#I mean… with the political climate against minorities in your country I expect a little more responsible and sensitive material but no

[truegodofthearena]

Pakistan every time a Bollywood movie comes out

[marvelsmostwanted]

Hey American voters! 🇺🇸

Guess what?!!

🚨 It’s time to start worrying about the 2022 and 2024 elections. 🚨

(Yeah. We really gotta do this. It's... not looking great.)

Long story short:

Republicans have been working hard since the 2020 election to enact voter suppression laws, overturn election results, and set themselves up to steal the 2024 presidential election if necessary.

You’ve probably heard about the Georgia voter suppression law. But did you know that “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorist Republicans are running to be election officials like Secretary of State in several swing states, setting themselves up to overturn future elections? They are dismantling democracy before our eyes.

So what’s the worst case scenario?

...Well, let’s start with the realistic scenario.

Republicans are likely to take back the House in 2022. They are possibly capable of doing it through gerrymandering alone. Is it possible for Democrats to keep the House? Yes, but it will take a huge effort.

Republicans could also win back the Senate since it's currently 50-50 and Democrats only have a narrow majority because we won the presidency.

Even if Republicans only win back the House, the Biden administration would legislatively accomplish very little from 2022-2024. Republicans would have the power to impeach Biden for no reason and cause another constitutional crisis, enable gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, and block any Democratic priorities from becoming law (gun control, climate change, and healthcare are just a few things that would be off the table entirely).

Then comes 2024.

Donald Trump is the most likely Republican candidate to run and win in 2024. In a recent poll (May 2021), 66% of Republicans indicated that they would vote for Trump again.

Yes, Trump can run even if he’s indicted on criminal charges. He can run even if he’s in prison!

Remember, although Biden won by 7 million votes, it was really a difference of about 44,000 votes in three swing states that prevented Trump from winning the Electoral College and becoming president again. That is a frighteningly small margin.

Even if the candidate isn’t Trump, this is still going to be a close election. 85% of Republicans say they would vote for a Trump-aligned candidate (same poll as above).

If Republicans win back or maintain control of Congress in 2024, this could set up an even more dangerous scenario:

The House has the power to choose the president if Congress does not award 270 electoral votes to either candidate.

How could that happen? Well, those "Stop the Steal" Republican election officials in swing states could refuse to certify the election, claiming fraud, and a close election could end up with neither candidate getting enough electoral votes. House Republicans could literally choose the next president without any input from voters and effectively end American democracy as we know it.

Because you know that Republicans will never let go of that power once they have it.

This is not far-fetched.

This is a realistic, highly likely scenario that will happen if we don’t do something to prevent it. Journalists and election experts are trying to sound the alarm, and we should listen:

New York Times - How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election

Washington Post - American democracy is in even worse shape than you think

Pod Save America - Stop the 2024 Steal (Discussion at 29:00)

LA Times - Trump’s allies are prepping to steal 2024 election

The only way to prevent this from becoming reality is to fight like hell against it. And I know we just did that in 2018 and 2020. But this fight isn't over until we restore and protect our democracy.

This isn’t about how much you like Biden & Harris, or even if you’re a Democrat in general. It’s about saving democracy in America.

What can we do about it?

Unfortunately, it’s going to be an uphill battle. But if we all engage in this fight, then we can make a difference.

TLDR, we need to raise awareness about the threat to democracy, encourage Democrats to end the filibuster and pass H.R.1 immediately, and organize, organize, organize to get voters back out there in 2022 and 2024.

Specific ways to help & additional resources below the cut.

How to help:

National Level:

*High priority: Call your Democratic Senator(s) right now and tell them to pass H.R.1, the For the People Act, with urgency.

*High priority: Call your Democratic Senator(s) right now and tell them that you are strongly in favor of ending the filibuster (Especially if your Senator is Manchin or Sinema.)

Call your Democratic Senator(s) and tell them to vote for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Call your Republican Senator(s) and tell them you are in favor of all of the above, especially if you live in a swing state.

State Level:

*High priority: Find out who is running for state legislature and other positions that have control over elections, such as Secretary of State. Donate or volunteer for their campaigns. Spread the word amongst your family and friends and make sure they know who to vote for and the date of the election.

If no one is running against the Republican, consider running! I’m not joking. Or if you know someone who is qualified and/or interested in running, encourage them to do so.

Local Level:

*High priority: Same as on the state level: Find out who is running and support the person who is supporting democracy. Local election officials can have a huge impact, especially in swing states and counties. Spread the word about this candidate, the election date, registering to vote, where to vote, etc.

Again, if no one is running, consider running! Incumbents often stay in power because they are unchallenged. And a local position is a great way to get involved in politics and help your community.

Additional ways to help:

Make sure you are registered to vote.

Check in with 3 friends/family members and help them register to vote if they are not already.

Send reminders to friends/family to vote on Election Day - not just in November, but for special elections, local elections, etc.

Volunteer with a group specifically working to help progressives win elections: SwingLeft, EMILY’s List, etc.

Donate to the candidates you support early and often! One of the reasons Democratic House candidates struggled in 2020 was that a lot of money came in at the last minute. Donating early and/or on a monthly basis ensures that they have the funds to run a long, successful campaign.

More Info & Resources:

Read: Washington Post - American democracy is in even worse shape than you think

Excerpt/TLDR: "The radicalization of the Republican Party has outpaced what even most critical observers imagined,” Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer told me. “We need to grapple with what that should mean for our expectations going forward and start thinking about real worst-case scenarios." - Perry Bacon Jr.

Read: New York Times - How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election

“It occurred to me,” [Erica Newland, counsel for Protect Democracy] told her colleagues then, “as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there’s no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.”

Listen: Pod Save America - Stop the 2024 Steal (29:00-36:27 covers the bulk of it, and they go on for about another 10 minutes after that)

Excerpt: "If you just watch what's happening... it is a very clear indication of a minority party that knows it has no path to majority status rigging elections at every level to set the stage for minority rule in this country. (...) People are not alarmed enough about [this]. The great asymmetry in American politics is that Republicans view power as an end in itself, and Democrats view power as a means to an end. Republicans are using the power they have to put in place laws that allow them to hold onto political power. (...) We need to raise the alarm. There are disturbing signs of complacency in our party." - Dan Pfeiffer

Register or check voter registration: Vote.org

Support H.R.1: VoteSaveAmerica.com/ForThePeople

[viciousgracearc]

sh.adow & b.one thoughts ( contains spoilers! ) tw: racism ( this is just a thought dump and to explain why i’m not adapting the show’s racist elements in my portrayals )

disclaimer: just because i will not adapt the racist element as it appears in the show doesn’t mean i won’t acknowledge the book canon, in-universe prejudice and discrimination against the poc characters in grishaverse. 

so. the racism in shadow and bone. having watched all of the show, i now have some mixed thoughts about it. in the books, alina is assumed to be white for the most part. it is only at the end when we ( or at least i ) suspected that she is not entirely ravkan, and then the casting confirmed it. the kind of racism alina ( and mal ) faced in the show was never a factor in the books, despite rampant anti-shu and anti-fjerdan sentiment. the suli are painted as people who are displaced and mostly neglected by the ravkan government, and definitely treated with prejudice, but as far as i recall there is no specific slur directed at them either in book canon.

however, whereas alina’s ethnicity is vague in the books, it is crystal clear in the show that she is a biracial woman. i know that for biracial folk, experiences vary across the board, especially if you’re a biracial person and an immigrant or a refugee. alina is a war orphan. her mother’s country of origin is at war with her current country of residence. to an extent, i understand the level of animosity ravkans have against people who look like the threat / the enemy. people of color face racism and prejudice day in and day out, sometimes from white people, sometimes from fellow people of color. this is a grim reality with a long and studied history of racism and racial superiority creating divides between minorities and pitting them against each other.

was the racism necessary to the plot? it definitely adds layers to it. you have an orphaned girl of color in a mostly white people country. they discriminate against her and her best friend for most of her life, using slurs such as “rice-eater” and “half-breed”. but this country has a huge problem, and it turns out only this orphaned girl of color can save them from it, despite them alienating her consistently. now they need her help, now they call her a saint. this girl, who based on show-canon, feels so different and abnormal from the rest of her peers because her ethnicity is always pointed out and considered a bad thing. now she has to be a hero for a country that despises her... and not only that, now she has to do it under the tutelage of a white man. white man looks older than her; there is an obvious imbalance in their power dynamic, but he looks at her like his hope come at last and places her on a pedestal she doesn’t ask for. this same white man puts a collar around her neck and then effectively subjugates her by taking control of her power.

it... it kinda sounds bad, doesn’t it? it does. “but wait,” the volcra screeches. “via, are you fucking stupid?” it asks. “that’s not how the story ends! she overcomes!”

well, yes. but does it really make the rest of it any less insidious? alina is denied food, consistently picked on, and mocked, for being half-shu. it is prevalent in her show storyline and difficult to ignore. and thus it will be woven into everything that happens to her, and every decision that she makes will in turn, make us, the viewers, look back on it even if she herself doesn’t do so explicitly. i know the intent of including this racism element into her ( and mal’s ) story is to portray an accurate depiction of the POC experience as they maneuver white or mostly white spaces, or just spaces not catered to their specific ethnicity. but does it work? is it necessary? the irregulars, which is also a netflix show, did a great job at casting a young chinese woman in a lead role and a black man as dr. john watson without ever having to define their characters or their capabilities to move in the world by their race alone. as a half-chinese woman myself, it was empowering to watch a chinese girl able to take the lead and make bold statements and brave decisions without ever being bogged down by the limitations of her race. 

at the end of the day, it is a fantasy world. do you think if the racism isn’t there, the story’s going to be worse off than it is? personally, if they left it out, i think the story will be just fine. there are a lot of things that tie these characters together outside of their racial struggles, like... i don’t know, personality? circumstances? the need to save their country from a powerful tyrant? the struggle for survival in a constantly at-war nation? there is also the fact that this racism element they’ve introduced is inconsistent. so much directed against alina and mal because they want the viewers to sympathize with these two characters. some of it directed towards inej, another protagonist, whose story has a lot to do with how she was exploited because she is suli. but where’s the racism directed at zoya? at botkin? if there’s racism against the shu and if they call them rice-eaters, where’s the anti-fjerdan racism and what do they call fjerdans? ice-shavers? cold-dwellers? aren’t fjerdans ravka’s enemies too? but oh wait... fjerdans are white. nevermind.

speaking of zoya: in the books, especially in RoW, it was implied that she is white-passing, which is why she was never treated differently for being suli. however, show!zoya is NOT white-passing at all. she is very obviously a woman of color, and while i acknowledge that yes, poc can be racist against poc, i don’t really see zoya -- bully, mean girl, attention-starved, ambitious, ruthless zoya -- resulting to such a low blow. sujaya dasgupta herself admitted that in show canon, zoya experiences racism ( though it was never explicitly shown to us ), and consciously turns it against alina in the hopes of hurting another woman of color. don’t get me wrong, zoya is definitely a terrible person at the start of the series. she was classist and mean and she had a superiority complex, and that superiority complex comes from being a powerful grisha, something she worked hard for. she thinks alina doesn’t belong in the little palace, not because alina is shu, but because alina appears out of nowhere, is untrained but is already considered powerful / the solution to everyone’s problem, and has nabbed her old place as the darkling’s favored. the “you stink of keramzin” jab is more than enough to drive her point home and i don’t think “half-breed” is necessary at all. besides, from what it looked like, alina isn’t the only mixed-race grisha. grisha comes from all over, taking refuge in ravka because they’re the only nation that treats their grisha under acceptable conditions. so one would expect some diversity there, which zoya, having been at the little palace since age 9, would have been used to by now. i don’t really think there’s a lot of incentive for her in using a racial slur, and she’s lethal enough with words that she doesn’t need them to injure somebody. 

“via, stop barking and tell us what you’re going to adapt in your portrayal!”

okay, well. personally, i’m not interested in including the show’s racist element in any of my characters’ storyline ( alina, zoya, mal, ehri ). i acknowledge the anti-shu, anti-fjerdan, and anti-suli sentiments as they appear in book canon, but i will not use alina’s ethnicity as the basis of her “otherness” because i like the book canon explanation for that better. nor will i acknowledge that zoya called alina a half-breed, because my zoya is not white-passing zoya, and she knows infinitely better ways to inflict verbal harm than racism. zoya will also be grappling with being half-suli because she was exposed to anti-suli sentiments by her own mother as a young child. 

all my characters are of asian-adjacent ethnicities, and as an asian person myself, do you really think i am interested in reliving my traumatic racism experiences through the characters that i write in a fantasy world? with alina especially, it’s like she couldn’t breathe without someone pointing out that she’s half-shu. i think as much as it is important to show authentic poc experiences in art and media, it is also equally important to show poc solidarity, and to stop defining people by their race alone and to just let them exist as people. 

it doesn’t help that the show’s way of depicting racism is gratuitous, insulting, and feels like it’s catered more towards the white gaze than... you know, actual POC viewers? i understand people will disagree with me on this and that’s fine. this is just how i feel. given that shu-han as a nation didn’t even feature much in the books and we don’t know ANYTHING about them in a cultural context aside from the fact that their appearance is coded as east asian, the discrimination towards them really just hinges on shallow factors like how they look, what they eat ( ???? ), and how they are viewed as ravka’s enemy. it boils down to an east vs. west type of scenario ( and considering the barrage of anti-asian sentiment in our current political climate it’s... questionable at the very least ), and the racism element is not a profound expression of the poc experience but more like... a caricature version of it, once again, in my opinion.

