a con. That’s the joke of the “snowflake” slur.  They give up on programs to save a buck, we soldier on and attempt to fix it or find a new way forward. - they’re the snowflakes. 

Are you a fixer, or a snowflake?

Mrs. Bitch

[tremendouspeachduck]

Why NOT go to college and learn about the social experiment that went terribly wrong!

can you think of any reasons NOT to go to college?

here’s 4 good reasons  click here

You probably don’t need a college loan - listen to  video.

College nowadays is very expensive - ask yourself - do I have the motivation to finish and get the degree.  If not, think of another path.

Find a loan  -- don’t do it unless you’re sure

How can a a first-timer buy a house?  Maybe something like this sounds logical, right?

Did you know . . .

The solution to poverty is to empower individuals to care for themselves and their families.   Removing government-imposed barriers to prosperity in areas such as education, criminal justice system, zoning regulations, and occupational licensure, among others, would do far more to help people escape poverty than government hand-out programs. We want the poor to participate in the market economy, rather than become trapped by welfare programs.

“Muslim migrants, especially to Europe, are used to establish ethnic enclaves and break down any remnants of European pride, while justifying increasingly oppressive measures against the European populations through ‘human rights’ laws and mass re-education of the young to discard the ‘xenophobia’ of their elders and embrace ‘multiculturalism’ as the new exciting wave of the future.”

— Kerry Bolton, Zionism, Islam and the West (AD 2014)

This Muslim invasion social experiment did not work as promised, so  Angela Merkel will not seek re-election as Germany’s chancellor when her term of office ends in 2021.

Next the globalists being ousted are:  Theresa May, Macron, Trudeau - YEAH!

Vote Republican   Click HERE to find out the grand UN plan for the USA - we must get out NOW

This shit just pisses me off.

Sharia law, or Islamic law is a religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the Hadith.    As a legal system, the Sharia law is exceptionally broad. While other legal codes regulate public behavior, Sharia regulates public behavior, private behavior, and even private beliefs. Compared to other legal codes, the Sharia law also prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation and favors corporal and capital punishments over incarceration. Of all legal systems in the world today, the Sharia law is the most intrusive and restrictive.

This is what the DEMS have invited into the USA and we are stupid enough to elect them to office.  It is impossible for any Muslim to put the US Constitution ahead of their Sharia Law.

 Why would you ever trust a DEM again, after Obama allowed this to happen?

The Muslims are recruiting our children.

We need to learn it in order to remove it

[thewestmeetingroom]

Hart House Changemakers: Building Resilient Democracies with Sabreena Delhon

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

democracy, people, Sabreena, question, Canada, understand, toxicity, pandemic, conversation, civic, space, important, leaders, feel, thought, justice system, happening, democratic, resilient, life

SPEAKERS

John, Sabreena

 John

It's my pleasure to introduce our special guest Sabreena. Sabreena is the Executive Director of the Samara Center for Democracy. A leading public sector strategist, Sabreena has over a decade of experience in developing and executing engagement initiatives that deliver complex information to diverse audiences. 

Sabreena has directed provincial research studies that examine public perceptions of the justice system. Results of those studies have informed the work of Ontario's Ministry of the Attorney General and they are now required reading in many Canadian law schools. About six years ago, Sabreena launched something called Access to Justice or ATJ. A week that brought together, or brings together Government, Community and justice sector partners to tackle multifaceted issues such as Indigenous child welfare, digital inclusion, and public legal education. 

Sabreena has also spearheaded architects of justice, which is Canada's premier narrative Forum Podcast focused on current topics and access based issues in the justice sector, It is the very first podcast to be accredited by the Law Society of Ontario, and its episodes have been downloaded thousands and thousands of times. Sabreena has also been featured on CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition and on various legal blogs. 

She's a fellow at Massey College here at the University of Toronto, which means that technically we are fellow fellows. And she's also a fellow at Simon Fraser University at the Morris J. WASC. Center for Dialogue. She holds an MA in sociology from Dalhousie, and a BA in sociology from the University of Alberta, from whence she hails, I think I'm saying that properly. So tonight's conversation will focus on the health of democracies generally, but particularly here in Canada. 

We also want to talk about what everyday citizens like most of us can do to help keep democracy healthy all the time, not just at election time, but all the time. How can we practice good democracy hygiene? And so with that, because I know you're all eager to hear from Sabreena and eager to hear less from me, Sabreena, welcome.

 Sabreena

Thank you, John. It's such a privilege to be here. I'm so thrilled to be part of this program.

 John  

We are thrilled to have you here. We would like to begin if you're okay, by asking me a little bit about your personal journey and your relationship to issues of democracy. So take a step back, the conversation is built as a series about changemakers. When you hear yourself describe that way, does it feel like a good fit?

 Sabreena

Ah, yeah, I guess so. Actually, in preparing for this, I did have to think about, you know, why would they be asking me to be part of this program, and that discomfort with the status quo. It really, it fits. I mean, if I think about my career journey, so far, it's been focused on addressing issues of equity and access. And it's been personal for me, because if you're gonna work on social change issues for a living, you have to care about them. And it's a privilege to be able to do that as well. 

I also thought about how, for me, like I started in sociology, like, that's really how this all began, for me was having a really critical view about how power works in our society. And I think, even though a lot of people might not use the label change maker, but there's something about that curiosity, and that critical lens that I think is is fitting in this case for me.

 John  

So let me follow up with that, because I wanted to ask you specifically, because we're going to be talking about democracy for the next hour and building resilient democracies. What draws you to this work specifically? Is it an exploration of power? Who has it how it's used? Is there a personal connection to the issue of democracy? What motivates you to be interested in the topic?

 Sabreena

Yeah, so definitely a personal connection. And I think the way I felt that connection has evolved over my lifetime. So I didn't grow up in a political family, I'm the first in my family to have the kind of job that I do, to have the kind of privilege that I do. And when you're the first generation to be able to make a kind of social jump like that, you're really conscious of power, you're conscious of culture. And in order to make that kind of shift, you have to be really adept at understanding how different cultures work, because you have to work extra hard to belong in that kind of space. 

So I think my experience in my work of being either the first or among the few to be like me in a certain space, or in a certain professional culture has shaped my lens in terms of change making and trying to be disruptive of the status quo. And it's really a factor I think, of being - feeling conspicuous and invisible at the same time. And that's a duality, that's actually quite accessible to a lot of people in Canada, but it's maybe one that we don't talk about that much or that is maybe under explored, but it's really shaped my lens on things. 

And when you're on the outside, you have the sense of power, and the way it functions as being effort. That's like that's just how it is. But one when you're the new person in that kind of space, and you start to see like, oh well this is who gets access and how and why and this is how decisions get made. Everything is brand new to you and it it gives you a really important lens for identifying potential improvements, or just questions around like, Well, why? Why do we do it like that? So that has also been shaped by how I grew up like that first generation professional identity is a really critical one for me. And it wasn't even something I was conscious of actually, until quite recently. So I think that's like a mid career, middle age kind of reflection, maybe. 

But it is heartening right now, to see that kind of lens and approach have a lot of credibility in terms of who leaders and change makers are today, I see increasing value for the perspective you can have when you're first generation professional, because it gives you connection and credibility in a wide range of spaces. 

I think it has to do with like an evolution and how we're approaching modern leadership. And to note that, you know, in thinking about tonight's conversation, it, it really, it kind of helped me understand like, Oh, this is a really powerful lens to have right now, and I really am only just awakening to that, because I'm at a stage in my life where different identities like professional, being a daughter, being a mother, being a partner. 

There's a fluidity there, there's no more boundaries around that or not as many, maybe it's because I've had to do everything on zoom from home with all of those identities all bound together, which has also been stressful, as we all understand. But there's some cohesion now. And that is helping to drive my contribution to this larger ever effort of making our society more just, it's not just the professional thing I do. So that personal and professional boundary, I think is much more permeable now. And that's really helping to drive the way I want to do things.

 John  

And I think it's fascinating, you talk about being simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, and how that is likely to resonate very strongly with some people, and maybe not resonate that strongly at all for others. But I'm curious to know, if now that you are the executive director of the Samara Center for Democracy, the leading think bank in Canada on on the practice of democracy Do you have to work to maintain those dual perspectives? Or does it start? Do you start to become only conspicuous and unless invisible? How is that? And is it important for you to maintain both perspectives in order to do your work, as well as you want to do it?

 Sabreena

You have to, you have to maintain both perspectives. And it's a real shift for me now, because the the privilege is now a little bit higher, right? So it's like, don't forget where you came from. And don't forget about making this relevant to your mom or dad who are going to still good naturally roll their eyes at whatever you're doing, because they don't really get it. So like calm down, you know, there's still that kind of energy going on. 

I am conscious of that being conspicuous and invisible aspect in my work, and that consciousness is helping me to use it. So we have seen a shift now in terms of standards of accountability from institutions and from a range of different spaces. So I get invited to speak on a lot of different panels now. And that wasn't always necessarily the case. 