“via, i can’t believe you used that many words trying to tell us you won’t include the racism in your portrayal.”

hey, i know. but a girl be having thoughts, a girl’s two brain cells be rubbing together, you know? this is me deep cleansing my brain by yoting my thoughts into the void. but yes, this is my take! i understand if you don’t feel the same way, but i just... i can’t feature the racist elements of the show in my blog, sorry (not really).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 5, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Today, Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. Haugen noted that Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg controls about 58% of Facebook’s voting shares, meaning he sets the terms of the company’s behavior. Her documents, illustrating that Facebook addressed only about 1% of hate violent speech and that its own algorithms pushed disinformation, supported her general observations about the need for government regulation of the social media giant.

While Haugen was testifying, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone reinforced that message when he texted the ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, to note that Haugen had not worked directly on issues of child safety or Instagram at Facebook, facts Haugen had already established.

Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch issued a statement attacking Haugen as untrustworthy but saying, “we agree…it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet…. [I]t is time for Congress to act.”

Tonight Zuckerberg responded in a Facebook post of his own. He echoed Pietsch’s call for government regulation.He called the recent coverage of the company a “false picture,” with claims that “don’t make any sense” because the company has “established an industry-leading standard for transparency.” He wrote that “[w]e care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.” He says it is “just not true” that “we prioritize profit over safety and well-being,” and that it is “deeply illogical” that they “deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit.” “It’s very important” to him, he says, “that everything we build is safe and good for kids.”

While information about Facebook has demonstrated the dangers the social media giant poses for our democracy, the congressional fight over the debt ceiling has brought into relief a different struggle for the same cause.

The Republican Party has now swung almost entirely behind former president Trump—one heck of a gamble as his legal jeopardy continues to mount. Today, a New York state court said Trump must give a deposition in the defamation case brought against him by Summer Zervos, the former "Apprentice" contestant who said he sexually assaulted her and sued him for defamation after he called her a liar. And as the January 6 committee continues to take evidence, bipartisan groups of lawyers have asked legal organizations to investigate and possibly disbar the lawyers who backed Trump’s attempted coup, John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark.

Nonetheless, right-wing insurgents are tripping over each other to move to extreme positions behind the positions of the former president.

In Idaho today, for example, as soon as the state’s governor, Republican Brad Little, left the state for Texas to meet with nine other Republican governors about President Biden’s approach to securing the border, Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin, who is challenging Little for governor next year, flexed her muscles over the state. She issued an executive order declaring she had “fixed” Little’s executive order prohibiting the government from requiring proof of vaccines to access services by extending the prohibition to schools, saying “I will continue to fight for your individual Liberty!” Then she enquired about activating the Idaho National Guard to go to the southern border.

Little promptly responded to her declarations with his own statement calling her actions “political grandstanding,” noting that he had not authorized her to act on his behalf, and saying he would be “rescinding and reversing any actions taken by the Lt. Governor when I return.” In the midst of all this posturing, Idaho is suffering a spike in coronavirus cases, with death rates at nearly three times the national average.

But while Republican leaders have encouraged the rush to the right because it fires up the party’s base voters, it may now have painted them into a corner from which they’re hoping the Democrats will rescue them.

The fight over the debt ceiling suggests that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is no longer in control of his caucus.

The debt ceiling is a cap on how much the Treasury can borrow to meet its obligations. We are now in trouble because under former president Trump, Congress created $7.8 trillion of debt, and now the Treasury cannot borrow to pay back that money. Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, have said they want the ceiling lifted, but they want Democrats to do it on their own.

But Republicans do not want the ceiling lifted by a simple vote, which the Democrats tried and the Republicans filibustered. They want to force the Democrats to raise the ceiling under the process of reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. This would prevent the Democrats from using the reconciliation process for their infrastructure package that would support human infrastructure like child care and elder care, and address climate change.

Yesterday, Democrats called Republicans out on this manipulation, and today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) set up a vote on the debt ceiling for Wednesday. Democrats today suggested that McConnell and the Republicans are not simply trying to stop the Democrats’ infrastructure plans, but want to sow chaos by crashing the economy. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) wondered on Twitter whether the billionaires “who prop up McConnell actually want a default” so “out of ashes they can build their new oligarchy.”

But tonight Adam Jentleson, an expert on the Senate whose knowledge of the institution is unparalleled among scholars, pointed out that McConnell seems unable to agree to let the Democrats save the country by a simple vote because five or six Republican senators will refuse. So, unable to control them, he seems to be forcing Democrats into a position in which they have no choice but to break the filibuster. Jentleson suggests McConnell knows that his own caucus might obstruct even reconciliation, so he is trying to open a door to make sure Democrats can keep the nation from defaulting and crashing the U.S. economy.

The fall of the Republican Party into the hands of extremists who are willing to destroy it recently prompted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to declare, “I'm astonished that more people don’t see, or can’t face, America’s existential crisis.”

Restoring sanity to the country will require free and fair elections, which, after years of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, will require federal legislation. The time for that to be most effective is running out, as Republican-dominated states are currently in the process of redistricting, which will determine their congressional districts for the next decade.

Today, in the Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This measure would restore the parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court gutted in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder and the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decisions. Of the three voting acts currently in play, the John Lewis Act seems like the easiest to pass, since Congress has repeatedly reauthorized the 1965 Voting Rights Act, most recently in 2006 by a vote of 98–0 in the Senate and 390–33 in the House of Representatives.

And yet, even this measure will be a hard sell for today’s extremist Republicans. When House Democrats brought the John Lewis bill up for a vote in August, not a single Republican voted for it.

—

Notes:

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-frances-haugen-congress-testimony-af86188337d25b179153b973754b71a4

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-set-to-appear-before-senate-panel-11633426201

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/04/biden-mcconnell-debt-limit-filibuster/

https://politicalwire.com/2021/10/05/schumer-sets-vote-to-lift-debt-ceiling/

Andy Stone @andymstoneFacebook Statement on today's Senate Subcommittee Hearing.

86 Retweets199 Likes

October 5th 2021

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPOaPE6MyWMdMV9f218nsSjGGrmSjnkw/view

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-deposition-summer-zervos-lawsuit-expected-before-christmas-2021-10

Adam Jentleson 🎈 @AJentlesonThis is your tell. McConnell is forcing Dems into a position where filibuster reform is clearly their best and perhaps only option. Why? Because he can’t control his conference. Reconciliation presents multiple chances for obstruction and he can’t guarantee Rs won’t exploit them. GOP Sen @RoyBlunt tells us he and probably 44 GOP colleagues would be willing to give consent to waive debt limit filibuster but other 5-6 senator would not give UC

Erik Wasson @elwasson

172 Retweets502 Likes

October 6th 2021

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/john-eastment-jeffrey-clark-coup-consequences.html

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/politics/idaho-lt-gov-janice-mcgeachin-vaccine-passport-order-covid-19/277-38c2fcb5-814b-4d33-ac7a-d9c6575cfe64

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/05/idaho-governor-guard-border-vaccines-515194

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mehrauli]

The shortcomings of secular leftism become obvious every single time Charlie Hebdo published another fucking piece of hate speech and they refuse to acknowledge it as hate speech even though it’s basically just a nazi-era antisemitic caricature with “PROPHET MUHAMMAD” written underneath it.

And maybe some “anti-racists” or something will pipe in to “defend” us with “oh, it iz against zeir religion to draw ze mahomet” which also makes us look ridiculous because 1. that’s only kind of true, there is a wider discussion of that and 2. people are basically not wrong to say that enforcing that is a police state measure that shouldn’t be acceptable. So all they’re doing is making a straw-man to represent the weakest, most hyperconservative possible take that could come out of a Muslim and is actually genuinely irreconcilable with a lot of the left’s values, values which I, and most Muslims, and most leftists, honestly hold. What’s more is that the position they present is genuinely violent and bad; the reason they shouldn’t draw the Prophet isn’t because it’s “against my religion” but because in the political climate we live in it’s inherently an act of hate speech to do so..

Westerners don’t consider it offensive to make fun of their respected political and religious figures, and this is a genuine cultural difference between them and a lot of Muslims particularly from south asia. I don’t think they should, I think the westerners should be free to “practice their culture” or whatever when they’re not killing my family about it. So when the liberals make this purely an issue of “oh ze iZlAm SaYs zat it iz, ‘ow you say, ‘ArAaAaAaM to draw zeir prophet!” they’re making us look like people who want to violently enforce something based solely on our (real or alleged) cultural values, which still agrees that we’re trying to ~eNfOrCe sHaRiA LaW~ in europe. If all they want to do is draw him, whatever. We can talk about that but it’s a different conversation.

Because when they draw Jesus they’re not drawing him as a hook-nosed banker jew with a suicide vest and a child bride, they’re drawing him in a way that is basically respectful and possibly with maybe a thumbs up if they want to be edgy, like it’s fucking different and if you can’t see that you’re just not engaging in good faith.

Aside from the cartoon itself, which nobody will even see by comparison, the publication of it in the first place, surrounded by a bunch of media fanfare and liberal anticipation, is, itself, a massive piece of performance art with the message that it’s good to #trigger all the angry barbarian peoples from out yonder in order to civilise us to French sophistication and defend freeze peach in contrast to the eastern despotism from which we all eagerly await western liberalism to free us, when we’re not busy migrating to the west in hordes to impose it on them from our positions of extreme political and social influence as refugees of ongoing global conflicts and genocides.

This recent publication comes weeks after Macron outlined new repressive police measures which had the explicit, stated purpose of stopping Muslims in France from developing an independent culture from the mainstream in a country where there’s literally a fucking burka ban that “even” liberals defend as “french culture”.

The basic message is secular fascist newspapers can do whatever it is they want and any voiced objection will be met immediately with a harsh punitive action from both the state and polite society. Again the secular left refuses to acknowledge that this is the situation and that this is a measure meant to humiliate a thoroughly subjugated people. They consider that they should be “respectful” of “our beliefs” but they do not actually criticise the power play against us and even participate in it by proclaiming themselves mediator instead of deferring to Muslims on this issue.

These basic normal foundational cornerstones of French culture, and global liberalism more broadly, tangibly and obviously lead to unthinkable violence against us on a global scale, and it’s good to be radicalised against that. The issue isn’t that it “leads to extremism” as if each of us has an inner terrorist just waiting for us to hulk out when we experience one too many microaggressions, but that Charlie Hebdo is actually a fascist publication and a huge part of the justifying apparatus for the past 20 years of western re-colonisation of the middle east, and, again, everyone should be radicalised against that because it is bad, if we’re radicalised against it and you’re not that’s a you problem and reflects a shortcoming in your analysis or organisation or both.

But even the liberals who think (for whatever reason) that they’re radicals will talk about “preventing radicalisation” among Muslim youth as if radicalism is some brand that belongs to them and them exclusively and we can’t be allowed to get our little terrorist mitts on it. They’re allowed to be radical and we’re not. And that right there is how you can tell they aren’t serious about the whole revolution thing, because revolution as they understand it demands a broad-based coalition of people willing to take direct action and who have a common analysis (that it’s their job to at least inform with their theoretical knowledge) about which actions should be taken and against what. They make no effort whatsoever to reach out to our obviously highly motivated and marginalised community with any of their talk of class solidarity because they’re a part of the same apparatus which keeps us marginalised and cooperate fully with it as far as we are concerned.

And the secular left agrees that the cartoons are racist and agrees that that’s bad and agrees that french liberalism sucks ass and is violent, racist, and nakedly imperialistic, but there has never been an instance of a left organisation to my knowledge that’s gone so far as to actually stand in solidarity with Muslims protesting against liberal Islamophobia. While the secular left may condemn islamophobia on its own terms, it never stands with Muslims and accepts Muslim leadership even when we’re protesting obvious violence and hate speech directed at us. Secular leftism and secular antifa agree that it’s good to be radical against a violent society in which hate speech is a normal accepted and even expected value and in which global leaders openly call for repressive police state measures against Muslims specifically on a good day, they even agree that it’s good and proper to use violence in such situations to prevent authoritarian overreach against persecuted minorities, but the moment we do it, it’s an act of terrorism that all radicals liberals have to Condemn Condemn Condemn or else.

And if we defend ourselves as Muslims, as Hannah Arendt called for when she said that if one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew, not as a world-citizen or a defender of the rights of man, or some shit, global radliberal leftism will never have a word in support of us.

It claims to be better, and it might actually even be genuinely preferable, but it still lacks any interaction or understanding of Muslim analyses of the violence against us and don’t even think to try to theorise it themselves outside of some shallow acknowledgement of a purely economic “imperialism” or racism, which is only a part of it. And so as a result the global left inevitably ends up with a far-right analysis of one kind or the other on this; either censorship is good if it hurts people (”of colour”)s feelings or it’s bad to protest hate speech by unapproved means.

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Star Trek: A Product of the Times

Miniskirts, beehives and bowlcuts, goodness gracious, is there any time that Star Trek could have been made but the 1960s?

The short answer?  Not really.

Star Trek was made at quite an interesting time.  The Civil Rights Movement, the space race, Vietnam, the Cold War, the hippie movement, and the new wave of feminism was all coming in a wave that swept the nation, turning the country on its head and plunging its people into turmoil.  The 1960s were an uncertain time: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated at the beginning of the decade after dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Luthor King Jr. was assassinated near the end, just in time to see the Civil Rights and Voting Act of the mid-’60s come to pass, ensuring equal rights for all.  In 1969, America put a man on the moon, Nixon won the election of 1968, and Woodstock closed out the summer of ‘69 with a bang.

This was the world Star Trek was born into: a world full of hope and fear.

You may be wondering why I’m telling you all this, why this all matters.

The answer is extremely simple: to help contextualize, and therefore understand, Star Trek, we have to understand the 1960s.

See, no piece of media is an island.  Every movie, every book, tv show and song, is a product of people living in the times, therefore, a product of the times itself.  Everything, no matter how much of a ‘classic’, exists as a product of those who created it, people whose thoughts and actions are influenced very heavily by the world they live in, and the culture around them, ‘dating’ them to future viewers.

That’s to be expected.

It makes sense that our culture shapes who we are and what we think, and therefore the kinds of things we create.  This, in and of itself, is far from a problem.  However, it does leave those of us who enjoy older films with a rather interesting question:

How dated is too dated?

Can we as an audience still enjoy a film that is discernibly made in a time before our own?  Is it possible to relate to the content created in a time of different technology, clothes, and, most importantly, a different political and social climate than the one we currently live in?

The fact is, there is nobody and nothing in existence that can stop any piece of media from being ‘dated’ in the sense that, no matter what, whatever is being made will have the impact of the culture it is made in.  It simply can’t be avoided.  Even films set in the future will feature the hairstyles of the decade it was created in, or use the special effects of the time.  This, although sometimes a little odd, does not negatively impact the films that we watch.  These things are mere trimming, the external demonstration of the culture of the times.  We can watch The Breakfast Club or The Terminator and notice the ‘80s clothes, slang, trends and references, but it does not hurt the core essence of the movie.

So what does?

Ideas.

In my opinion, it is not the styles of a film, but the ideas, the themes, how the world is viewed, that dates a film, more than any beehive or mullet ever could.  It is these elements that cause modern viewers to cringe at offensive lines or words, to wince at blatant displays of sexism or prejudice, and sometimes, turn away from older movies forever.

However, ignoring it, and refusing to watch it, doesn’t make anything better.  After all, those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, and although movies and television aren’t quite history, they’re a picture of it.

Looking at the context in which a film was created can help us figure out why decisions were made, and understand how the culture has changed.  By looking at where we’ve been, we can better appreciate where we are now, and look to where we are going to be.  We can, and indeed, we should look back at older films, and recognize what doesn’t hold up and what is considerably Not Okay, without ignoring what does hold up.

That’s what we’re doing now.  Today, we’re answering the question:

How dated is Star Trek?

Let’s take a look.

To be honest, at first glance, it seems like it is.  Very much so.

Between very on-the-nose storylines facing off against hippies, racism and the Vietnam war, Uhura’s miniskirt, Yeoman Rand’s beehive, and Chekov’s bowl cut, it seems utterly impossible that this show can exist and hold up in a time period past the 1960s.  The special effects are sometimes cheesy, the acting can be hammy, and the moments of ‘progressiveness’ that are so often praised seem rather small.

Uhura was a black woman on the bridge, sure, but she was horrendously underutilized.  Female characters regularly wore skimpy outfits and threw themselves at male members of the crew, serving as props, seducers, innocents, and rarely holding any real power.  The final episode of the series is about an insane woman who swaps bodies with Captain Kirk because she claimed women weren’t allowed to be starship captains.  Evil Kirk’s assault of Janice Rand is brushed off.  The main characters are all white, and every minority character is in a supporting role.

It’s easy to look back from the twenty-first century with uncomfortably raised eyebrows and ask: “This was progress?”

All in all, it seems impossible to modern audiences that this show could possibly be as revolutionary as it is often said to be.  How can this show be a television game changer, the show that inspired so many and so much good?  How can Star Trek be considered so progressive?

Honestly, it’s all dependent on the time.

Looking back, it’s very easy to judge, to turn our backs on a show that is, in a lot of ways, clearly dated.  There’s no saving the reputation of the bowl cuts, the campy acting, or the tinfoil bikinis, but, if you will, allow me to contextualize, not just the show, but the culture as well.

The year is 1966, and Star Trek’s first pilot has failed, accused of being ‘too cerebral’, (among other things) and having a woman as the second in command on the ship.  The new show, considerably retooled with a whole new crew except for a mixed-race half extra-terrestrial, is set to air, and your crew includes two white American men, the aforementioned half alien, a Scotsman, an Asian man, and a black woman, all in positions of authority on a military ship designed for exploration in deep space.

An Asian man with no stereotypically Asian accent, hobbies, or background was the helmsman for the Enterprise.  A black woman was a lieutenant commander, the chief communications officer.  They were positioned in such a way that they were unmissable for viewers, and regularly took part in landing parties and missions.  They were very smart and very capable.

Now, that’s nothing.  Then?

In 1966, that was huge.

While to modern eyes, the show’s claim to progressiveness seemed like the bare minimum, in the time that the show was produced, it was a big deal.  The equality on the bridge of the Enterprise, (unquestioned, undiscussed equality) changed television, and subtly forced viewers to question their own prejudices.  The idea of a perfect future was one with no prejudice, no distinction among humans.

To quote Kirk himself:

“Leave any bigotry in your quarters; there’s no room for it on the bridge.”

On Star Trek, especially in the Federation, everyone was an equal.  No member of the crew was worth more, or treated differently, than any other.  Multiple characters (non male, non white) characters are portrayed as high ranking, deserving of equal respect.  Sure, now it doesn’t look like a big deal, but in the end, that’s a good thing.

It means that times have changed, and that even in the 1960s, people knew they should change.

In the end, Star Trek remains a good look at a utopian future where everyone is deserving of equal respect and care.  Is it perfect?  No.

But it was about as good as we can expect: Fair For Its Day.

To quote the TVTropes definition of this specific phrase:

“Something from the past that seems like a huge load of Values Dissonance. It seems laden with, say, a Rose-Tinted Narrative or a Historical Hero or Villain Upgrade.

Only… it turns out it was comparatively Fair for Its Day. Maybe the Historical Hero Upgrade or Historical Villain Upgrade wasn’t that unfair a reflection on the person’s views. Maybe the Rose-Tinted Narrative just wasn’t rose-tinted enough for its original audience. Maybe it was even ripped apart in its own time for being downright insurrectionist, and was brave to go as far as it did. It might even completely agree with modern attitudes, but not do so Anviliciously enough for today’s audiences.”

Such is Star Trek.

The miniskirts?  A demonstration of freedom and fashion in the late 1960s.  Uhura’s job?  As a black woman in the ‘60s in a position of authority, it was groundbreaking.  A non-stereotyped Asian man and a non-evil Russian?  Unthinkable.  Khan, one of the show’s most memorable and well-loved villains?  Played by Ricardo Montalbán, a Mexican.  Kirk reported to higher-ranking non-white officers.

Does that fix the fact that Janice Rand’s assault was largely brushed off?

No.

But it’s a start.

Star Trek’s legacy is, not in its perfection, but in the fact that it was a product of the times that saw the need for change.  It’s impact, it’s importance lies in its guts to push the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, to be a product of the times that was looking for a better future.

Yes, times have changed, and Star Trek no longer looks as groundbreaking as it did at the time.  That’s good.  It shouldn’t.  But that does not mean that it loses its importance.

Star Trek remains a titan among game-changers in the history of pop-culture, and rightfully so.  Very few franchises have the scope of influence and inspiration that Star Trek lays claim to having, and in a true test of its values, continued to expand on them and grow and change with the culture with each version, continuing to strive for the best.

All that leads us to our final question.

Is Star Trek dated?

In some ways, yes.  Some of those stories could only have been created in the 1960s.  Some interactions were only possible in a bygone era.

In others?

Star Trek’s general concept, and indeed, a lot of its execution, actually does hold up very well.  The stories are often just as interesting and compelling as they were when they were first released, and the characters remain as gripping and entertaining, over fifty years later.  In terms of storytelling and characters, for the most part, Star Trek is not dated.

After all, the idea of equality, and a better future, is never dated.

Yes, Star Trek is a product of its times.  Very much so.  However, that fact makes the series no less enjoyable.  It was influenced by its culture and its times just as much as it would go on to influence, and even today, it still casts a long shadow on television, and the culture at large. Star Trek stands the test of time, serving as a reminder of times past, while at the same time looking to the future.

In 1966, Star Trek was a visionary concept that ended up changing the world.  Just because we’ve seen progress since then doesn’t take away any of its punch, it just shows us that it was on the right track.

Fifty years later, Star Trek is still boldly going, and it will continue to do so as long as people still look for a better, brighter future.

Thanks so much for reading!  Don’t forget to use that ask box if you have your own ideas or thoughts that you’d like to share.  I hope to see you in the next article.

[neverwatchedonepiece]

549-550: "A Rift Opens Up! Luffy vs. Jimbei!" and "Something Has Happened to Hordy! The True Power of the Evil Drug!"

TEAM WORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK, RIGHT GUYS?

Another two good episodes here. They seemed shorter but lots of little things happened to advance the plot, which is good when you’re trying to predict what’ll happen. 

When you notice these more minor developments click into place, it’s like seeing a master watchmaker at work, fitting all the tiny parts together to create a finely-honed plot machine.

Still not sure how they’ll come together but I have a few guesses now.

(Oh, and I only just got the Conchcorde Plaza pun. xD)

Brook’s Out of Body Experience!

This. Was. So. Cool.

I love Brook’s new power up. There was no way I could’ve seen that coming, so kudos to Oda for creativity. I was always a bit worried for Brook, in that he was up against Zoro in the swordsman role. What could he do except back up Zoro? What other unique purpose did he have other than playing sweet, sweet tunes? Well, now Brook can take on stealth and recon for the Strawhats! 

How?

He can force his freaking soul from his own body.

If that’s not badass, I honestly don’t know what to say. (Though he should probably team up with Jiraiya with that pervy peeping habit he’s cultivating. Bad Brook!)

Thanks to Brook, Zoro might be able to cut them out of the cage. I say “might” because the plan relies on Pappagu not having a fear-induced embolism with the disembodied soul of Brook chasing him through the deserted palace.

I mean, it’s hilarious to watch but I fear for Pappagu’s blood pressure. His little starfish face when Brook rose out of the wall wailing, “Pappagu-saaaaaan” was another 10/10 would watch and laugh at again moment. xD

And while Zoro, Usopp and Brook were planning to succeed where Houdini failed, Luffy was duking it out with Jimbei down at the Sea Forest.

Still Agree With Jimbei

But I know how I’d solve the problem...

I honestly wasn’t expecting these two to actually come to blows. I thought Jimbei would manage to calm Luffy and they’d thrash out an agreement.

Not a chance. At least I got another showcase of Fishman Karate. And I just have to let this be said: Fishman Karate is awesome. I always wondered how Jimbei’s hits could affect Luffy, since he’s been rubberized. It’s nice to know the mechanics of the art. Fishman Karate is about manipulating the water all around you. As all humans are 70% water, being punched by a Master like Jimbei would not be a pleasant experience. (I wonder if it’s the same for Logia users, though?)

The comedy moment when Robin stepped in between them was great. Sanji playing the White Knight and getting smashed in both directions by Jimbei and Luffy was another comedy gold moment (probably a good idea after the dark themes of the flashbacks).

And speaking of Sanji.... I was so disappointed. I’ll tell you why. I got an alert for one of the older posts here and it led to a post where you guys were discussing the Flanderization of Sanji. You all said it would get worse. I didn’t quite believe you, but here were are.

It was the moment when Jimbei tried to convince Luffy that wading in and beating the crap out of some Fishmen was not a good idea considering the current political climate. 

“Every time Fishmen opened their hearts to humans, humans disappointed them,” Jimbei said. “Humans are violent. Humans hate and look down on Fishmen. The past planted twisted ideals in Fishmen minds. Take Arlong. Many Fishmen believe humans hunted him only because he was a Fishman. If the Strawhats, who beat Arlong, beat Hordy Jones too, what do you think would happen? Even if it helped solve the crisis, witnessing you beating down Hordy Jones, who is taking a stand against humans, would make the islanders think things will never change.”

A fair point and one I agree with, to be honest.

Then Sanji chipped in, briefly, with an eloquent and thoughtful answer. For a moment, I thought I might have the Sanji of old back. The one who would make a meal for a starving man.

“But Jimbei, we have to rescue our crew and if nothing else is done, Hordy Jones will rule this island,” Sanji countered. “We have lots of friends here. Hatchi is trying really hard to hide who injured him, but he said Hordy Jones attacks those who are sympathetic to humans. Is he doing that because he spoke up for us? I think part of the reason Luffy wants to fight is because this is your home.”

Okay, I thought... this is great. Sanji is being a human being again with capacity for debate and critical thought. Please say this is the return of Sanji?

He acknowledged how Jimbei helped Luffy at Marineford, but that if Luffy wanted to fight, they would go with him as members of the Strawhat crew. They couldn’t just leave the island like this.

“We have a reason to fight.”

Guess what his reason was?

CAMIE-CHAN’S HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERE.

FFS.

I would have been really funny if the joke hadn’t been done to death. I feel a bit sorry for Sanji now. You guys are right. The Flanderization is merciless. :(

But at least I still had the Showdown Between Luffy and Jimbei to sink my teeth into. Neither of them will budge. Normally, I admire Luffy’s drive to protect his friends and fight tooth-and-nail for them. Normally, Luffy’s disregard of the past is refreshing.

Well, when it comes to individuals, that is. When you’re talking entire countries were with millions of inhabitants with varying experiences, a rich history which unfortunately involves violence, slavery and suppression, it’s... less sensible to disregard the past.

Chopper did say Luffy wants to help Fishman Island and his friends, but at the moment, from where I’m sitting as a first time viewer anyway, is that it looks more like Luffy wants to help his friends and Jimbei wants to help his country.