Now that has to do because, has to do with the honor of getting to lead an organization like the Samara Center, but there's also increasing pressure now to not have an all-white panel or all white male panel. So I know that there's multiple reasons that my presence is being requested these days. I'm also at this stage in my life, to understand that I have the credibility to back it up, I have the relationships to back it up. 

So I have a comfort and I have more of a comfort, I think then some other actors in the space who are maybe still in different learning stages around how they are approaching power and race in our society. So the the use of that conspicuous invisibility duality is hard. One (1),  because it takes a lot of processing and understanding and maturing to understand that you know, power isn't only about a meritocracy. That's not how it always works. And you might think it's going to be this way, but it's not and the struggle to find people who can support you and help you translate what's going on because you don't always have that kind of generational knowledge guiding you as you move through your career. 

So I'm conscious of that and I'm also aware of how that would affect other younger people as well. So with my increased visibility comes in certain spaces, increased normalization of my leadership. And when the announcement came out about my joining the Samara Centre, I heard from lots of young people on social media that I didn't even know, it meant a lot to them that like this brown lady's running this think tank, you know, and I was like, what? And then I thought about when I was at age, like, of course, like I didn't see anybody who looked like me.  

Like, in an essay that I wrote a few years ago, I talked about how I kind of just made a composite character out of Barbara Frum, Cher and Oprah to like, for my professional ambition. I thought Barbara Frum had like, some South Asian element to her for a really long time as a child, she doesn’t... So it made me realize like, Oh, my goodness, like, there's my journey is very different from other journeys, that I'm popping into now, as well and that's really powerful. It makes me understand that I have to act with integrity and be responsible in it for a group that I didn't even realize was paying attention to me.

 John  

So somewhere, someone is, is thinking about their career composite role model, and you're in it. I want to be like Sabreena Delhon and Oprah and whoever else was an exciting thought. I want to ask one more question about about your personal relationship to these issues, and then delve more into resilient democracy specifically. 

But I think it's very fascinating that the, the area in which you really have marked yourself, or head marked yourself as a trailblazer, before arriving at the Samara Centre was in the area of access to justice and I'm wondering if you just talk a little bit about that?

 I as a recovering lawyer, I'm particularly impressed by the fact that you're not a lawyer. Yet, you have done so much substantive work to move important needles on on equity and access to justice. Tell us a little bit about why you bring that passion to the area of justice specifically?

 Sabreena

So I've worked at law schools, I've worked at the legal regulator and what got me into those spaces was the sociological lens and my interest in social research. And I didn't understand when I had those opportunities, how rare it was, for someone who is a non lawyer, which is a word that they use unselfconsciously to describe someone like me

 John  

like I just said the same thing. But yes.

 Sabreena

I didn't realize how rare that was. And it, it gave me a really useful lens, because I was an insider outsider in that space. So it's that feeling of duality again. And it's such a an intense, professional culture and so it felt like being in those spaces was like doing an ethnography almost for me. And it helped me identify levers potentially for change, like getting your podcast accredited for professionalism hours, like that is an inside baseball thing to know.

 John

Yea it is!

 Sabreena

But then just do it. And then it's done, It's free. And now people are motivated, because it's free content. And you know, it goes a long way for their regulator. But also like, what shaped my understanding in that space was the notion that, having a legal problem is such a normal and common experience. And most people don't know that. 

Most people at some point in their life are going to have a consumer problem, a problem with their landlord, a problem with their employer. And it's totally normal. But there's a weird sense of shame that people have when they've got a legal problem. And it's because of the cost that it would take to solve it or the perceived cost, it's likely going to be very high. But in some instances, you could maybe get some help. And intimidation and confusion play a big factor in that. 

So one of the things that I did a couple years ago was a public engagement initiative where we just wanted to ask the public like, what are your top three ideas? What would you want to do if you could make the justice system better? What would you pick just off the top of your head? And We took this to the CNE, so the annual fair. 

We had a booth there, it was by designed to be somewhere happy, positive during the day, a bunch of law and paralegal students wearing matching t-shirts really friendly. We were beside the dog show, like, really positive vibes. And everybody we went up to and said, you know, Hi, we're looking for ideas about how to make the justice system better. What do you think?  Their response was “nothing, it's fine”, “I haven't done anything wrong”. And “I don't have anything to say”. And so then we had to, you know, give some assurance like this is a confidential thing, we're just looking for ideas, this isn't going to be attributed to you. 

And once we gave that sense of assurance, then we got these really candid and rich responses about ways that the justice system had let them down. How it had been really difficult for them to watch someone that they care about flounder in the legal system trying to resolve a legal problem. And then, you know, they they just shared like, such deep and personal details with us about how they didn't trust the system, it didn't feel like they didn't feel like they had a sense of ownership for it. And any sense of improvement was just around making it more respectful. And so that's an anecdotal example. But it was a really illuminating one for me. 

And around the same time, I sought to quantify the sentiment, because most of the discourse around making the justice system better is driven by lawyers and judges, and it's from the perspective of lawyers and judges. And there's more happening around user centered experience, but people don't identify as users, especially when they're trying to solve problems that are, you know, in many cases, life and death. And so the study that I directed, measured the trust that Ontarian’s had in their justice system. 

So we're looking for a quantification now, this is a more empirically sound approach to the same question. So not what would you do to make it better? But like, where are you at? Like, where's your relationship as with this core, democratic institution. Across age, income, race, gender, the descriptors were “broken”, “intimidating”, not for me.  That's really telling, right? That's a really solid baseline that you need to use to measure responses and improvements against. 

But there was sort of just like a weird response to that study. Like, some people were pleased to put it on their syllabi for access to justice courses, which was really wonderful. And there was a lot of uptake in certain spaces. But there were key people influencers, powerful people who were very dismissive, like, what does the public know? 

And so for me, like, I understood through that kind of work, that there's a lack of respect and dignity and connection there, that's relationship that needs some repair and attention. And another, like just research tidbit here is that when someone does try to solve their legal problem, they're they're much more satisfied with the outcome if their expectations are managed at the outset. So if they're just told, listen, this is what's gonna happen. 

These are the steps this might happen, that might happen, you might not get what you want. But just having that understanding, having someone speak to you in a respectful way, just walk you through it. It leads to a higher sense of satisfaction with the legal system, even if you didn't get what you wanted. 

And so when we think about going to the polls, or being civically engaged, like you mentioned in the introduction, like how do you keep democracy healthy between elections? It's really something that we need to shore up because people feel kind of used as voters right now. Right? Like, Oh, you want my vote, and then we're done? Okay, fine, right?  It's not a healthy relationship. 

So the connection between justice and democracy, for me are those parallels around respect for the public, trust from the public, managing that relationship in a really healthy and an engaging way, like it's okay to be normal in how you communicate. It's okay to use plain language and it's really important to address that intimidation and confusion factor.

 John  

So, Sabreena, that list of descriptors,  would they define or at least defined in part a resilient democracy? What are the hallmarks of resilient democracies? For you?

 Sabreena

Yeah! So I think like what we're describing here is struggle. And that's a key word used by a professor I admire named Harry Hahn, who's at Johns Hopkins University. She's a political scientist. And she describes how in our democracies, struggle is important is a source of dynamism. 

It's normal and healthy for things to be difficult, because this is, you know, important. And, you know, we've seen with the pandemic conversations about economic and racial justice, accelerate, and they've generated demands from our democratic institutions that have had been a long time coming. But now here they are. So the struggle is definitely a key element of a democracy, of a healthy one. And if we look at data, we work with a consortium on electoral democracy. 

And they've collected data that shows that most Canadians are perfectly satisfied with their democracy, but they have very little trust of elected officials. And so there's that trust element. Again, the Justice study showed really low trust in the justice system. And the struggle and the trust relate to another element of you know, what should be a hallmark in our democracy, which is participation.

And we need to approach that as something beyond just voting. And I think that entails normalizing and validating a wide range of, you know, actions and units of civic engagement, like community organizing various forms of advocacy, just gauging how people feel when they think or talk about politics, like, broadly, do we have a culture where people feel equipped to hold power to account? So I think we're in a in a major period of transformation right now, to kind of put it mildly in terms of what we're experiencing.

 John  

I was gonna say, I mean, Samara is not the only think tank to flag the fact that democracy is going through a difficult phase – Shifting it that way, I think you actually called it a period of democratic backsliding, which is really.... what do you mean by that? Democratic backsliding?

 Sabreena

Yeah, democratic, backsliding, democratic recession, those are technical terms used in the academic world to describe this erosion of our democratic culture. So that can entail the proliferation of misinformation, it can relate to polarization. And it can also involve the alienation of the electorate, as we're talking about now.

 John  

So I mean, I'm thinking about those people at the CNE that you're approaching in those matching T shirts, that were reluctant to even express an opinion about the justice system. I wonder if if it hadn't been the justice system that you were asking about if it had been that political system? Or the or democracy that that slightly, that slightly more vague term, when people have felt more comfortable expressing an opinion was, specifically because it was justice it feels more rarefied people didn't, it didn't want to didn't want to formulate ideas? or do you think that there's a general hesitation among Canadians to express opinion about any of our democratic institutions? What do you think?