The way to get round it without fighting, I think, is to work together. Show a united front. I mean, a famous Fishman and an infamous pirate human fighting side by side and ridding the island of fanatical extremists? That’s got to sear like a firebrand across the ol’ memory, right? The islanders won’t forget that in a hurry. Maybe seeing cooperation first hand will change opinions. 

Or Oda will let Luffy do what he wants to do. This wouldn’t sit well with me, but if it’s done well enough, I could be convinced.

You Know This Guy Bought His Costume From That 50% Off Store

Meanwhile, Hordy’s goons continued their rampage unabated. Well, the Princes and Palace Guards took down a shark goon until a fodder slipped him a Fish Roid, then all bets were off. Oda is making it very clear that these guys can only fight while Roid-boosted.

I’m trying to decide who’ll fight who. There are less Fishmen Head Goons than Strawhats, so maybe there will be team ups. The Roided shark guy might suit Franky or Sanji.

I can’t remember the name of the angry little guy with the sharp teeth (Daruma?) but I doubt smashing up Big Mom’s candy factory is a good idea. (The little guy might fight Chopper?)

The drunken mercenary swordsman is Extra Drunk and is on a slashing spree. (He’ll obviously engage with Zoro in battle.)

Ikaros, who fears fire because his giant squid pal, Daidalos, was dried out by swimming too close to the sun, has been feeding Fish Roids to Sea Kings, which... isn’t a sensible idea as they turn on their handlers. His spear that turns his victims into dried up raisins is cool. (Maybe Brook could fight him. Would Brook be immune to such a weapon?)

The blue-ringed octopus guy is my favourite Head Goon, by the way. The camouflage and stoic “straight man” comedy role are the best traits of the bunch. This guy is called Zeo: the noble of Fishman District. So noble that when stomped like a cockroach, he still keeps his cool. (He’d suit someone with a tricky fighting style, like Usopp or Robin).

And speaking of Fish Roids...

Hordy Jones Showing Off His Leadership Skills

Luffy and Jimbei had better resolve their differences quickly because Hordy and crew are on their way to Conchcorde Plaza (ha). But... the thing is, Hordy’s been having a rough time. The old wound Zoro gave him, that single slash, has been plaguing him with flashes of pain.

Instead of taking paracetamol like a normal person, Hordy Jones necked a meaty fistful of Roids. When the wisdom of this decision was questioned, Hordy replied in the measured and sensible manner we’ve all come to expect from him. xD

Of course, as soon as he did, he doubled over, palms spread, sweating buckets, veins a-poppin’, with Happy Hardcore BPM speed palpitations.

Turns out necking that many Fish Roids yields an interesting side-effect.

They turn you into an evil, white-haired anime villain! (And they also take years off your life. WINNING!)

[patriotsnet]

Who's Winning The Democrats Or The Republicans

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/whos-winning-the-democrats-or-the-republicans/

Who's Winning The Democrats Or The Republicans

More Than Half Of Young Americans Are Going Through An Extended Period Of Feeling Down Depressed Or Hopeless In Recent Weeks; 28% Have Had Thoughts That They Would Be Better Off Dead Or Of Hurting Themself In Some Way

Fifty-one percent of young Americans say that at least several days in the last two weeks they have felt down, depressed, or hopeless–19% say they feel this way more than half of the time. In addition, 68% have little energy, 59% say they have trouble with sleep, 52% find little pleasure in doing things. 49% have a poor appetite or are over-eating, 48% cite trouble concentrating, 32% are moving so slowly, or are fidgety to the point that others notice — and 28% have had thoughts of self-harm

Among those most likely to experience bouts of severe depression triggering thoughts that they would be better off dead or hurting themself are young people of color , whites without a college experience , rural Americans , and young Americans not registered to vote .

In the last two weeks, 53% of college students have said that their mental health has been negatively impacted by school or work-related issues; overall 34% have been negatively impacted by the coronavirus, 29% self-image, 29% personal relationships, 28% social isolation, 25% economic concerns, 22% health concerns–and 21% politics .

A Plurality Believe History Will Judge Trump As A The Worst President Ever; Less Than A Quarter Of Young Americans Want Trump To Play A Key Role In The Future Of Republican Politics; Young Republicans Are Divided

Thirty percent of young Americans believe that history will judge Donald Trump as “the worst president ever.” Overall, 26% give the 45th president positive marks , while 54% give Trump negative marks ; 11% believe he will go down as an average president.

Twenty-two percent of young Americans surveyed agree with the statement, “I want Donald Trump to play a key role in the future of Republican politics,” 58% disagreed, and 19% neither agreed nor disagreed. Among young Republicans, 56% agreed while 22% disagreed, and 21% were neutral. Only 61% of those who voted for Trump in the 2020 general indicated their desire for him to remain active in the GOP.

If they “had to choose,” 42% of young Republicans consider themselves supporters of the Republican party, and not Donald Trump. A quarter indicated they are Trump supporters first, 24% said they support both.

The Democrats Try To Create Victims By Using Ingratitude As An Agenda Towards Their Adversaries Pragerus The Key To Unhappiness Describes This Theory Perfectly Its A Short Five Minute Must Watch

You see the Republicans defending themselves in court all the time, but they aren’t the ones filing the lawsuits.  And just because a lawsuit is filed against you doesn’t mean you’re the guilty one.  The courts are constantly tied up with bogus lawsuits created by people who just want to make someone’s life miserable or try to prove a point they’ve already lost.  People who file the lawsuits like that are people who have more of a negative attitude than positive.  Read our article on Attitude and Politics, it can really help you live a happier life.

I might be guilty of overload of the media which interprets everything incorrectly.  As a Democrat I don’t think I’m unhappy but maybe I should be?

So, get to know your Republican or Democratic neighbor.  Let’s quit hating each other for what our political views are. After all, we all know that Washington D.C. doesn’t represent the general public.  They are far more caught up in their own bubble screaming and yelling at each other through the media .

This all being said I hope I’m wrong about who’s happy or not.  I think the media and the politicians don’t represent the true American thoughts but rather just their own agendas that we are all caught up in.

Stop talking and do something to change this.

“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.” ?Abraham Lincoln

A hopeful Conservative Democrat

Young Americans Are Significantly More Likely To Be Politically Engaged Than They Were A Decade Ago; A Sharp Increase In Progressive Political Values Marked Since 2016

Less than one year after Barack Obama’s election, 24% of young Americans considered themselves to be politically active . Twelve years later, we find the share of politically active Americans increased by half — and now 36% are politically active. The most politically active among this cohort are young Blacks . 

Over the last five years, on a host of issues ranging from health care, to climate, immigration, poverty, and affirmative action–young Americans are increasingly more likely to favor government intervention. For example, we found:

A 19-point increase in agreement with the statement “Qualified minorities should be given special preferences in hiring and education” .

An 18-point increase in agreement with the statement “Government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth” .

A 16-point increase since 2016 in agreement with “The government should spend more to reduce poverty” .

A 16-point increase in “Basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it” .

An 8-point increase in agreement with “Recent immigration into this country has done more good than harm .

Democrats Tend To Have A Lot More Anger And Negativity In Their Rhetoric According To Them If You Support President Trump Well Then You Are A Racist And A Nazi

They generally seem to be out to get someone making things more personal.  Why are they so afraid to use the facts to reinforce what they want to do? It’s agenda first then find or make up facts to support the rhetoric.

If they can’t beat you at the polling booth, they try and beat you in court and that’s just a great example of something that’s not a pleasant experience. And not quite working in the long run. They keep getting overturned.

Forty Percent Of Young Americans Expect Their Lives To Be Better As A Result Of The Biden Administration; Many More Feel A Part Of Bidens America Than Trumps

Whites: 30% better, 28% worse

Blacks: 54% better, 4% worse

Hispanics: 51% better, 10% worse

Forty-six percent of young Americans agreed that they “feel included in Biden’s America,” 24% disagreed . With the exception of young people living in rural America, at least a plurality indicated they felt included. This stands in contrast to “Trump’s America.” Forty-eight percent reported that they did not feel included in Trump’s America, while 27% indicated that they felt included . The only major subgroup where a plurality or more felt included in Trump’s America were rural Americans. 

39% of Whites feel included in Biden’s America, 32% do not ; 35% of Whites feel included in Trump’s America, 41% do not .

61% of Blacks feel included in Biden’s America, 13% do not ; 16% of Blacks feel included in Trump’s America, 60% do not .

51% of Hispanics feel included in Biden’s America, 12% do not ; 17% of Hispanics feel included in Trump’s America, 55% do not .

But When You Watch The Republican In The Media Being Attacked The Majority Tend To Handle It With More Grace Then The Majority Of The Democrats

I don’t think it’s because the Republicans have more money because the Democrats tend to be the wealthier group.  The majority of the richest people in the world are Democrats or Liberals.  Yet, they sure don’t look like a happy group of folks .  I think a lot of people who are rich were their happiest when they were working hard coming up through the ranks and earning their money.  I also think sometimes the social issues they get caught up in when they become wealthy can be frustrating causing many people to lose their tolerance over time.

Nearly A Third Of Young Americans Say That Politics Has Gotten In The Way Of A Friendship; Differences Of Opinion On Race

Thirty-one percent of young Americans, but 37% of young Biden voters and 32% of young Trump voters say that politics has gotten in the way of a friendship before. Gender is not a strong predictor of whether or not politics has invaded personal space, but race and ethnicity are. Young whites are more likely than young Blacks to say that politics has gotten in the way–and nearly half of white Biden voters say politics has negatively impacted a friendship; 30% of white Trump voters say the same.

When young Americans were asked whether a difference of opinion on several political issues might impact a friendship, 44% of all young Americans said that they could not be friends with someone who disagreed with them on race relations. Sixty percent of Biden voters agreed with this sentiment, as did a majority of women and Blacks . Americans between 18 and 24 were more likely than those slightly older to feel that race relations would cause a problem with friendships. Differences of opinion on whether or not to support Trump was an issue for slightly more than a third , followed by immigration , police reform , abortion , climate change , and guns .

Despite The State Of Our Politics Hope For America Is Rising And So Is Youths Faith In Their Fellow Americans

In the fall of 2017, only 31% of young Americans said they were hopeful about the future of America; 67% were fearful. Nearly four years later, we find that 56% have hope. While the hopefulness of young whites has increased 11 points, from 35% to 46% — the changes in attitudes among young people of color are striking. Whereas only 18% of young Blacks had hope in 2017, today 72% are hopeful . In 2017, 29% of Hispanics called themselves hopeful, today that number is 69% .

Reality Check #4: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the party’s national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Biden’s 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call “wasted” votes—Democratic votes that don’t, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? “Abolish the Electoral College!” In practice, they’d need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasn’t seen support from a single red or purple state.

New 2020 Voter Data: How Biden Won How Trump Kept The Race Close And What It Tells Us About The Future

As we saw in 2016 and again in 2020, traditional survey research is finding it harder than it once was to assess presidential elections accurately. Pre-election polls systemically misjudge who is likely to vote, and exit polls conducted as voters leave the voting booths get it wrong as well.

Now, using a massive sample of “validated” voters whose participation has been independently verified, the Pew Research Center has . It helps us understand how Joe Biden was able to accomplish what Hillary Clinton did not—and why President Trump came closer to getting reelected than the pre-election surveys had predicted.

How Joe Biden won

Five main factors account for Biden’s success.

The Biden campaign reunited the Democratic Party. Compared to 2016, he raised the share of moderate and conservative Democrats who voted for the Democratic nominee by 6 points, from 85 to 91%, while increasing the Democratic share of liberal Democrats from 94 to 98%. And he received the support of 85% of Democrats who had defected to 3rd party and independent candidates in 2016.

How Trump kept it close

Despite non-stop controversy about his policies and personal conduct, President Trump managed to raise his share of the popular vote from 46% in 2016 to 47% in 2020. His core coalition held together, and he made a few new friends.

Longer-term prospects

BillGalston

Reality Check 3: The Democrats Legislative Fix Will Never Happenand Doesnt Even Touch The Real Threats

It’s understandable why Democrats have ascribed a life-or-death quality to S. 1, the “For the People” bill that would impose a wide range of requirements on state voting procedures. The dozens—or hundreds—of provisions enacted by Republican state legislatures and governors represent a determination to ensure that the GOP thumb will be on the scale at every step of the voting process. The proposed law would roll that back on a national level by imposing a raft of requirements on states—no excuse absentee voting, more days and hours to vote—but would also include public financing of campaigns, independent redistricting commissions and compulsory release of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

There are all sorts of Constitutional questions posed by these ideas. But there’s a more fundamental issue here: The Constitutional clause on which the Democrats are relying—Article I, Section 4, Clause 1—gives Congress significant power over Congressional elections, but none over elections for state offices or the choosing of Presidential electors.

Initial And Incomplete First Ranked Choice Results In Nyc Mayoral Race To Be Released Tuesday

June 29, 2021

The New York City Board of Elections will release preliminary ranked-choice results today for last Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary.  In results released that night, no candidate in the 13 person field got a majority of the vote. As a result, ranked-choice is being used for the first time to determine a winner.

The BOE is expected to release round-by-round results. In ranked choice voting, the lowest polling candidate is eliminated in each round, with votes reallocated based on the ranking preference of each of his or her voters. The process continues until only two candidates remain, by which point one will have a mathematical majority.

Today’s results will be the based on in-person voting that occurred during the early voting period and on Election Day. That is, it is the ranked-choice outcome of the results released last Tuesday.  

Absentee ballots excluded

Today’s results will not include any absentee ballots cast in the election. By law, the counting of those did not begin until yesterday. Today is also the deadline for the BOE to receive absentee ballots. Those had to be postmarked by June 22.  