 Sabreena

Yeah, I think that the Justice factor is significant, because there's so much pop culture messaging around court, in jail and guilty. And I think that is inadvertently affecting the way people approach the justice system in Canada. And this was something that we did, you know, over five years ago, so this was before the mainstream understanding of the legacy of colonialism within our justice system was, you know, made more clear and apparent to people. 

So there is some there is some specific intimidation around the justice system as an institution has its core democratic institution because it's just inherent to the culture. But it does relate and it does reverberate out to our democracy. I think if we were to ask What are the top three things we should do to make Canada's democracy better? I think they would feel stupid, they would feel put on the spot. And they would feel like they're being shamed. 

And that is a recurring feeling that people have right now, because they aren't sufficiently in our society, equipped for those kinds of conversations, there is a lot of shaming and kind of status oriented approaches to how we talk about democracy in this country. So that, that disconnection and detached reaction, I think is is really important for us to continue to probe and explore and understand better.

 John  

So I was gonna ask you, what are some of the indicators that you're looking at professionally, that tell you that democracy is being challenged in Canada or is under duress in Canada? Is it the fact that people are intimidated by conversations that people are not sufficiently equipped to have meaningful conversations about about civic matters? Is that is that our challenge? Is that the indication that democracy is, is is having a difficult patch here in Canada?

 Sabreena

Yeah, I think that's part of it. But the pandemic is doing interesting things with that feeling. So, you know, we're at a critical juncture right now to define the next chapter for our democracy, because we've been viewing everything with this COVID-19 lens for a couple of years now. And what comes to mind for me, in response to your question, is public schools! 

Public schools exist to produce an engaged citizenry. And right now with the pandemic, we've seen deepening and accelerating inequities in terms of education outcomes, because of the school closures, and you know, that's going to be challenging for any child, but it's really going to take a toll on kids who are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. 

Children who are racialized or from indigenous communities, newcomers, children with disabilities, children who are gender diverse, neuro-diverse, like their learning loss, is our civic loss. And I think we are not really paying attention adequately to the generational impact that can have on us. Most of us who are joining this conversation today have had school, you know, elementary, middle high school be a constant in our lives, we could take it for granted.  Of course, it was going to be there. And that consistency, and the community and all the other social and civic benefits that come from just going to school has been absent for for two years. 

So my daughter is eight years old, that's a quarter of her life. And these are these are really critical years for defining your norms, your values, and just your expectations of society. Because it's not just that schools have had to say to kids, like, I'm just not going to be around right now. Sorry. And like, all of my respect to teachers who have navigated this, this terrible time, but parents have been tasked with managing this message. And that has been so challenging to convey to your child school is really important. 

Your education is really important, and so is your community. But it's not there right now. But it might be back but I don't know. And that is sowing seeds of doubt and potential disconnection and exacerbating inequities, which is really troubling.

 John  

This really troubling and, and I'm wondering if, if most people are connecting the dots or even seeing the dots between the inequities that are being revealed and exacerbated. And the challenges to having a strong healthy democracy I mean, that right now, I think parents and anyone that cares about children right now are just worried about just worried about things like, you know, my child's mental health, their their physical well being, do they have friends? Do they know how to talk to other people? 

All of which, of course, are are fundamental to our lives as as atomistic human beings, but there's also that longer term societal impact on on civics on the ability to have healthy democracy, not just today, but in 20 years and 30 years when it's your daughter's generation that are running the country. So I wonder, you know, whose job is it to draw those dots and connect those dots for people to think about those longer term implications?

 Sabreena

Yeah, I mean, I think we're, we're seeing something critical happening in terms of our identities as citizens and and then also consumers. And for a lot of kids online, when they had to move to learning online, that citizen identity, I think, just kind of is getting a bit jostled, right, they are now learning through Google Classroom. And, you know, they, they have to have a device and they have to have like, there's all these like consumer elements, because you're using the same device to do other things like play and watch shows, but then you're also learning but using that same thing to learn, and there's just adults have been doing that for a really long time. 

But there's something really significant about that happening with kids right now. And so who is responsible for producing an engaged citizenry, like we all are, so that's quite a common, shared the Democratic agenda. And I think, you know, everyone is in survival mode right now. And I am optimistic that when things relent, when the pandemic can Abate, we can build this Civic loss into our recovery plan and have that drive a revitalized Democratic agenda for us.

 John  

So I'm pleased to hear that you're optimistic, because there does seem to be some reason for optimism. And maybe a little bit of schadenfreude, for mixing with it. And what I'm thinking about is, because how can you not think about living this close to the world's greatest superpower? How are we define that? 

And I, it's interesting that that polling, for example, recent polling, you and I talked briefly about this from the Environics Institute, our friends of Environics Institute, points to some positive trends of Canada, relative relative to the United States. And specifically, they've noted that Canadians are generally quite satisfied with the state of our democracy. And the trend is actually towards increasing levels of trust. 

You mentioned trust earlier in key institutions. And unlike our neighbors, south of the border, we've become less divided on questions of democracy with Canadian political parties, drawing most of their support from the center of the political spectrum, rather than from the extreme ends of that spectrum, which appears to be the case more and more in the state. So I'm curious to know if that is optimistic, in your opinion, and what do you make those of that contrast? How do you account for it?

 Sabreena

Yeah, I think it's important that we take pride in what we have at home, and that we value it and that we talk about it and that it is a part of our discourse, to be thinking about our own democracy and how we're taking care of it. 

I think in Canada, we often take comfort in making really selective comparisons about worse instances of racism, voter suppression, violence in the in the United States. And that also leads us to being distracted because we're just focused on like, What's going on over there? What's happened now? oh, my gosh, like this is this is like the latest. And then we forget to work on what's happening in our own house. 

So I think we need to see the democratic recession that's happening in the US or democratic backsliding as a cautionary tale and take heart, like take that really seriously, and get ourselves together to respond in a cohesive way. And that is something that considers everything from what our public schools in our society to how are we handling toxicity online. 

And I think that relates to this, this general state of awakening and reflection that's happening in Canada right now, as we reconcile colonial history with exacerbated inequality during the course of the pandemic, and kind of are sitting with this understanding about the way we talk about power in Canada and a kind of nefarious politeness with which we, we've you used and approached our common Democratic agenda. And we kind of need to push through that if we're really going To be relevant and just advance as a democracy as well. And I think we have to obviously manage our relationship with the United States. And maybe one underutilized way to do that is to draw on the tremendous social capital we have there in our Canadian diaspora.

 John  

I just want to say if I were starting a garage band, right now, their name, the band's name would be Nefarious Polite, I just think that is just perfect. So to continue talking about the relative healthiness of our democracy, you're right, and touched on the toxicity here in Canada, you know, we're, we're looking at the log in someone else's eye, or, you know, what's expression where we have specs, with chips in her own eye anyway, our hands are not clean. That's what I'm trying to say. We had a fairly contentious federal election here in Canada just a few months ago. 

And I know that at Semara, as part of your efforts to understand the online toxicity, as well as the in-person toxicity that that partly defined that campaign? You've been tracking political commentary, or you've tracked political commentary on Twitter that was directed towards hundreds of the political candidates? I'd like to hear more about that. And and what have you learned by analyzing that, that Twitter traffic?

 Sabreena  

So we talk a lot a lot about the need to have more diverse leaders in Canada and in the political arena. If you were to ask someone like you're an amazing leader, you know, fill this critical gap, you've got this amazing contribution to make, what do you say? I think if you ask someone who looked like me, they would say no way, because I don't want to deal with any of the online hate. And I don't want to subject my family to it either. 

So online toxicity is a barrier to civic engagement it's a key reason why people leave politics, or they don't enter it, or they just steer clear of the political conversation altogether. So we wanted to get into that deeper. And elections are often a period of high toxicity online. So we used the recent federal election as an opportunity to collect some data and also increase public awareness about this problem about the toxicity in the online political conversation. 

So one way that, well, the way we did this, and it was a bit novel, because civil society organizations don't always do this. We partnered with a startup tech company called Reto labs based in Edmonton, my hometown. Just a coincidence. total coincidence. Yeah. And we used their machine learning bot, to track tweets received by incumbent candidates and party leaders in the weeks leading up to the election. So we were looking at just a very small slice of the Canadian political conversation online, just one platform. 

We were monitoring tweets received by 300 accounts. And we did it for five weeks. And we analyzed over 2 million tweets. We were able to break down the toxicity with the bot that we had. So our findings confirmed what many in the political world and in other professions, as well, like journalism, understand about the intensity of the toxicity online. So about 20% of what we tracked, qualified as being threatening profane had an identity attack, or was sexually explicit or insulting. We shared reports. 