The absentee ballot numbers are significant. There were approximately 800,000 early and same-day votes counted on election night. As of June 28, approximately 124,500 Democratic absentee ballots had been returned.  Not all will be valid, but assuming the vast majority are, these will end up comprising 12-13% or so of the total ballots cast.

One more complication

  Black Voters And Faith Leaders Rejoice At Warnocks Historic Win: I Think It Speaks Volumes

ATLANTA — Michael Simmons, 63, has not missed voting in a major election since 1976. The most important for him was 2008, when he cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. But his votes in November’s general election and the Senate runoffs on Tuesday were ranked closely behind.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock’s success in the Senate runoffs sent a jolt of jubilation through much of Georgia’s African-American community, as they saw a Black man taking an office that had been held by segregationists when he was born. There was also a level of pride in having an emissary of the Black church serve in the highest levels of government.

“I never would have thunk — put that down, thunk! — I’d see this happen,” said Mr. Simmons, a manager at a nonprofit organization in downtown Atlanta. “Personally, I don’t expect the world to change because we have a Black man in the Senate, but we can see progress.”

The office of the nonprofit where Mr. Simmons works is just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the renowned congregation that Mr. Warnock leads. Mr. Simmons often saw Mr. Warnock walking around the neighborhood.

The win carried enormous significance for him: “This was a place where for many years we got the short end of the stick,” Mr. Simmons, who grew up in Alabama and moved to Atlanta after college, said.

Peach States Two Runoff Elections On Tuesday Will Determine Which Party Controls Us Senate

Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are facing off in runoff elections against Georgia’s two Republican incumbent senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.

+0.09%

As Georgians vote Tuesday in two U.S. Senate runoff elections that will determine the balance of power in Washington, betting markets and polls are signaling some confidence in the Democratic Party’s prospects.

Betting market PredictIt gives Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff a 53% chance of defeating incumbent Republican Sen. David Perdue as of Tuesday afternoon, while in the other Georgia contest, Democratic candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock has a 62% chance of ousting GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler. PredictIt’s odds had favored Republicans last week. Other sites that enable wagers on politics, such as Smarkets, also give the edge to the Democratic challengers as of Monday.

Republicans already control 50 seats following November’s elections and can remain the majority party in the 100-seat Senate by winning just one of the two Georgia races. They then would provide a check on policies backed by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and the Democratic-run House of Representatives.

Polls show Ossoff leading Perdue by 0.5 percentage point, and Warnock is ahead of Loeffler by 0.5 percentage point, according to RealClearPolitics moving averages of surveys for the two races. To be sure, pollsters are coming off a rough November in which they missed badly on some races.

But That Shouldnt Stop Democrats From Embracing Big And Sweeping Changes While They Can

It’s time for Democrats to stop cowering in the face of Republican threats.

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I am not worried about what Mitch McConnell will do should Republicans take back the Senate in 2022. I am not worried about what Republicans will do should they retake all of government in 2024. I am not worried, because I already know the answer: When Republicans have power again, they will do “the worst.” I don’t waste a lot of time or mental energy contemplating the worst, because history has shown that I am simply not creative enough to imagine what evil Republicans will come up with next. No matter where I think the bottom is, Republicans will always find a new one.

Unfortunately, many centrist and moderate Democrats seem paralyzed by the fear of what Republicans will do if they take back the Senate or the White House. They’re afraid to pass sweeping policy or procedural reforms because of how they think Republicans will punish Democratic politicians in the future. It’s hard to even have a debate about big, structural changes to how government functions because too many arguments devolve to “If Democrats do anything, Republicans will be super mean.”

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Will Democrats Or Republicans Win Congress In 2020 Here’s What The Polls Have To Say

U.S.Congress2020 ElectionDemocratic PartyRepublican Party

Democrats and Republicans currently split control of Congress, but one party could win it all in this November’s elections.

Polls show that Democrats have the upper hand in the race for the legislative branch. According to FiveThirtyEight forecasters, Democrats have an 8-point lead over the GOP for control of Congress.

The FiveThirtyEight projection is based on surveys that ask voters which party they would support in an election. As of Friday, 48.6 percent of voters said they’d back Democratic congressional candidates, while 40.8 percent said they’d support Republican candidates.

A recent poll from Morning Consult showed a similar picture. Forty-six percent of registered voters surveyed said they’d support a Democratic candidate for Congress, while 38 percent said they’d back a Republican candidate. The survey, conducted in early April, polled 1,990 voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

The two parties currently split control of Congress, after Democrats took back the House of Representatives during the 2018 midterm elections. The GOP has maintained its majority in the Senate since 2014.

But one party could sweep the balloting in November. The chamber to watch is the Senate, as Democrats need to flip only three or four seats to gain a majority. Republicans also have to defend far more territory this election cycle, as 23 of the 36 Senate seats in play are held by conservatives.

Democrats Republicans Will Decide Tuesday: Whos Our Best Shot At Beating Mayor Walsh

From left to right: Khalid Bey and Michael Greene, Democrats; Thomas Babilon and Janet Burman, Republicans.Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com

Chris Baker | cbaker@syracuse.com

Syracuse, N.Y. — Ben Walsh broke a 100-year tradition of Democrats and Republicans controlling city hall when he won the mayor’s race in 2017.

Now, as those parties’ voters head to the polls to decide who will run against him in November, they’ll be looking for a candidate who can solve a political challenge:

Can anyone defeat Walsh?

Historically, incumbents are difficult to oust from top positions in Central New York. Walsh heads into November with a big fund-raising advantage, the power of the mayor’s office and perhaps the most recognizable name in local politics.

But the Democratic Party has a massive voter enrollment advantage in the city — more than half of registered voters are Democrats. And a viable Republican candidate could play spoiler if he or she can peel away enough of the voters who supported Walsh four years ago. Who knows, a Republican could even win.

Democrats Tuesday will choose between two Common Councilors who have both previously won election citywide: Khalid Bey and Michael Greene, who is backed by the Onondaga County Democratic Committee.

Republican have a choice between Thomas Babilon, an attorney, and Janet Burman, an economist who was picked to run by the Onondaga County Republican Committee.

So will those Republicans who voted for Walsh four years ago stick with him again?

Senate: Sinema To Challenge Flake In Arizona; Blackburn Likely To Run In Tennessee

September 29, 2017

Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema announced she will run for U.S. Senate in 2018. This gives the party a high-profile candidate in their efforts to unseat incumbent Republican Jeff Flake. While Arizona hasn’t had a Democratic Senator in over 20 years, next year’s race is expected to be highly competitive. The Democratic nominee may even be favored if Flake loses a primary to former State Senator Kelli Ward. A recent poll by GBA Strategies showed him losing to Ward by a 58-31% margin.  

Flake’s national visibility was raised earlier this summer with the publication of his book “”, which harshly critiqued President Trump and his own party. Needless to say, this hasn’t helped his standing with Arizona Republicans. The GBA Strategies poll gave Flake just a 25% approval rating among Republican primary voters in the state.

In her first run at U.S. Senate, Ward lost the Republican primary to Sen. John McCain in 2016. 

Sinema becomes the 26th House member to pass on running for reelection to the House in 2018. The next such announcement is likely to come from Tennessee, where Republican Marsha Blackburn is likely to run for the seat being vacated by Sen. Bob Corker. 

The Arizona Senate race is currently considered a toss-up, while Tennessee is very likely to remain in Republican hands.

Tennessee Rep Blackburn Announces Bid For Senate; Gov Bill Haslam Declines To Run

October 5, 2017

Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn announced her bid for U.S. Senate, becoming the front-runner to replace retiring Sen. Bob Corker in Tennessee. The move came just after termed-out incumbent Gov. Bill Haslam passed on a run for the office.  

Blackburn is in her 8th term. She represents a safe Republican district in west-central Tennessee, winning reelection by nearly 49 points this past November. She will start out as a large favorite in the 2018 Senate race. The Volunteer State last elected a Democratic Senator in 1990 .

Blackburn becomes the 28th House member to pass on reelection in 2018. Included in that are now three of Tennessee’s nine Representatives.

October 4, 2017

10/5 UPDATE: Murphy has resigned from Congress effective October 21st.

Republican Tim Murphy, in his 8th term representing southwestern Pennsylvania in the U.S. House, will not seek reelection in 2018. The pro-life congressman ran into trouble earlier this week when text messages surfaced of him urging a woman with whom he was having an affair to seek an abortion. 

Murphy met with Republican leadership who apparently told him that he either had to resign or announce his retirement at the end of the current term.

Murphy is the 27th Member to announce they are not seeking reelection in 2018. There are 18 Republicans and 9 Democrats. Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee is expected to join this list in the days ahead. She is expected to run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Corker.

Making The Call: Why Media Outlets Are Showing Different Electoral Vote Totals

November 7, 2020

Depending on where you look, Joe Biden is projected to have won 253 or 264 or 273 electoral votes. Why the discrepancy? There are several independent organizations making race calls. Each has a ‘decision desk’, where experts analyze incoming election results, and mathematically model what’s yet to be counted. When they are highly certain that the final numbers for a race will favor one candidate, they will make a call. For example, NBC and ABC use a 99.5% level of certainty before making a projection.

As each of these decision desks works independently, and are sequestered from outside influences, races will be called at different times, although absent the rare situation where a call has to be retracted, they will all eventually get to the same place.

Here’s how things stand as of Saturday morning, courtesy of this excellent interactive from The New York Times.  In the graphic below, we are showing the states/districts that remain uncalled by one or more outlets.

Here’s a bit more on some of the players involved here.

Decision Desk

National Election Pool

Associated Press

  Who Is Richer Democrats Or Republicans The Answer Probably Wont Surprise You

Which of the two political parties has more money, Democrats or Republicans? Most would rush to say Republicans due to the party’s ideas towards tax and money. In fact, polls have shown about 60 percent of the American people believe Republicans favor the rich. But how true is that?  can help you write about the issue but read our post first.

Former Virginia Governor Mcauliffe Wins Democratic Primary In Governors Race

Gabriella Borter

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe speaks at the North America’s Building Trades Unions 2019 legislative conference in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

June 8 – Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe easily won the Democratic nomination on Tuesday for the state’s gubernatorial election, securing his spot in a race that could signal where voters stand after the divisive 2020 presidential contest.

McAuliffe, a 64-year-old moderate who served as governor from 2014 to 2018, was leading four other candidates, with more than 60 percent of the vote with 2,063 precincts of 2,584 reporting. Major news organizations projected him the winner shortly after polls closed at 7 p.m.

He will face off against the Republican nominee, former private equity executive Glenn Youngkin, 54, in the general election on Nov. 2.

If McAuliffe wins that contest, he would become Virginia’s second two-term governor since the U.S. Civil War. The state’s constitution prohibits governors from serving consecutive terms.

“Thank you Virginia!!!” he tweeted on Tuesday night.

A longtime Democratic fundraiser with close ties to former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, McAuliffe benefited from his political experience and popularity in the state party.

On the campaign trail, he touted his achievements as governor, which included expanding voting rights for ex-felons and overseeing a drop in unemployment and a rise in personal income.

Tim Kaine: End Superdelegates In Democratic Presidential Nominating Process

November 15, 2017

Politico reports that “Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is urging the Democratic National Committee to end its tradition of using superdelegates, which activists say diminish the influence of regular voters at the expense of party bigwigs in the presidential nominating process.”

Superdelegates are party insiders that can cast their vote for whomever they wish, regardless of the will of the voters in their state. In 2016, Hillary Clinton – with Kaine as her running mate – received the support of almost all of these superdelegates, pushing her across the 2,383 total delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. 

While Clinton likely would have ultimately prevailed over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in a nominating process without superdelegates, their existence gave the impression that the party favored the Clinton ticket, depriving Sanders supporters of a fair fight. This, in turn, likely dampened enthusiasm among some of them to turn out for Clinton on Election Day. To that end, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that the existence of superdelegates in the Democratic nominating process is one of the reasons Donald Trump won the election.

  California Legislature Approves Earlier 2020 Primary; Awaits Gov Signature

September 16, 2017

Seeking a more active role for the state in choosing the next Democratic presidential nominee, The California Legislature has approved a bill to move the presidential primary from June 2nd to March 3rd in 2020. The bill has been sent to Gov. Jerry Brown for his signature. 

The state controlled over 11% of Democratic delegates in 2016, but Hillary Clinton was already the presumptive nominee by the time the state voted that year. If the move becomes law and assuming the same roster of Super Tuesday states – and delegate distribution – in 2020, approximately 1/3 of all delegates will be awarded that day, up from about 20% in 2016. 

This is not the first time California has moved up its primary.  According to Politico: “In 2008, the state tried to change that by holding a February primary. But more than 20 other states also moved up their contests in response, and while California drew a competitive race, the outcome was not decisive — Hillary Clinton won the primary here but lost the nomination.” If something similar happens in 2020, it could mean a much shorter primary season than 2016, despite the likelihood of a much larger Democratic field.

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[simonvvfx865]

What exactly may be the Most Spectacular Flag There may be?

The moon additionally represents calmness and the cold temperature of the highland region whereas, the solar also symbolizes fierce and heat temperatures within the lowland region. The eight spikes of the moon represent the eight phases of the moon whereas the 12 rays of the solar symbolize the 12 levels of the solar. The flag has sturdy links to Christianity and is credited with influencing other Nordic nations, such as Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, to undertake comparable styles of their flags, creating the Nordic Cross.

The Aussies are more identified with these colors than with those of the official flag. The reason is that they need to mark the border between the Australian colonial previous and the means forward for fashionable Australia. The Mexican flag is thought to be some of the beautiful flags on the planet. It is an erect tricolor mixture of red, white and green and has the nationwide coat of arms that's charged in the middle of the white stripe. The second African nation after Ethiopia to adopt the Pan-African colours of pink, gold and green, Ghana’s flag symbolises the country’s battle for independence, its mineral wealth and its rich forests. Around the internal a part of the symbol is the sun, representing peace and wealth, whereas the forty totally different rays symbolise the Kyrgyz tribes that united to battle against the Mongols.

High 12 Most Stunning Individuals In The World

It’s a tapestry of range that blends with it’s pristine and unbelievable pure beauties round. I suppose greater than half of the nations in this list are simply overrated . This is a subjective Top 10 record, so I don’t expect anyone to share my preferences. As for Romania , as much as I would have beloved to include it in my list, it was impossible for me to exchange it with one of the countries above. Let me inform you… i've been in italy 3 instances, and yes, it's lovely, but nothing close to the range Spain can offer.

Which is the most famous country in the world?

MAP: The Most Popular Countries In The World To VisitRankCountryAnnual Visitors1France81,400,0002United States62,700,0003China57,600,0004Spain56,700,00046 more rows•Feb 26, 2014

The flag was first used through the uprising in opposition to the French, who had dominated the nation for centuries. Vietnam finally gained independence in 1945 – and the pink flag with a single yellow star has been used ever since. The country was finally unified under communist rule in 1949, and the daring pink flag with five yellow stars was adopted the same 12 months. Red is a conventional color in Chinese society, and likewise represents all the blood lost during the civil war and invasion.

America Of America

You’ll find no matter panorama your coronary heart needs here. Soak up the cosmopolitan ambiance in Buenos Aires, learn to journey within the wide-open expanse of the Pampas, explore the vineyards of Mendoza or watch ice calving from the Perito Moreno Glacier – the choice is yours. Wherever you go you’ll be struck by what one reader called the country’s “majestic geography”. Connect with our local tour operator in Nepal with our tailor-made travel service and luxuriate in a totally personalised itinerary - designed, booked and executed only for you.

The green colour stands for the Brazilian beautiful green fields.

I do not perceive how you can complain concerning the Union Jack on Hawaii's flag while lauding Maryland's flag.

Spain is ruled by each Queen and King and this has been occurring for a number of years.

It is for that reason that a silent warfare continues even at present concerning essentially the most lovely flags on the planet.

I thought that it was a little expensive until it arrived.

The middle white stripe also symbolizes peace and purity, whereas the red stripes symbolize the bloodshed attributable to the numerous invasions that the nation has endured all through the course of historical past. The high half of the flag relies on the country’s coat of arms, with a purple background and a golden solar and frigate bird. The frigate is Kiribati’s national animal, and represents energy and power at sea, while the sun and its 17 rays symbolize the Gilbert Islands and the solitary Banaba Island.

Flag Of Australia

Blue signifies the blue sky which is the abode of God. The two skinny purple stripes that separate the three main colours characterize the minority religions. The 12 stars beside the crescent moon symbolize the 12 imams of Islam, 12 zodiac signs of the horoscopes, and 12 months of the yr. An attention-grabbing feature of this flag is the association of the 12 stars varieties the word “Allah” in Arabic script. One of the 2 socialist countries on the earth that does not use any communist symbols of their flag, Cuba officially adopted it in 1902.

OK, Spain has the Almeria desert but Italy also has the islands of Sardinia and Sicily which are like mini-continents themselves and both have semi-desert areas, as well as Sicily’s volcanoes. It also has one of the highest when it comes to plant species with forests, upland plains, macchia, garrigue and the numerous completely different climatic zones all contributing to its variety. Each area has it’s own distinctive identification that going from one area to the following is nearly like going to another country in some cases.

India nationwide flag was first raised in the 12 months 1947 after India’s independence. When you have a look at this flag you possibly can see how lovely it by its design and the meaning of its simbols. The white moon that tells us about purity, freedom, the star about victory and the purple colour represents the blood of those that battle and died defending this lovely nation that it's Turkey.

The red-and-white bicolour is alleged to have been created by Indonesian freedom fighters, who, during their battle towards the Dutch, had been tearing the blue strip off the Dutch tricolour. Another version of the story insists that the flag’s colors are consultant of the 14th-century Majapahit Empire that was based mostly on the island of Java. The solely Nordic flag and not using a Nordic Cross, Greenland’s flag was designed by native Inuit trainer and politician Thue Christiansen. The colors are based on the flag of Denmark and the design represents the solar setting into the iceberg-filled ocean with glaciers in the background. Representing the two main parties of Panama, the general design of this flag symbolises the new Republic of Panama after its separation from Colombia. The pink stands for the country’s Liberal get together, whereas the blue represents the Conservatives.

In front of the tree is a protect containing photos of a ship and a logging device. Below them is the country’s slogan “in the shadow I thrive”. All this mainly symbolizes the importance of the forest for the country’s economy. The coat of arms is surrounded by a wreath of fifty mahogany leaves that symbolizes the yr 1950 when the nation began to oppose British rule. The background colors symbolize the country’s two largest political parties. The purple, white and blue stripes of the flag of Croatia and the checkerboard shield in its middle symbolize the traditional colours and coat of arms of the country and its constituent kingdoms.

Dedicated to all those that have lost lives or family and associates in this awful time in our lifetime. To many people that is such a shock, never could a new web page in history be created within the time we lived on the planet. I all the time puzzled the method it felt to be part of history, to be part of the word happening in books. To expect one day, hear your grandchildren coming up to you with wondering eyes, yearning to hear of the details of probably the most terrorists act ever known to America's history.

[album1989]

a little rant about people ignoring politics

Okay, so the honest issue with the Swift Life is the fact that everyone wants this app to only have rainbows, cats, positivity, etc. But, right now the world of politics is probably the craziest it’s ever been. I mean we have crappy businessmen with no past political for president, who would’ve expected that twenty years ago? Anyway, people are ignoring politics more than ever before and just want to be uninvolved with politics in general. But, there are WAY too many issues going on right now to not talk about it. Let’s discuss a few:

DACA: “an American immigration policy that allowed some individuals who entered the country as minors, and had either entered or remained in the country illegally, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit. As of 2017, approximately 800,000 individuals—referred to as Dreamers after the DREAM Act bill—were enrolled in the program created by DACA. The policy was established by the Obama administration in June 2012 and rescinded by the Trump administration in September 2017.”

videos: https://twitter.com/maxjoseph/status/941369550200643585, http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/04/politics/daca-dreamers-immigration-program/index.html

Net Neutrality: “Net Neutrality is the internet’s guiding principle: It preserves our right to communicate freely online. Net Neutrality means an internet that enables and protects free speech. It means that ISPs should provide us with open networks — and shouldn’t block or discriminate against any applications or content that ride over those networks. Just as your phone company shouldn’t decide who you call and what you say on that call, your ISP shouldn’t interfere with the content you view or post online.”

videos: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/net-neutrality/story?id=48596615, http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosenworcel-fcc-net-neutrality-repeal-20171122-story.html

PLEASE educate yourself on these issues. Politics will always be important to me and the future of your nation should be important to you as well. Let’s always remember to focus on others too. Without DACA, some of your classmates could end up being sent back to their home countries. Politics should definitely be discussed in our current climate. Even though we all want an escape from politics, this is the world we live in and we need to do our best to protect the legislation we have. Call your congressmen and make a change. The future of our country depends on it. 

[bennettmarko]

Fiction and Identity Politics

I hate to disappoint you folks, but unless we stretch the topic to breaking point this address will not be about “community and belonging.” In fact, you have to hand it to this festival’s organisers: inviting a renowned iconoclast to speak about “community and belonging” is like expecting a great white shark to balance a beach ball on its nose. The topic I had submitted instead was “fiction and identity politics,” which may sound on its face equally dreary.

But I’m afraid the bramble of thorny issues that cluster around “identity politics” has got all too interesting, particularly for people pursuing the occupation I share with many gathered in this hall: fiction writing. Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.

Let’s start with a tempest-in-a-teacup at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Earlier this year, two students, both members of student government, threw a tequila-themed birthday party for a friend. The hosts provided attendees with miniature sombreros, which—the horror— numerous partygoers wore. When photos of the party circulated on social media, campus-wide outrage ensued. Administrators sent multiple emails to the “culprits” threatening an investigation into an “act of ethnic stereotyping.” Partygoers were placed on “social probation,” while the two hosts were ejected from their dorm and later impeached. Bowdoin’s student newspaper decried the attendees’ lack of “basic empathy.”

The student government issued a “statement of solidarity” with “all the students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and demanded that administrators “create a safe space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.” The tequila party, the statement specified, was just the sort of occasion that “creates an environment where students of colour, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, feel unsafe.” In sum, the party-favour hats constituted – wait for it – “cultural appropriation.”

Curiously, across my country Mexican restaurants, often owned and run by Mexicans, are festooned with sombreros – if perhaps not for long. At the UK’s University of East Anglia, the student union has banned a Mexican restaurant from giving out sombreros, deemed once more an act of “cultural appropriation” that was also racist.

Now, I am a little at a loss to explain what’s so insulting about a sombrero – a practical piece of headgear for a hot climate that keeps out the sun with a wide brim. My parents went to Mexico when I was small, and brought a sombrero back from their travels, the better for my brothers and I to unashamedly appropriate the souvenir to play dress-up. For my part, as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song.

But what does this have to do with writing fiction? The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.

In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.

We wouldn’t have Maria McCann’s erotic masterpiece, As Meat Loves Salt – in which a straight woman writes about gay men in the English Civil War. Though the book is nonfiction, it’s worth noting that we also wouldn’t have 1961’s Black Like Me, for which John Howard Griffin committed the now unpardonable sin of “blackface.” Having his skin darkened – Michael Jackson in reverse – Griffin found out what it was like to live as a black man in the segregated American South. He’d be excoriated today, yet that book made a powerful social impact at the time.

The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

What strikes me about that definition is that “without permission” bit. However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot? I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.

But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.

So far, the majority of these farcical cases of “appropriation” have concentrated on fashion, dance, and music: At the American Music Awards 2013, Katy Perry got it in the neck for dressing like a geisha. According to the Arab-American writer Randa Jarrar, for someone like me to practice belly dancing is “white appropriation of Eastern dance,” while according to the Daily Beast Iggy Azalea committed “cultural crimes” by imitating African rap and speaking in a “blaccent.”

The felony of cultural sticky fingers even extends to exercise: at the University of Ottawa in Canada, a yoga teacher was shamed into suspending her class, “because yoga originally comes from India.” She offered to re-title the course, “Mindful Stretching.” And get this: the purism has also reached the world of food. Supported by no less than Lena Dunham, students at Oberlin College in Ohio have protested “culturally appropriated food” like sushi in their dining hall (lucky cusses— in my day, we never had sushi in our dining hall), whose inauthenticity is “insensitive” to the Japanese.

Seriously, we have people questioning whether it’s appropriate for white people to eat pad Thai. Turnabout, then: I guess that means that as a native of North Carolina, I can ban the Thais from eating barbecue. (I bet they’d swap.) This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you. Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts? The fiction writer, that’s who.

This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

As for the culture police’s obsession with “authenticity,” fiction is inherently inauthentic. It’s fake. It’s self-confessedly fake; that is the nature of the form, which is about people who don’t exist and events that didn’t happen. The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; it’s all about what you can get away with.

In his 2009 novel Little Bee, Chris Cleave, who as it happens is participating in this festival, dared to write from the point of view of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl, though he is male, white, and British. I’ll remain neutral on whether he “got away with it” in literary terms, because I haven’t read the book yet.

But in principle, I admire his courage – if only because he invited this kind of ethical forensics in a review out of San Francisco: “When a white male author writes as a young Nigerian girl, is it an act of empathy, or identity theft?” the reviewer asked. “When an author pretends to be someone he is not, he does it to tell a story outside of his own experiential range. But he has to in turn be careful that he is representing his characters, not using them for his plot.” Hold it. OK, he’s necessarily “representing” his characters, by portraying them on the page. But of course he’s using them for his plot! How could he not? They are his characters, to be manipulated at his whim, to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to.

This same reviewer recapitulated Cleave’s obligation “to show that he’s representing [the girl], rather than exploiting her.” Again, a false dichotomy. Of course he’s exploiting her. It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm. Yet the reviewer chides that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell” and worries that “Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go.”

What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.

I’m hoping that crime writers, for example, don’t all have personal experience of committing murder. Me, I’ve depicted a high school killing spree, and I hate to break it to you: I’ve never shot fatal arrows through seven kids, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker, either. We make things up, we chance our arms, sometimes we do a little research, but in the end it’s still about what we can get away with – what we can put over on our readers.

Because the ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction. Someone like me only permits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt. All that’s left is memoir.

And here’s the bugbear, here’s where we really can’t win. At the same time that we’re to write about only the few toys that landed in our playpen, we’re also upbraided for failing to portray in our fiction a population that is sufficiently various.

My most recent novel The Mandibles was taken to task by one reviewer for addressing an America that is “straight and white”. It happens that this is a multigenerational family saga – about a white family. I wasn’t instinctively inclined to insert a transvestite or bisexual, with issues that might distract from my central subject matter of apocalyptic economics. Yet the implication of this criticism is that we novelists need to plug in representatives of a variety of groups in our cast of characters, as if filling out the entering class of freshmen at a university with strict diversity requirements.

You do indeed see just this brand of tokenism in television. There was a point in the latter 1990s at which suddenly every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: look at us, our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!