Every week, during the campaign period, the last week of the campaign, we captured about half a million tweets. And we found that 4% of those tweets had sexually explicit content. And that number sounds really small, 4% whatever. But it's, it translates to 20,000 tweets, and that's not going to be coming evenly across those 300 accounts. It's coming in one week, it’s just a handful of accounts.

And we also found, and this is probably not a surprise for anyone in the audience, that women get more toxic tweets than men and that toxicities generally misogynistic and personal. So, you know, this data is about measuring the obvious because everybody knows this is happening, but we put some really narrow boundaries around it just so that people could get a sense of like the day in the life what's it like to be on the digital campaign trail, what's coming at a candidate and their staffers? And, you know, what do you do when you're navigating this torrent of vitriol. And, you know, your party is maybe required you to be on a social media platform as part of your campaign. And it's just a matter of fact, like, you have to use social media tools, like that's a key way that you're going to get engagement and get your message in front of people. 

So, you know, this is about really illustrating with numbers, what people are asking when they say, well, can't you be more resilient, like, who is going to be able to handle this as a part of the job, like, who is going to be able to tolerate and withstand nonstop digital abuse as their conditions of work. And another element in our finding was that the more well-known you are, the more likely you are to get toxicity online. So Justin Trudeau got the most toxicity. 

But if you're from an underrepresented community, and you decide to become a politician, and you get some measure of success, the reality is, the better you do, the worse it's going to get. And that really needs to be addressed because it is really hindering representation and participation in our democracy. There's the fact that people are receiving this content. But there's also the fact that people can just see this content. It's part of our digital public square, and it has a real silencing effect on people that turns them away. They don't want to have anything to do with this ugliness. And if that's what's happening to our electorate, is very damaging to our democracy.

John  

Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

Sabreena  

it sends a signal to other sectors and to broader society about whose voices heard, who's a leader who gets to take up space. And it's kind of insidious and kind of difficult to grasp what this impact truly is, in terms of lived experience. And so that was our intention with our bot, Sam. And

John  

do we know I mean, one can assume I think, probably safely but do we? Do we know for a fact that candidates are people that might have run unsuccessfully, this time, will not run again, the next time?

I mean, do we do exit interviews to find out if this kind of toxicity actually dissuades people from pursuing their political ambitions participating that active way in democracy? I mean, I assume that it that it would be hard to face that, again, if you've already lived through a once. But do we know that empirically?

Sabreena  

Well, with this iteration of the project, we just looked at incumbent candidates and, and party leaders. So we kind of, you know, just worked with that slice, and we see it as a pilot. So we're looking forward to expanding on this later in the year, where we'll be doing a new iteration of our exit interviews, Project, which is a signature Samara Center initiative. So it's really top of mind for us the retention factor here.

John  

We have a question from one of our audience members. And I think it's a really good one, this harkens back to, to the start of our conversation, you talked about your double perspective, being outside being inside being seen being invisible simultaneously. 

The question is, do you feel that those of us who are situated within marginalized communities constantly struggle with the visible due to our differences or because of our differences, yet? Invisibility with respect to getting our needs and our needs met? So the person says, I'm thinking of myself how it sometimes becomes a Pick Your Battles scenario, should I be visible? Because of my difference? Should I be invisible with respect to having my needs met? How do you manage that struggle? How do you pick your battles? Any thoughts on that as we connect that specifically to engagement in democracy?

Sabreena  

Yeah, so I think that gets at like the performative element that we all play in society and at work and who we are and how we want to present, and I am, you know, for lack of a better way of describing it a recovering model minority. I felt like I had to be really nice. Don't take up too much space. Like I've got this agenda and we like want to change the status quo, but then also just like Um, you know one step at a time, right? 

And I think what this person's question is about that internal reckoning of, you know, who are you? How do you want to present? How are others perceiving you, and then like just trying to manage their expectations and the emotional labor of that, which is so exhausting? 

If you can, I would encourage you to find lots of different tools and supports that liberate you from that, and just, you know, approach it like a really privileged white guy. Is he thinking like that every day? No, he's not. He's just thinking about what he wants. And then he can just, you know, live his life and will encounter challenges and barriers as well. 

But just try to like, get that burden off of you. Because that is a part of the colonial history of like, you are not the default image of this. So you must manage yourself accordingly, you must manage how you speak, and how you look and what you say and what you want. And it doesn't really feel like that for someone day to day, you know, if you're younger, you're just trying to figure out who you are. 

But it's important, I think, to really probe that further and understand like, where’s that coming from? Like, what's the kind of potential generational messaging around that, or what's everyone else doing in this space, and there's a lot of reading you can do around critical race theory, there's also therapy, there's also just kind of being kind to yourself, and understanding that that's a burden that doesn't have to be yours. And if there are ways that you can get that lifted off of you, then you'll have so much more time and energy for the things that you truly want to be contributing to.

John  

Another question from one of our other guests tonight has to do with the difference, if there is a difference between local democracies versus the federal government. So are local democracies. And you can probably extend it to provincial democracies, are they more or less resilient than more senior levels of government? So is there kind of a we're most democratic locally, and then slightly less democratic provincially? And we're the least democratic federally, is that too simplistic? How do you see the different challenges or the different challenges to resilience? And each level of government?

Sabreena  

Yeah, that's such an interesting question like that would be a good one for us to take back and think about and see if our academic collaborators have some data to help us understand what are those units of civic engagement? And how do they carry across those different spaces. 

What comes to mind for me is how the pandemic has changed expectations for each of those levels, as we have become more tuned in and engaged about how the pandemic is being managed. So I think the mainstream understanding of this is a federal decision, schools are a provincial thing. This is a vaccine procurement happens federally, and then what's happening in my city around, you know, or town in terms of, you know, restrictions and things like that. 

So I think our literacy around how what we can expect and hold power to account in those different spaces has evolved. And I wonder if that will be retained as we as we come out of the pandemic, as well. But that's a really interesting question. So

John  

there's an interesting question. I don't know, if you would agree, but you've referred to the engagement, the different kinds of engagement in the pandemic of the different levels of government. One thing that I think that Pandemic has done is kind of to reveal for all to see that Canadian federalism it's messy. It's a patchwork. And, you know, I think we can be much better. And maybe we'll come out of this by I don't know that there'll be any kind of motivation for grand constitutional revisit. 

But we have seen that in certain areas of public health that different public policy approaches across the country have brought about very different results and outcomes for Canadians. And I think we need to think about whether that's what we want as a country. Do we are we content with there being different outcomes across the country because different provincial jurisdictions or even local public health units are taking different approaches to this very fundamental issue of encouraging public health in order to save lives? 

I think it's in I don't think that people are necessarily consciously thinking about federalism, when they're trying to make sense of the competing press releases are really that's kind of almost by osmosis. I think that's something that's happening for people that maybe have never thought about what different levels of government can do.

Sabreena  

Yeah, because it's never, you've never really had to think about it. It hasn't necessarily affected your day to day for a majority of people in the country. And people are paying more attention now to other countries like, well, how come New Zealand could do this thing that, you know,

John  

there's a question about the current debate, maybe it's no longer current, maybe it's not resolved as of yesterday, but the debate over the filibuster in the US Senate and the issue have been raised, obviously. As to whether or not the Democratic Party, the Democratic caucus and Senate should support the eradication of the filibuster specifically for the purpose of passing the voting rights legislation. 

Of course, famously, Senator Christ cinema. And Senator Joe Manchin made that an impossibility. But the question I think, is really interesting, because it compares that whole the vote, the voting rights, tobacco, as it's connected to the filibuster in the States is kind of a central or Central. They call it a centerpiece issue, as an obstruction to democracy in the United States. Are there any obstacles in Canadian democracy? Systemic obstacles? 

I'm presuming that should be addressed in a similar way. It's maybe something that we've taken for granted. It's always been done that way. But is there an institution or institutional practice, I don't know, maybe it's the monarchy, maybe it's the appointed Senate, I have no idea. But it's very such an obstruction that maybe is so present in our lives, we don't even see it. But it really needs to be addressed in order to kind of unleash the full potential of democracy in Canada. What do you think?

Sabreena  

Um, well, I'm going to go back to hurry Han for this one, because she talks about how, like, who were the leaders we need right now. And I think in this moment of transformation, we're like, we're having this awakening, we've got this reckoning. And there's a sense, like, maybe there's more, that could be better, and we just can't quite put our finger on it. 

As you're explaining, I think there is an emerging new wave of leaders right now. And that's something we should be paying attention to. And for Harin Han, she describes, she describes this, this new wave as being adept at navigating all of the shifting terrain that we've explored today. So they can handle the institutional demands, but they're also very connected with their constituents, they have credibility in both spaces, so not talking down to the constituents, not that politicians are doing that. 

But they're balancing it, it's not as if they're, you know, feeling this push pull. So maybe one thing that we need to be attuned to right now, and that could be filled with potential solutions, and maybe bring forth a new golden age for Canada's democracy is a new wave of leaders that can balance all the things that we're talking about, that have the credibility and all these different spaces and the training for it, too. 

You know, when we started this conversation, I talked about how, you know, I'm, I'm this recovering, model minority, and now my leadership of you know, having been a first-generation professional is more valued than ever, and it's my strength. So maybe that's something that we need to be paying attention to. And when you're in a position where you feel like I don't know what I don't know, it's usually a matter of getting different problem solvers into the mix. And maybe that's what we should be paying attention to.

John  

So speaking of the next generation of leaders, let's imagine the next generation of leaders is in grade three, like your daughter, you talked about the need for better civics education for Canadians so that we grow up and we don't shy away from questions at the end or, or at the election booth for stories and media that were actually engaged in those conversations actively and enthusiastically. 

So is there currently a good practice of best practice in terms of civics curriculum that you've seen in Canada? Are there any specific projects that you can point to? That should give us some, some sense of optimism in terms of the future of civics curriculum in Canada and? And who can? Who can benefit from it?

Sabreena  

Yeah, well, I'll mention the work of civics. They're a fantastic organization, they organized parallel election programs at schools across the country. And they have excellent and very respectful relationships with teachers. I'm a big fan of their Ctrl F initiative, which teaches media, digital media literacy skills to students and teachers. 

A key civic skill that we need to equip that generation with is the digital media literacy. And so it would be wonderful to see an expansion of that. But we need to see a culture that is ready to equip this next generation with the Civic skills and understandings that we need. It's you can't just put that on one nonprofit organization, I say, as the executive director of one.

John  

Sabreena?

Sabreena  

Yeah you are fine. Yeah, I'll just default to model minority mode, and I'm not going to complain. So but it would be wonderful for there to be this kind of civic onboarding process normalized in our society where you learn this at this age, you learn that at that age, and then you feel equipped to conduct yourself accordingly to hold power to account. 

You don't feel intimidated or shamed by not knowing this, or that how many MPs are in Parliament, that sort of thing. That would be really, really crucial. And maybe that's something we can get to as part of our pandemic recovery is to have this commitment to a resilient Democratic agenda. And it's one that takes a generational perspective.

John  

He talks a little bit about just now about digital media literacy. Thinking about media more broadly, we have a question about the state of journalism, and how it intersects with the state of our democracy. What do you think is the role of professional journalism in rehabilitating our democracy?

Sabreena  

Yeah, journalism is critical to the health and functioning of our democracy, they have a critical role to play, especially in this era of, you know, misinformation. When we were talking about the sanbot project or action, we got a lot of media coverage, and the, you know, post interview conversation with a producer reporter, with them saying thank you for doing this kind of work, because it helps validate our experiences. 

Because, you know, we all know this happens, but no one really talks about it or quantifies it or makes it real in this way. So thank you for doing that. And so we need to understand what journalists’ conditions of work are. And we've seen instances of abuse online, where journalists have had their personal information shared publicly and have had to deal with abuse and violence. And that's not acceptable. And I think increasing our support and value for journalists as a commitment to healthy democratic culture is, is wise and important.

John  

Yeah, it's healthy. I think it's a good sign that the co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize last year were both journalists. It's a positive sign, but it's a drop in the bucket of what needs to happen in terms of protecting the lives and the rights of journalists. So we're winding down our conversation, Sabreena, and as you know, and as those of you have joined us for previous Changemakers conversations, we'd like to do a quick speed round of questions with our special guest. And you're open for that, Sabreena, I mean, you don't have to rush, but the spirit there is short answer as opposed to essay.

Sabreena  

Sure.

John  

Okay. So first of all, when we talk about changemakers, we use the term leaders by example, I said that when I was introducing you, what traits do you think make effective leaders?

Sabreena  

I think it's important for effective leaders to consult and be decisive and to own their mistakes.

John  

Is there an example of a leader that you admire who has been influential in your life, someone that you perhaps maybe even model your own leadership after?

Sabreena  

Yes, who comes to mind is Mrs. Newbold, my grade eight social studies teacher she didn’t, this was not in it was not in the curriculum to understand the harms that have occurred against indigenous communities in Canada. She educated us about residential schools when she didn't need to. And they're not schools. We understand that today. 

But she took the time to do that, and just have her own accord. And she increased, she introduced me to Amnesty International, she helped me understand human rights. And that sense of like equity and justice was really sparked for me in her classroom. And she spoke to everybody, like in a kind of aloof way. Like we were all adults. And I'd like to kind of she had that attitude about her, it was really engaging.

John  

What do you think she would say about you about what you do for a living today?

Sabreena  

Well, I hope she'd be proud. You know,

John  

I'm positive she would be proud. I don't even know where, but I feel I know where you mean.

Sabreena  

Yeah, yeah.

John  

So leaders like Mrs. Newbold, you don't always succeed. Many, many leaders talk about the importance of failure in their life, to help them figure out who they are to help them hold their priorities, clarify which strategies and tactics to use. We're wondering if you would be willing to share a failure, or a setback from your own life that taught you something meaningful and valuable?

Sabreena  

Yeah, I'm glad you're asking that question. Because it's important to normalize that life isn't just this linear path of things that happened exactly as you planned. So for me, I left my Ph. D. program in my second year. And this was perceived as a failure by my peers. But it was a very liberating decision for me. And I pursued that path because people encouraged me to do it. And then I felt like I would be letting them down if I did it. 

And I kind of knew the whole time that that wasn't the right place for me. But I felt like, you know, this is an important to, and, you know, elite space, if I've given if I've been given access to it, you know, I really should go ahead. And this gets out a feeling that I think a lot of people have in their 20s, which is just not being true to yourself, and the social conditioning, back to that model minority thing, again, of, you know, keeping people around me comfortable, avoiding conflict, and then subsequently ending up detached from my own voice and what I actually want it because that those two elements of who I am, at that time really just weren't reconciled yet. 

So I would share that if a relationship isn't working for you, if a decision isn't working for you just dig into that early. And if it's not getting better, or if you're not being met halfway, just move on. But try to do so with integrity, because you might go back, you might reconnect, and to just be open to that and to not fixate on quitting as bad, you have to make the best decisions you can with the information and understanding you have in the moment, even when it's about yourself.

John  

So my last question, and you might have just answered it, unknowingly. But my last question is, if you could go back and talk to your 18-year-old self about how to be a change maker, what advice would you give yourself? Um,

Sabreena  

I would say just focus on doing things and building relationships that don't worry about being a leader or a changemaker. Just get some experience and get to know some people learn, learn some things, and take your time, you have lots of time, so don't worry about the time variable. 

And I would also say ask your elders for advice. Like any elder like professors, people you work with. You don't have to always listen to what they tell you to do. And you don't only have to get advice from someone who looks like you or grew up like you. And this will help you understand that your allies along the way might surprise you. It might surprise you who your allies are.

John  

Sabreena, thank you so much for joining us tonight. This time has flown by, at least for me, and I hope for you and for our other guests in this conversation. I want to remind everybody that our special guest tonight has been Sabreena Delhon, and I want to thank Sabreena and the great team that works with her at Samara especially Abra Rissi. 

We are so grateful to you for sharing your insights, your experiences, your honesty in discussing these very pressing issues around democracy, which obviously affect all of us whether we know it or not it or not. I want to say that this Changemakers conversation was produced and supported by a team of wonderful colleagues at Hart House. Jenifer Newcombe, Lena Yusim, Michele Che, Amy Wang, Christine Lieber, Megan Mueller, and Janine Raftopoulos. Thanks to all of them. 

And for those of us who have joined us in the audience, thank you so much for finding us. Thank you for connecting. Thank you for staying connected. I hope that you'll join us for the next installment of Changemakers in 2022. On March 9, I'll be speaking with human rights lawyer Lorin McDonald, the founder and CEO of HearVue. 

Last year, Lorin was named one of the top 25 Most Influential lawyers in Canada, one of Canada's most powerful women. That was a top 100, but if you've ever had the opportunity to listen to Lorin speak and share her story. She is you know the very top. She's a remarkable speaker and a true Changemaker. So join us on March 9. Thank you again for coming tonight. We hope that tonight has inspired you to be the change that you want to be. Good night.

 John  

Thank you so much to Sabreena Delhon, for joining me in conversation. 

To learn more about Sabreena and her work. You can follow her on Twitter at Sabreena Delhon D E L H O N follow the Samara Center for Democracy on twitter or Instagram at Samara CDA and on Facebook at Samara Canada. This Changemakers conversation was produced and supported by the team at Hart House. That's Jennifer Newcomb, Lena Yusim, Michelle Che, Amy Wang, Christine Liber, Megan Mueller, and Janine Raftopoulos. The podcast was edited by Janine Al Hadidi. Original Music by Recap, they can be found on SoundCloud. 

To learn more about Changemakers please visit Harthouse.ca or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook. Our handle is @HartHouse U of T and I'm John Monahan. 