We’re now going through the same fashionable exercise in relation to the transgender characters in series like Transparent and Orange is the New Black. Fine. But I still would like to reserve the right as a novelist to use only the characters that pertain to my story.

Besides: which is it to be? We have to tend our own gardens, and only write about ourselves or people just like us because we mustn’t pilfer others’ experience, or we have to people our cast like an I’d like to teach the world to sing Coca-Cola advert?

For it can be dangerous these days to go the diversity route. Especially since there seems to be a consensus on the notion that San Francisco reviewer put forward that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell.”

In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, who’s black. She’s married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible family’s 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids’ objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, they’re obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.

Behold, the reviewer in the Washington Post, who groundlessly accused this book of being “racist” because it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line in its political outlook, described the scene thus: “The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, she’s held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.”

Your author, by implication, yearns to bring back slavery.

Thus in the world of identity politics, fiction writers better be careful. If we do choose to import representatives of protected groups, special rules apply. If a character happens to be black, they have to be treated with kid gloves, and never be placed in scenes that, taken out of context, might seem disrespectful. But that’s no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing. The natural result of that kind of criticism in the Post is that next time I don’t use any black characters, lest they do or say anything that is short of perfectly admirable and lovely.

In fact, I’m reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected – why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About Kevin Armenian? He didn’t like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something!

Especially for writers from traditionally privileged demographics, the message seems to be that it’s a whole lot safer just to make all your characters from that same demographic, so you can be as hard on them as you care to be, and do with them what you like. Availing yourself of a diverse cast, you are not free; you have inadvertently invited a host of regulations upon your head, as if just having joined the EU. Use different races, ethnicities, and minority gender identities, and you are being watched.

I confess that this climate of scrutiny has got under my skin. When I was first starting out as a novelist, I didn’t hesitate to write black characters, for example, or to avail myself of black dialects, for which, having grown up in the American South, I had a pretty good ear. I am now much more anxious about depicting characters of different races, and accents make me nervous.

In describing a second-generation Mexican American who’s married to one of my main characters in The Mandibles, I took care to write his dialogue in standard American English, to specify that he spoke without an accent, and to explain that he only dropped Spanish expressions tongue-in-cheek. I would certainly think twice – more than twice – about ever writing a whole novel, or even a goodly chunk of one, from the perspective of a character whose race is different from my own – because I may sell myself as an iconoclast, but I’m as anxious as the next person about attracting vitriol. But I think that’s a loss. I think that indicates a contraction of my fictional universe that is not good for the books, and not good for my soul.

Writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser on Vox, the author of the essay “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Scare Me” describes higher education’s “current climate of fear” and its “heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity” – and I am concerned that this touchy ethos, in which offendedness is used as a weapon, has spread far beyond academia, in part thanks to social media.

Why, it’s largely in order to keep from losing my fictional mojo that I stay off Facebook and Twitter, which could surely install an instinctive self-censorship out of fear of attack. Ten years ago, I gave the opening address of this same festival, in which I maintained that fiction writers have a vested interest in protecting everyone’s right to offend others – because if hurting someone else’s feelings even inadvertently is sufficient justification for muzzling, there will always be someone out there who is miffed by what you say, and freedom of speech is dead. With the rise of identity politics, which privileges a subjective sense of injury as actionable basis for prosecution, that is a battle that in the decade since I last spoke in Brisbane we’ve been losing.

Worse: the left’s embrace of gotcha hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and cannot say. Pushing back against a mainstream culture of speak-no-evil suppression, they lash out in defiance, and then what they say is pretty appalling.

Regarding identity politics, what’s especially saddened me in my recent career is a trend toward rejecting the advocacy of anyone who does not belong to the group. In 2013, I published Big Brother, a novel that grew out of my loss of my own older brother, who in 2009 died from the complications of morbid obesity. I was moved to write the book not only from grief, but also sympathy: in the years before his death, as my brother grew heavier, I saw how dreadfully other people treated him – how he would be seated off in a corner of a restaurant, how the staff would roll their eyes at each other after he’d ordered, though he hadn’t requested more food than anyone else.

I was wildly impatient with the way we assess people’s characters these days in accordance with their weight, and tried to get on the page my dismay at how much energy people waste on this matter, sometimes anguishing for years over a few excess pounds. Both author and book were on the side of the angels, or so you would think.

But in my events to promote Big Brother, I started to notice a pattern. Most of the people buying the book in the signing queue were thin. Especially in the US, fat is now one of those issues where you either have to be one of us, or you’re the enemy. I verified this when I had a long email correspondence with a “Healthy at Any Size” activist, who was incensed by the novel, which she hadn’t even read. Which she refused to read. No amount of explaining that the novel was on her side, that it was a book that was terribly pained by the way heavy people are treated and how unfairly they are judged, could overcome the scrawny author’s photo on the flap.

She and her colleagues in the fat rights movement did not want my advocacy. I could not weigh in on this material because I did not belong to the club. I found this an artistic, political, and even commercial disappointment – because in the US and the UK, if only skinny-minnies will buy your book, you’ve evaporated the pool of prospective consumers to a puddle.

I worry that the clamorous world of identity politics is also undermining the very causes its activists claim to back. As a fiction writer, yeah, I do sometimes deem my narrator an Armenian. But that’s only by way of a start. Merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word.

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough.

I made this same point in relation to gender in Melbourne last week: both as writers and as people, we should be seeking to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

The reading and writing of fiction is obviously driven in part by a desire to look inward, to be self-examining, reflective. But the form is also born of a desperation to break free of the claustrophobia of our own experience. The spirit of good fiction is one of exploration, generosity, curiosity, audacity, and compassion. Writing during the day and reading when I go to bed at night, I find it an enormous relief to escape the confines of my own head. Even if novels and short stories only do so by creating an illusion, fiction helps to fell the exasperating barriers between us, and for a short while allows us to behold the astonishing reality of other people.

The last thing we fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us. In a recent interview, our colleague Chris Cleave conceded, “Do I as an Englishman have any right to write a story of a Nigerian woman? … I completely sympathise with the people who say I have no right to do this. My only excuse is that I do it well.”

Which brings us to my final point. We do not all do it well. So it’s more than possible that we write from the perspective of a one-legged lesbian from Afghanistan and fall flat on our arses. We don’t get the dialogue right, and for insertions of expressions in Pashto we depend on Google Translate. Halfway through the novel, suddenly the protagonist has lost the right leg instead of the left one. Our idea of lesbian sex is drawn from wooden internet porn. Efforts to persuasively enter the lives of others very different from us may fail: that’s a given. But maybe rather than having our heads taken off, we should get a few points for trying. After all, most fiction sucks. Most writing sucks. Most things that people make of any sort suck. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make anything.

The answer is that modern cliché: to keep trying to fail better. Anything but be obliged to designate my every character an ageing five-foot-two smartass, and having to set every novel in North Carolina.

We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.

This is the full transcript of the keynote speech, Fiction and Identity Politics, Lionel Shriver gave at the Brisbane Writers Festival on 8 September.

[trebaolsmovingcastle]

are we all gonna die?

What? No, God no! I mean, we all die in the physical sense at some point, but if you mean in the near term...then no, heavens no!

I almost certainly won't die, I’m nearly unkillable.

So you’re probably afraid about Korea? Well, if you’re in North America, you’re as safe as a bug in a rug. There’s nearly zero chance that even if Kim  was able to load a nuclear weapon into his newest and longest range rocket, that it would successfully connect, let alone with the area you are in. These things are finite, they have hard numbers, and not a large number either.

If you’re in South Korea, well, arguably you’re chances go down some, but there’s still gonna be a likelihood you’d live.

A week ago the odds were at 50/50 with a war with North Korea, they probably aren’t better this week...but, we have to recall that despite the US no longer representing a rational actor, North Korea is. Meaning Japan is potentially not going to be targeted, at first...plus there’s the possibility that the US will do nothing because Trump is a big enough idiot to make threats, but not the type to follow through. Plus he would know the Chinese very deliberately said they’d retaliate if we did anything. Even Russia has a vested interest in us not doing anything. Korea likewise knows that if it uses nukes it can’t take it back, and will face retaliation. So if we don’t strike first we can reasonably expect Korea to keep being aggressive but pulling their punches.

If however you’re talking about automation or the coming economic/political crises of 2020-2030 well...you won’t die. Most people won’t die. The world won’t look like it does now, and it will probably look frightening and hazardous and unfair...but you’ll be alive.

Maybe you mean climate change? Well, you probably wont die, but I would worry about your grand kids.

But let’s stop and think, the likelihood that you yourself will die from the ills of the world in the near term is very low. You may not like what you see, your faith in yourself and the world will be challenged. Bad things will happen right before your eyes and you probably will have to make hard choices about yourself and what is okay and what isn’t. But you won’t die.

What you need, what everyone who has a soul needs, is hope. You can’t despair that the world is ended, that there is nowhere to go, that history, civilization, your life, is at its end. When you abandon hope you give a little more breathing room to the idea that it’s all going to end, and end badly.

Look around at all the bad things in the world and think about how the expectation is ‘it will just get worse’ the soul sapping idea that things will never get better, that it’s inevitable that they spiral into annihilation. A minority of people hijacked the country and do evil with it, and somehow it means that it’s all over.

Never! Not ever! Hope, you need hope, and to see around you the people who also hope, and will do the hard work of being alive, and saying ‘no’ to this world. The world isn’t impure, it isn’t wicked, it isn’t impossible to beat  back this sense of doom. The future does not just belong to fascists, to automation, to environmental collapse, it belongs to the meek, the unheard, the invisible, it belongs to the people who have fought since time immemorial to be seen as deserving of the rights of all humans as any white bureaucrat has.

Look to hope, look to the people who still believe it’s possible to stand against all of this despair and insist that they will keep trying. Take strength in the friends, neighbors, strangers who refuse to go quietly along with despair.

I loathe these short term outcomes, where you have to see our petty little President performing some disgusting speech, when you see more news, more evidence of coming demise. That isn’t all there is to reality, when asked, when presented with a choice, an opportunity to say no, I take it, I say there is another way. 

In the small moments between people, in casual conversation, on the street, when presented with the rot at the heart of society, I say no, I stand up, I say something, I do something, because someone needs me to. The world needs people to hope and say something, to resist. 

Don’t mistake this either, don’t throw your life away on a statement, live, be smart, live and do good, live and provide hope, because martyring yourself once may set a person in motion, but the world needs all of us to do more than rise up, extinguish ourselves to send a message, and hope it was received.

So think, be critical, consider, weigh, stand up and never back down when evil presents itself, but remember that tomorrow someone may need you, someone you haven’t met may need you to stand up for them, to stand with them.

So we won’t die, I won’t die, you won’t die. We may see war, but many, many will live, and the world will continue, and the choices will present themselves, choices in everyday life asking ‘do you hope, or do you despair?’ Choose hope!

[juliestacy]

This is one smart device that every urban home could use Natasha Lomas @riptari / 1 day

Living in a dense urban environment brings many startup-fuelled conveniences, be it near instant delivery of food — or pretty much whatever else you fancy — to a whole range of wheels that can be hopped on (or into) to whisk you around at the tap of an app.

But the biggest problem afflicting city dwellers is not some minor inconvenience. It’s bad, poor, terrible, horrible, unhealthy air. And there’s no app to fix that.

Nor can hardware solve this problem. But smart hardware can at least help.

For about a month I’ve been road-testing a wi-fi connected air purifier made by Swedish company, Blueair. It uses an Hepa filtration system combined with integrated air quality sensors to provide real-time in-app feedback which can be reassuring or alert you to unseen problems.

Flip to the bottom of this article for a speed take or continue reading for the full review of the Blueair Classic 480i with dual filters to reduce dust, smoke and pollen

Review

If you’re even vaguely environmentally aware it’s fascinating and not a little horrifying to see how variable the air quality is inside your home. Everyday stuff like cooking, cleaning and changing the sheets can cause drastic swings in PM 2.5 and tVOC levels. Aka very small particles such as fine dust, smoke, odours and mite feces; and total volatile organic compounds, which refers to hundreds of different gases emitted by certain solids and liquids — including stuff humans breathe out by also harmful VOCs like formaldehyde.

What you learn from smart hardware can be not just informative but instructive. For instance I’ve switched to a less dusty cat litter after seeing how quickly the machine’s fan stepped up a gear after clearing the litter tray. I also have a new depth of understanding of quite how much pollution finds its way into my apartment when the upstairs neighbour is having a rooftop BBQ. Which makes it doubly offensive I wasn’t invited.

Though, I must admit, I’ve yet to figure out a diplomatic way to convince him to rethink his regular cook-out sessions. Again, some problems can’t be fixed by apps. Meanwhile city life means we’re all, to a greater or lesser degree, adding to the collectively polluted atmosphere. Changing that requires new politics.

You cannot hermetically seal your home against outdoor air pollution. It wouldn’t make for a healthy environment either. Indoor spaces must be properly ventilated. Adequate ventilation is also of course necessary to control moisture levels to prevent other nasty issues like mould. And using this device I’ve watched as opening a window almost instantly reduced tVOC levels.

Pretty much every city resident is affected by air pollution, to some degree. And it’s a heck of a lot harder to switch your home than change your brand of cat litter. But even on that far less fixable front, having an air quality sensor indoors can be really useful — to help you figure out the best (and worst) times to air out the house. I certainly won’t be opening the balcony doors on a busy Saturday afternoon any time soon, for example.