Thank you for listening

[medicinemane]

Hmm... I'm mad right now, and thanks to tumblr's search being ass I can't even fully say why

I just remember that bolton said some shit a few years back that really pissed me off... something along the lines of just brazening talking about organizing coups or something... like it was that level

Now, I reblogged the clip from the interview to be mad about it at the time, but searching for bolton on my blog... no hits

Couldn't even remember his name for a hot minute there, just thought "that asshole with the big mustache", but man... I wish I could literally just find and reblog the clip... I could probably track it down with a search engine, but then it wouldn't be easy to just reblog it, so I'd probably just end up summarizing it... and I'm too tired for that

Anyway, fuck john bolton and fuck the US government. I get fucking sick of the total lack of accountability those assholes have. Honestly a fair few of them should probably be on trial for war crimes, and we shouldn't protect them

Just hit with a sudden wave of being pissed off about this stuff, so there it is

[qqueenofhades]

It's mind-boggling how the "Republicans are better for the economy" narrative exists. Like we've been in a cycle for the past 30 ish years where we elect a Republican, who ruins shit, and then a Democrat to fix it. It's really, really annoying. Hell, even under Trump-the lowest unemployment rate was 3.5%, in February 2020. The current unemployment rate now under Biden, post-COVID recession, is 3.6%. The idea that Republicans fix the economy and "make new jobs" is a blatant lie.

WELP. I made a recent-ish post on this exact topic, so... yeah. It is part and parcel of how Republicans successfully tricked the entire country into thinking that "Reaganomics" was an actual functional economic strategy and not just a blatant cash-grab plot to make rich people even richer and remove all the limitations of government or regulation on what they could do with their unlimited black-cash mega-fortunes. Even now, as you note, Republicans get the accolade of being Good for the Economy, which means being good for rich white dudes. Since they have successfully rigged the entire system to largely support this proposition, and insisted that the God of the Unlimited Free Market would magically fix everything and anything else was dirty commie socialism, they still have a large fraction of the country automatically buying it.

Like. Reagan, for all his talk about Fiscal Responsibility, ballooned the federal debt to unprecedented levels and as we have also discussed, dismantled the high taxes on the rich that funded postwar recovery and development both at home and abroad. Bush 1 was largely ineffective at everything. Clinton unfortunately contributed to the deregulation frenzy and continued the basic principles of Reagonomics, but by the end of his second term he had consistently delivered balanced budgets with financial surpluses. Then Dubya arrived and really fucked everything up, even before the Great Recession almost wiped out the global financial system. Obama had to come in and fix that. Then Trump crashed it again. (To be fair, Covid did a lot, but y'know, maybe a response that wasn't miserably mishandled on every level would have helped!) Then Biden had to come in and fix that. Etc etc.

Anyway, to translate the Republicans on this issue, just realize that what they consider a healthy economy is high taxes for poor people, none at all for rich people, cutting every single "entitlement" or social welfare program such as Medicare or Social Security, spending billions on the military budget and "Homeland Security" border nonsense, and making sure the stock market stays up by whatever means necessary. Of course, the shell game will eventually collapse and destroy the whole thing, but who cares. Then they can spend their entire time attacking the Democrats for Not Fixing It Fast Enough!!! WINNING.

[seven-oomen]

Okay, this probably won’t be that long, because I have an early shift in the morning, and really should probably already be in bed.  But, I am very glad to hear from you again, even if things are shitty right now.  Also, omg, again, you are not a dick for focusing on your mental health for a while.  I figured there was a good chance that was part of what was going on.  I have multiple friends who have pulled back from various social media, because shit is just really fucked up right now, and most people are having trouble dealing, without any extra issues on top of it. 

I’m really sorry about your therapists, and hope you can either find some equally helpful new ones, or maybe follow your old ones if they end up somewhere else?  Would having official diagnoses possibly help make your old employer more cooperative about the unemployment stuff?  And that sucks about the whole reducing how much welfare you get if people help you thing.  The US has similar stupid issues with some of their programs.  I have a friend on disability that has to be careful how much child support she gets from her ex at a time because if she has too much in savings she could lose her disability.  Which is ridiculous on so many levels, but hey, what else would I expect from this country at this point?

Things at work/in my city have somewhat settled down at this point.  Protests are still happening, and the cops are still being assholes, but slightly less so than before.  Things aren’t not good necessarily, but they’re better.  And while I still have to fight the urge to throw elbows with customers who can’t understand proper social distancing, work has been okay on that front at least.  My schedule has been all over the place due to various people on vacation/medical leave, but thankfully nothing covid related.

Speaking of vacations, I did finally get a few days off, even though I did not get as much done as I’d hoped.  I did get at least a few items checked off my list however, so that’s something.  The most entertaining part was after I finally cleaned out my “bar cabinet” as such, and tossed all the old and/or opened liqueurs left by past roommates and guests that hadn’t been touched, in some cases, in years.  I didn’t toss everything, but it was a pretty fair amount, and as I was taking out my recycling afterwards I just kept praying I wouldn’t run into any neighbors lest they decide to stage an intervention (so…many…empty…bottles…)

I’m trying to get into the holiday spirit this year, but between (probable) executive dysfunction and rollercoastering anxiety, it’s been sporadic at best.  I added some more songs to the Halloween mix on my computer, so now it’s nearly 10 hours of music, so I’ve been playing it to try and help.  I have a decent amount of decorations up now, and I caved and bought two frankly huge pumpkins at the grocery the other day that I now have to figure out what to do with.  One of my friends is trying to arrange a spooky gift exchange since we can’t have any of the parties we normally would, so we’ll see how that goes.

And I will definitely get that story dug back out and give it a going over as soon as I have a free day.  I think it was pretty much done, but it’s been a little bit since I looked at it because I’ve been trying to get further in my current WIP (I need to listen to that “Just write the scene” post, because that’s one of my main issues right now, thinking of scenes for later and getting irritated because I’m not that far in the plot yet.)  And I very much still love that universe, and think of those assholes fairly often.

Holy crud, it’s later than I realized.  To sum up, I’m very glad that you’re still here, and if getting through stuff requires the occasional tumblr sabbatical, that is absolutely okay.  Take care of you first.  And if you want to email me, you can, that’s an older email address, but I do still check it sometimes.  Be warned, however, that I am pretty much fuckall useless for any helpful advice.  My main skill is to be awkwardly yet earnestly encouraging while having no real clue what to say.  But I’m here.  And on a related note, I continue to be awed and impressed at the way you refuse to let any of this stop you, and keep pushing through despite everything, even if it doesn’t feel that way from your side of the view.  (I hope that made sense.  Like I said, not so great with the practical advice/support, but I assure you the sentiment it there.)  I’m glad you’re doing the best you can, and that Mo is doing okay (I didn’t know he’d been having issues, poor kitty!)  Sending all the hope and positive energy (to both of you!)  *Hugs!*  

Nah but I feel like a dick for not saying anything or responding to anyone on here and I feel like a dick for worrying people. And for that, I do owe you an apology.

(I also recognize that this is probably one of these things that was hammered into me and is a residual thing I still do. I apologize for everything.)

And honestly, it’s really appreciated. It really doesn’t feel like it no, but the logical part of me does agree with you on that one. And I’m really glad you’re still around <3

Mo’s doing okay despite his arthosis, he was limping a little last week but the new food seems to be working and it’s slowly easing again. He seems to be a lot happier now.

Ooh, Spooky gift exchange sounds like a blast though! I was going to go ghost hunting but one of my friends has COVID at the moment and we’re going into a second intelligent lock down over here. 

(You’d think the Dutch would be better at social distancing and wearing masks... but- yeah, more and more people seem to be doing the typical annoying Dutch habit of me me me and fuck everybody else and I’m not going to be controlled by my government and wear a muzzle. And yeah, we have a semi-curfew now and Germany has already decided to close its border to us.)

So I definitely get how it might feel for you guys and I’m really sorry people are being dicks to you. If I could slap them I would. <3 

I’m glad you got to take a few days off though, sounds like it was really something you needed and I’m happy you got to tick some boxes.

Also this is the funniest thing I’ve read all day:

The most entertaining part was after I finally cleaned out my “bar cabinet” as such, and tossed all the old and/or opened liqueurs left by past roommates and guests that hadn’t been touched, in some cases, in years.  I didn’t toss everything, but it was a pretty fair amount, and as I was taking out my recycling afterwards I just kept praying I wouldn’t run into any neighbors lest they decide to stage an intervention (so…many…empty…bottles…)

Cause it kinda gives me the image of Noah doing that when he’s clearing out his own house to prepare for the move to the Hale house. And he clears out some of the old bottles of alcohol. And my brain keeps supplying the image where his family catches him in the act and stages an intervention for him.

Idk why that’s so funny to me.

Glad your neighbours didn’t catch you though XD.

It is kinda late over here too so I’mma head in and catch some zzzz’s. Hope your day went well!

[breezybadaboom]

So what happens when we run out of natural resources?

When is that expected to happen? 1 year? 10 years? Hello big scary looming climate change. You don’t uhh… you don’t think the government hasn’t done something to prepare for it? I mean when we put on our thinking caps and just ask ourselves… why haven’t they tried some sort of population control thing? Oh um probably because Americans can have a slight tendency to be self-righteous “freedom” obsessed protesters. Okii. Well... capitalists are the pioneers of “magic” right? So when your at the top looking down and your so used to the easy lifestyle what do you do to fix a complicated problem? You grab your pen and go to town; social Darwinism muahahaha.

Okay um. Bleh, well that didn’t workout. Hello, goodbye, and good riddance occupy-wallstreet. That’s just for lazy drug addicts… right? <wrong> Hmmm. Wow why do the poor people keep having babies? Then they want welfare?? No you scum, your supposed to stop reproducing! Now look what you horny poor people have done! Your polluting our beautiful world. Why cant you just die?

Okay yeah... That’s a little extreme…we’ve got people in the 1% who are decent and human. They all like “Uhg- you try sorting through this knot! We need something quick and easy, and lets do it before we run out of natural resources please? I don’t want that… ehem, strange, mysterious, alien crowd attempting to break down my door when anarchy breaks out. No thank you. How do we save the earth? Have you tried talking to the 99%? Total bafoons. TV watching, fast food eating, drug addicted (oh hush thats not MY family who was involved with making that happen...). Its too late; the damage is done. There are too many of them, we can’t sustain them any more and who cares anyways? I mean once they are all dead nobody will suffer, and the earth will still have plenty of resources for years to come to provide for my babies…”

Don’t talk about the concentration camps on the internet though because every person who does becomes so afflicted with insanity, disease and… Wait hold on. Concentration camps?

Well yeah, its all over the internet; all these strange mysterious camps are popping up across America with massive amounts of boxes that are just perfect for loading up with bodies and burying. Quick and dirty method for getting things done… that’s how a real badass would do it… right? Wrong. Whatever helps you sleep at night...

What happens when “the machine” turns magic into a science? You know; with machines that generate high frequency sonar waves? Machines that they can program to drive people insane… Suddenly suppressing the revolution/all resistance turns into a game of “whack a mole.” (Aw shoot i think thats classified...).

Its not genocide, its… saving the world; saving the earth; preserving natural resources so that humanity can thrive. Please don’t call it genocide sweetie; this needs to happen. Survival of the fittest hun; you’ve earned your right to come visit the capital and live in the new world. Why don’t you come teach us some of your fancy little magic tricks? Show us your favorite calculations. You know we will find you<3 And we are going to do whatever it takes to force you to comply with saving the world. Hun, you need to realize that you can get into some serious trouble. 

… so here I am looking around me, with guns pointed in my direction every which way I look, when a hand extends to me with only the most fulfilling promises… Do I take it?

No; the only thing I see is God. And He says run. Run to me, and I promise everything will be alright. 

...You’ll come to realize that sometimes when God doesn’t answer your prayers… it’s a blessing in disguise.

https://youtu.be/gMuaFfbJw1g

[bigyack-com]

The World Wants More Danish TV Than Denmark Can Handle

COPENHAGEN — Merete Mortensen, the founder of a successful television production company here, is used to having her pick of the industry’s top talent in Denmark. But when she was trying to hire a new developer this year to help her create new shows, her first and even second choice turned her down.She sweet-talked them with everything she could think of — a larger salary, a longer contract, beers — but with no luck.“It’s been crazy this year in Denmark,” said Ms. Mortensen. “We’ve been having bidding wars over the best people.”Netflix, Amazon Prime and their ever-growing number of competitors have dramatically reordered television, creating a boom in TV shows as well as jobs for actors, directors, producers and writers. A lot of that content is being developed far from the usual hubs in Hollywood, New York and London, as the streaming services mine international productions from countries including France, Japan and Brazil.Perhaps nowhere is that expansion more evident than in Denmark, where thanks to years of rising demand, there are many more critically-praised series and movies being made than ever before. But what there isn’t, in this country of just 5.6 million people, is enough skilled professionals to produce them all.Help-wanted ads are popping up all over industry Facebook groups. Certain shows have had to postpone production by six months, or indefinitely, said Claus Ladegaard, the director of the government-sponsored Danish Film Institute, which helps fund many productions here. There’s a two-year wait for skilled line producers, who oversee productions, Mr. Ladegaard said, noting there is also a shortage of scriptwriters, cinematographers and directors.Both TV2, a public station, and the film institute recently called on the Danish Film School — the country’s only training center of its kind — to double its enrollment to meet the demand. Currently, only 42 students are admitted every two years.A decade ago, there might be two or three television series in production in Denmark at any time, Mr. Ladegaard said. Now there are close to 20. That’s in addition to 20 to 25 films being shot, a number that has remained steady, but exacerbates the labor shortfall because they draw from the same talent pool. The country’s theater producers, who tend to book actors far in advance, are also suffering.Stine Meldgaard, a television producer, said her staff frequently must coordinate with other shows over their actors’ increasingly complicated schedules. “They’ll call another production and say, ‘We need him here until 2 p.m., but we can get him over to you after that,’” Ms. Meldgaard said during an interview on Thursday at Hvidovre Hospital outside Copenhagen, where her show about a con artist couple, “Pros and Cons,” was shooting in an examining room. “Luckily,” she added, “we’re very cooperative in Denmark.”Long known for generous social welfare benefits, minimalist furniture design and Lego, Denmark was until recently just a pixel in the television world. About a dozen years ago, Danish broadcasters began ramping up their investments in high-quality TV dramas. Shows like “The Killing” and “The Bridge” helped establish the popular genre known as ‘Nordic noir,” which features brutal crimes set in bleak landscapes, and builds narratives around complicated, often tormented protagonists who contradict the region’s reputation for contented, well-behaved citizens.Denmark is in demand for other genres, too. One of the most popular Danish shows of the last decade was a political drama, “Borgen,” a fictional series about the country’s first female prime minister struggling to balance the demands of family and consensus politics. The Danish programs became huge hits at home and abroad and “broke the subtitle barrier for TV,” said Hanne Palmquist, the vice president of original programming for HBO Nordic. The shows also sparked a broader interest in Scandinavian productions, including Sweden’s “Wallander” and Norway’s “Lillehammer.”“The Killing” and “The Bridge” earned English-language remakes in the United States, and many of the Danish projects in development today are being produced for American companies. On Dec. 3, HBO Nordic announced that its first Danish production, a young adult drama called “Kamikaze,” will begin shooting next year.Netflix premiered its first Danish series, “The Rain,” in 2017. A sci-fi tale that follows a band of young survivors after a virus wipes out most of Scandinavia, the show is currently shooting its third and final season. The first season was “one of Netflix’s most successful non-English series to date,” said Tesha Crawford, Netflix’s director of international original series. Yet it never would have been made, the show’s producer and co-creator Christian Potalivo said, had it not been for the streaming platform. “We knew that no big broadcaster in Denmark would have touched it,” he said. “Budget-wise and target audience-wise, it was out. We put it in a drawer until Netflix came along.”The Nordic streaming service Viaplay, which airs “Pros and Cons,” is even thinking of launching an all-Nordic platform in the United States and Britain. Anders Jensen, the chief executive of Viaplay’s parent company, Nordic Entertainment Group, said that today “the likelihood of a Nordic service finding an audience is much stronger.” While all this global interest might be putting strain on production companies, it has been a boon for those working in the industry, especially people starting out. Mads Mengel, who graduated from the Danish Film School this summer, found high-profile work right away, directing a new series for DR, Denmark’s largest broadcaster. “You always hear, ‘Yeah, you want to be a film director, good luck with that,’” he said. “So it was way beyond what I expected, to find a job in one and a half months.”As a producer of reality and documentary shows, Ms. Mortensen’s company, Heartland, tends to hire graduates of the journalism school, rather than the film school. But they, too, are in high demand. “You have people right out of school, with no experience, getting jobs that pay 40,000 krone ($6,000) a month,” she said.Besides pushing the film school to increase enrollment, the Danish Film Institute is also collaborating on an initiative that, if it is approved, will require broadcasters and streaming services to pay Danish production companies to cover the costs of including trainees on all their feature films and TV shows, so people new to the industry can learn as they work.Unlike other European countries, Denmark does not offer tax incentives to production companies. The Danish film and television industry does, however, have idiosyncrasies that serve it well. Professional relationships formed at film school tend to last throughout a producer or director’s career, and a strong subsidy system helps launch new filmmakers. Fluid boundaries between media mean that directors and screenwriters can bring the same degree of artistry to television as they do to film. “Even back in the 1990s,” said Ms. Palmquist of HBO, “it wasn’t shameful for a film director to do television.”Most important to the success of these Danish exports, industry insiders agreed, is the local talent for storytelling. “We are very good at telling stories about people and relationships,” said Louise Vesth, a producer of “A Taste of Hunger,” a new Danish film that faced difficulties hiring crew, despite having a prominent director and a starring role for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” “It goes all the way back to Nordic mythology,” Ms. Vesth said. “We’re very good at telling big stories about small problems.” The “feeding frenzy,” as Ms. Palmquist described it, has led some to worry that by attempting to meet the demands of a global audience, Danish films and shows will sacrifice the things that made them great in the first place. A reputation for complex narratives is one of them. So is faithfulness to a sense of place and national character, as seen in the post-apocalyptic but still recognizable Copenhagen of “The Rain,” and in the wry underdog spirit of “Pros and Cons.”“It’s extremely important to write the story that is based on your own locally-based existence,” said Adam Price, the Danish writer and creator of “Borgen.”“If you aim for too big an audience,” he said, “you might find yourself with no audience at all.” Read the full article

[sinesalvatorem]

I was just thinking more about Sam[]zdat’s review and, actually, there’s another quote that seems more valuable. One about how even we today can fail to understand other people’s knowledge of their own conditions, just because half of what they say is actually flatly wrong:

In the [cool kids scene] of the 2000’s, opposition to Christianity was a given. No subject was more likely to unite than a good old bashing of fundamentalists. Marxists, Anarchists, Libertarians, Liberals, Randians – it crossed political borders. (I’m from California, if that helps.)

It was hard not to – it’s not like the fundies had any coherent reasons they could articulate. Every other day some [class indicator] pastor would announce opposition to “the gay agenda” or seek to return to “a Christian nation” as though that were a desirable thing that had ever existed (like, deism duh, etc.). If that wasn’t bad enough, when pressed for an explanation, they’d just read some passage from John or Corinthians. “And? Was that all?” Readers take note: if someone is busy mocking you for your holy book, justifying your actions based on your holy book is a terrible rhetorical strategy.

Standard interpretation: “The olds are lamenting the loss of an oppressive institution that has no objective value, right?” Right?

So this is what churches do in our language: they’re probably the single most important economic institution in rural America. Period.

Here are some obvious economic effects: Nearly every church functions as a community safety net, where tithes collected are distributed to poor members or members experiencing sudden economic shock (disemployment, medical issues, etc.). Depending on the church, this is actually a lot more immediate and a lot larger than government distributions that approximate the same thing. They also function as labor banks, wherein members help one another with projects that they could otherwise not afford (think of home improvement projects coordinated through the church, wherein one can afford to repaint their house or call on the labor expertise of a fellow congregation members [say a plumber] to perform a simple  but otherwise costly repair). Hell, one of the biggest things they do is something almost no one seems to think about: most churches provide free after school programs for poor congregation members, which is a humongous cost for parents. “Big deal.” Yeah, but the cost of childcare is actually fucking enormous.

Note that most of those are vastly more important for the old and the retired (“it’s just the olds complaining!”), both in terms of cost (local members helping for free) and autonomy (one is less likely to have to enter the anonymity of a retirement home, etc. if community members are there to help).

Churches have many more nebulous effects that are even larger: they improve social trust, which has a stupidly powerful economic effect. They provide local networking effects, allowing members to find new jobs and move up using church connections. Many studies relate churches to decreased violence and drug problem in communities (although I suspect this is confounded by social trust and the kinds of people who tend toward religiosity). A lot of these aren’t going to have great studies attached, because they’re under the radar and understudied. But want to see something that will knock your socks off?

Gruber’s results suggest a “very strong positive correlation” between religious market density, religious participation, and positive economic outcomes.” People living in an area with a higher density of co-religionists have higher incomes, they are less likely to be high school dropouts, and more likely to have a college degree.” Living in such an area also reduces the odds of receiving welfare, decreases the odds of being divorced, and increases the odds of being married. The effects can be substantial. Doubling the rate of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent, decreases welfare participation by 16 percent from baseline rates, decreases the odds of being divorced by 4 percent, and increases the odds of being married by 4.4 percent.

Source, emphasis mine. Note the most important part of that: one has to live nearby other co-religionists for these effects. “The kids are turning to atheism/the Devil” is a sign that all the coreligionists are going away.

In other words, churches are a cornerstone of local economic activity but they have to be churches. You can replace a Widget Factory with a Zigdet Factory and it’ll be the same, but we have no idea how to replicate church attendance.

This has another effect: any attempt to “stop” these negative effects won’t work. They only work based on the logic of the community. Because metis is both the worldview and the action, undoing one messes with the other. You can literally see this happening right this very moment in the midwest: church attendance collapsing is deleting a lot of those benefits even while the government tries to fill the void. It doesn’t “work” in the same way, because a lot of those effects are based on shared culture and trust that a government agency just can’t replicate. They only come with a shared worldview.

In a weird way, maybe that welfare participation is the (attempted) replacement, but then it’s hard to square the simple economic replacement with this:

And, attending religious services weekly, rather than not at all, has the same effect on individuals’ reported happiness as moving from the bottom to the top quartile of the income distribution.

“Man, this sounds like something everyone should know!” I agree, but also HA! That will never happen. I know how to argue for cultural conservatives to my left-wing, coastal audience. But how do you think the average actual conservative argues for that? “Faith”, “family values”, “God”, i.e., irrationally.

I know this is hard, but imagine actually being a conservative Christian in a dying town. Everything I just described is going away, nothing seems able to replace it, and things are just getting worse. The most noticeable difference by far is going to be “cultural” – what language would you use? “Loss of faith and family” is actually pretty apt. Let’s say that their arguments are identical to mine, just shrouded in local language. Fine – all that means is that In the final analysis, the conservative christian recognizes that they’re being deprived even of the power to complain, which is to say, even of the power to explain their powerlessness.

VII

“Ew. Are you saying-”

No, I’m not saying that the government is oppressing American Christians. That’s stupid. They lost the culture war, but no one is tearing up their actual communities. There’s a broader social pressure now that has, well, social effects. I do think that two hundred years from now when we have a better handle on psychology and economics everyone is going to look back at this time with total confusion. Like – how did no one notice? Didn’t you see this economic and social collapse? They were even yelling at you about it! We will confidently aver: “Yes, but when they were yelling they had the impertinence to quote the Bible, and so we knew that they were wrong.” And the person from the future will, quite reasonably, call us complete fucking twats.

[magister-christophe]

"And the result is you, as in every tax payer pays a higher price for the product, and the government gets money from tariffs. That’s not taxes how?"

No, the result is you pay for the less expensive product offered by the domestic market, or choose to pay more for the imported. It's not a tax on the taxpayer because they're not compelled to pay for the price increase. It's the same forces at play that keep corporations from just jacking up their prices currently, without any of these proposed increases in taxes.

"They’re leaving because of the taxes, to make this scheme work you have to tax them even more than you would if they were here."

Yes, exactly. Why is this hard to understand?

"Ignoring the obvious immoral implication that you believe peoples property belongs to the state and they need to be punished for doing with it what they will, those tariffs transfer to US citizens."

The state in this situation is only representing the will of the people. The people are saying, if you want to do business here with us - if you want to make a profit off of our market - then you have to pay.

Their property is still their property. If what they want to do with it involves selling it here, then they have to agree to the terms set by the residents here. If they don't want to agree to those terms they're free to miss out, and someone else will fill the gap in the market.

"Because it doesn't work" is a pretty shit answer. There are parts that work well and parts that don't. There are people living in houses instead of the streets, buying groceries instead of eating out of dumpsters, and getting medical care instead of dying - because of welfare. I'd say that's working to do exactly what it's meant to.

"Because it's not your money", yeah that's a good point if you believe that taxing in general constitutes theft. I don't see it that way, because your money doesn't exist in a vacuum. Acquisition of that money is predicated upon the existence of a system, and as part of your use of the system you agree to give a portion of that money back into it.

"Tell that to people who want gun control."

I have and do tell that to the people who want gun control but this isn't what we're discussing, please try and stay on topic.

"Have you seen the debt, have you seen the spending, have you ever once literally even one time in the history of the country seen government spending GO DOWN."

Debt isn't deficit. Spending facilitates growth. Overall, no; within specific programs, yes.

"The majority of US taxes go to welfare, if you can’t do what you want with that then the welfare state is an object failure."

Earlier you said half a trillion goes to welfare, so we only pull in a trillion dollars in taxes? I'll save you the trouble of figuring that out - that's not true. You should probably check your numbers. Though if you are concerned about lowering welfare spending then you'll be happy to know that socializing health care can easily and significantly reduce the amount of welfare already allocated towards that.

Either way this is an incredibly stupid argument. The amount of money necessary to successfully implement a social program depends on many different factors - absolutely none of which have anything to do with what percentage of overall tax revenue goes to it. So this is ultimately an emotional argument - you just don't like the idea of the majority of taxes (true or not) going to welfare but you have no good logical argument as to why it's bad. This seems to be a trend here.

"What percentage of my labor do you feel entitled to?"

There are people who make more in the minutes they spend pushing out a turd than you could with a year's worth of brutal manual labor. Labor isn't synonymous to wealth. You're not taxed on your labor, you're taxed on your income. You also neglected to answer my question - what percentage of a cut do you think would be appropriate and why?