Blueair sells a range of air purifiers. The model I’ve been testing, the Blueair Classic 480i, is large enough to filter a room of up to 40m2. It includes filters capable of filtering both particulate matter and traffic fumes (aka its “SmokeStop” filter). The latter was important for me, given I live near a pretty busy road. But the model can be bought with just a particle filter if you prefer. The dual filtration model I’m testing is priced at €725 for EU buyers.

Point number one is that if you’re serious about improving indoor air quality the size of an air purifier really does matter. You need a device with a fan that’s powerful enough to cycle all the air in the room in a reasonable timeframe. (Blueair promises five air changes per hour for this model, per the correct room size).

So while smaller air filter devices might look cute, if a desktop is all the space you can stretch to you’d probably be better off getting a few pot plants.

Blueair’s hardware also has software in the mix too, of course. The companion Blueair Friend app serves up the real-time feedback on both indoor air quality and out. The latter via a third party service whose provider can vary depending on your location. Where I live in Europe it’s powered by BreezoMeter.

This is a handy addition for getting the bigger picture. If you find you have stubbornly bad air quality levels indoors and really can’t figure out why, most often a quick tab switch will confirm local pollution levels are indeed awful right now. It’s likely not just you but the whole neighbourhood suffering.

Dirty cities

From Asia to America the burning of fossil fuels has consequences for air quality and health that are usually especially pronounced in dense urban environments where humans increasingly live. More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas — with the UN predicting this will grow to around 70% by 2050.

In Europe, this is already true for more than 70% of the population which makes air pollution a major concern in many regional cities.

Growing awareness of the problem is beginning to lead to policy interventions — such as London’s ultra low emission charging zone and car free Sundays one day a month in Paris’ city center. But EU citizens are still, all too often, stuck sucking in unhealthy air.

London’s toxic air is an invisible killer.

We launched the world’s first Ultra Low Emission Zone to cut air pollution. Since then, there have been on average 9400 fewer polluting vehicles on our streets every day. #LetLondonBreathe #ULEZ pic.twitter.com/0mYcIGi1xP

— Mayor of London (@MayorofLondon) May 23, 2019

Last year six EU nations, including the UK, France and Germany, were referred to the highest court in Europe for failing to tackle air pollution — including illegally high levels of nitrogen dioxide produced by diesel-powered vehicles.

Around one in eight EU citizens who live in an urban area is exposed to air pollutant levels that exceed one or more of the region’s air quality standards, according to a briefing note published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) last year.

It also said up to 96% of EU urban citizens are exposed to levels of one or more air pollutants deemed damaging to health when measured against the World Health Organization’s more stringent guidelines.

There are multiple and sometimes interlinked factors impacting air quality in urban environments. Traffic fumes is a very big one. But changes in meteorological conditions due to climate change are also expected to increase certain concentrations of air pollutants. While emissions from wildfires is another problem exacerbated by drought conditions which are linked to climate change that can also degrade air quality in nearby cities.

Action to tackle climate change continues to lag far behind what’s needed to put a check on global warming. Even as far too little is still being done in most urban regions to reduce vehicular emissions at a local level.

In short, this problem isn’t going away anytime soon — and all too often air quality is still getting worse.

At the same time health risks from air pollution are omnipresent and can be especially dangerous for children. A landmark global study of the impact of traffic fumes on childhood asthma, published recently in the Lancet, estimates that four million children develop the condition every year primarily as a result of nitrogen dioxide air pollution emitted by vehicles.

The majority (64%) of these new cases were found to occur in urban centres — increasing to 90% when factoring in surrounding suburban areas.

The study also found that damage caused by air pollution is not limited to the most highly polluted cities in China and India. “Many high-income countries have high NO2 exposures, especially those in North America, western Europe, and Asia Pacific,” it notes.

The long and short of all this is that cities the world over are going to need to get radically great at managing air quality — especially traffic emissions — and fast. But, in the meanwhile, city dwellers who can’t or don’t want to quit the bright lights are stuck breathing dirty air. So it’s easy to imagine consumer demand growing for in-home devices that can sense and filter pollutants as urbanities try to find ways to balance living in a city with reducing their exposure to the bad stuff.

Cleaner air

That’s not to say that any commercial air purifier will be able to provide a complete fix. The overarching problem of air pollution is far too big and bad for that. A true fix would demand radical policy interventions, such as removing all polluting vehicles from urban living spaces. (And there’s precious little sign of anything so radical on the horizon.)

But at least at an individual home level, a large air purifier with decent filtration technology should reduce your exposure to pollution in the place you likely spend the most time.

If, as the Blueair Classic 480i model does, the filtration device also includes embedded sensors to give real-time feedback on air quality it can further help you manage pollution risk — by providing data so you can better understand the risks in and around your home and make better decisions about, for instance, when to open a window.

“Air quality does always change,” admits Blueair’s chief product officer, Jonas Holst, when we chat. “We cannot promise to our consumers that you will always have super, super, clean air. But we can promise to consumers that you will always have a lot cleaner air by having our product — because it depends on what happens around you. In the outdoor, by your neighbours, if you’re cooking, what your cat does or something. All of those things impact air quality.

“But by having high speeds, thanks to the HepaSilent technology that we use, we can make sure that we always constantly fight that bombardment of pollutants.”

On the technology front, Blueair is using established filtration technology — Hepa and active carbon filters to remove particular matter and gaseous pollutants — but with an ionizing twist (which it brands ‘HepaSilent’).

This involves applying mechanical and electrostatic filtration in combination to enhance performance of the air purifier without boosting noise levels or requiring large amounts of energy to run. Holst dubs it one of the “core strengths” of the Blueair product line.

“Mechanical filtration just means a filter [plus a fan to draw the air through it]. We have a filter but by using the ionization chamber we have inside the product we can boost the performance of the filter without making it very, very dense. And by doing that we can let more air through the product and simply then clean more air faster,” he explains.

“It’s also something that is constantly being developed,” he adds of the firm’s Hepa + ionizing technology, which it’s been developing in its products for some 20 years. “We have had many developments of this technology since but the base technical structure is there in the combination between a mechanical and electrostatical filtration. That is what allows us to have less noise and less energy because the fan doesn’t work as hard.”

On top of that, in the model I’m testing, Blueair has embedded air quality sensors — which connect via wi-fi to the companion app where the curious user can see real-time plots of things like PM 2.5 and tVOC levels, and start to join the dots between what’s going on in their home and what the machine is sniffing out.

The sensors mean the unit can step up and down the fan speed and filtration level automatically in response to pollution spikes (you can choose it to trigger on particulate matter only, or PM 2.5 and tVOC gaseous compounds, or turn automation off altogether). So if you’re really not at all curious that’s okay too. You can just plug it in, hook it to the wi-fi and let it work.

Sound, energy and sensing smarts in a big package

To give a ballpark of energy consumption for this model, Holst says the Blueair Classic 480i consumes “approximately” the same amount of energy as running a lightbulb — assuming it’s running mostly on lower fan speeds.

As and when the fan steps up in response to a spike in levels of potential pollutants he admits it will consume “a little bit more” energy.

The official specs list the model’s energy consumption at between 15-90 watts.

On the noise front it’s extremely quiet when on the lowest fan setting. To the point of being barely noticeable. You can sleep in the same room and certainly won’t be kept awake.

You will notice when the fan switches up to the second or, especially, the third (max) speed — where it can hit 52 dB(A)). The latter’s rushing air sounds are discernible from a distance, even in another room. But you hopefully won’t be stuck listening to level 3 fan noise for too long, unless you live in a really polluted place. Or, well, unless you run into an algorithmic malfunction (more on that below).

As noted earlier, the unit’s smart sensing capabilities mean fan speed can be set to automatically adjust in response to changing pollution levels — which is obviously the most useful mode to use since you won’t need to keep checking in to see whether or not the air is clean.

You can manually override the automation and fix/switch the fan at a speed of your choice via the app. And as I found there are scenarios where an override is essential. Which we’ll get to shortly.

The unit I was testing, a model that’s around two years old, arrived with instructions to let it run for a week without unplugging so that the machine learning algorithms could configure to local conditions and offer a more accurate read on gases and particles. Holst told us that the U.S. version of the 480i is “slightly updated” — and, as such, this learning process has been eliminated. So you should be able to just plug it in and get the most accurate reads right away.

The company recommends changing the filters every six months to “ensure performance”, or more if you live in a very polluted area. The companion app tracks days (estimated) remaining running time in the form of a days left countdown.

Looks wise, there’s no getting around the Blueair Classic 480i is a big device. Think ‘bedside table’ big.

You’re not going to miss it in your room and it does need a bigger footprint of free space around it so as not to block the air intake and outlet. Something in the region of ~80x60cm. Its lozenge shape helps by ensuring no awkward corners and with finding somewhere it can be parked parallel but not too close to a wall.

There’s not much more to say about the design of this particular model except that it’s thoughtful. The unit has a minimalist look which avoids coming across too much like a piece of ugly office furniture. While its white and gun metal grey hues plus curved flanks help it blend into the background. I haven’t found it to be an eyesore.

A neat flip up lid hides a set of basic physical controls. But once you’ve done the wi-fi set-up and linked it to the companion app you may never need to use these buttons as everything can be controlled in the app.

Real-time pollution levels at your fingertips

Warning: This app can be addictive! For weeks after installing the unit it was almost impossible to resist constantly checking the pollution levels. Mostly because it was fascinating to watch how domestic activity could send one or other level spiking or falling.

As well as PM 2.5 and tVOC pollutants this model tracks temperature and humidity levels. It offers day, week and monthly plots for everything it tracks.

The day view is definitely the most addictive — as it’s where you see instant changes and can try to understand what’s triggering what. So you can literally join the dots between, for example, hearing a street sweeper below your window and watching a rise in PM 2.5 levels in the app right after. Erk!

Though don’t expect a more detailed breakdown of the two pollutant categories; it’s an aggregated mix in both cases. (And some of the gases that make up the tVOC mix aren’t harmful.)

The month tab gives a longer overview which can be handy to spot regular pollution patterns (though the view is a little cramped on less phablet-y smartphone screens).

While week view offers a more recent snapshot if you’re trying to get a sense of your average pollution exposure over a shorter time frame.

That was one feature I thought the app could have calculated for you. But, equally, more granular quantification might risk over-egging the pudding. It would also risk being mislead if the sensor accuracy fails on you. The overarching problem with pollution exposure is that, sadly, there’s only so much an individual can do to reduce it. So it probably makes sense not to calculate your pollution exposure score.

The app could certainly provide more detail than it does but Holst told us the aim is to offer enough info to people who are interested without it being overwhelming. He also said many customers just want to plug it in and let it work, not be checking out daily charts. (Though if you’re geeky you will of course want the data.)

It’s clear there is lots of simplification going, as you’d expect with this being a consumer device, not a scientific instrument. I found the Blueair app satisfied my surface curiosity while seeing ways its utility could be extended with more features. But in the end I get that it’s designed to be an air-suck, not a time-suck, so I do think they’ve got the balance there pretty much right.

There are enough real-time signals to be able to link specific activities/events with changes in air quality. So you can literally watch as the tVOC level drops when you open a window. (Or rises if your neighbor is BBQing… ). And I very quickly learnt that opening a window will (usually) lower tVOC but send PM 2.5 rising — at least where I live in a dusty, polluted city. So, again, cleaner air is all you should expect.

Using the app you can try and figure out, for instance, optimal ventilation timings. I also found having the real-time info gave me a new appreciation for heavy rain — which seemed to be really great for clearing dust out of the air, frequently translating into “excellent” levels of PM 2.5 in the app for a while after.

Here are a few examples of how the sensors reacted to different events — and what the reaction suggests…

Cleaning products can temporarily spike tVOC levels:

Changing bed sheets can also look pretty disturbing…

An evening BBQ on a nearby roof terrace appears much, much worse though:

And opening the balcony door to the street on a busy Saturday afternoon is just… insane…

Uh-oh, algorithm malfunction…

After a few minutes of leaving the balcony door open one fateful Saturday afternoon, which almost instantly sent the unit into max fan speed overdrive, I was surprised to find the fan still blasting away an hour later, and then three hours later, and at bedtime, and in the morning. By which point I thought something really didn’t seem right.

The read from the app showed the pollution level had dropped down from the very high spike but it was still being rated as ‘polluted’ — a level which keeps the fan at the top speed. So I started to suspect something had misfired.

This is where being able to switch to manual is essential — meaning I could override the algorithm’s conviction that the air was really bad and dial the fan down to a lower setting.

That override provided a temporary ‘fix’ but the unnaturally elevated ‘pollution’ read continued for the best part of a week. This made it look like the whole sensing capacity had broken. And without the ability to automatically adapt to changing pollution levels the smart air purifier was now suddenly dumb…

It turned out Blueair has a fix for this sort of algorithmic malfunction. Though it’s not quick.

After explaining the issue to the company, laying out my suspicion that the sensors weren’t reading correctly, it told me the algorithms are programmed to respond to this type of situation by reseting around seven days after the event, assuming the read accuracy hasn’t already corrected itself by then.

Sure enough, almost a week later that’s exactly what happened. Though I couldn’t find anything to explain this might happen in the user manual, so it would be helpful if they include it in a troubleshooting section.

Here’s the month view showing the crazy PM 2.5 spike; the elevated extended (false) reading; then the correction; followed finally by (relatively) normal service…

For a while after this incident the algorithms also seemed overly sensitive — and I had to step in again several times to override the top gear setting as its read on pollution levels was back into the yellow without an obvious reason why.

When the level reads ‘polluted’ it automatically triggers the highest fan speed. Paradoxically, this sometimes seems to have the self-defeating effect of appearing to draw dust up into the air — thereby keeping the PM 2.5 level elevated. So at times manually lowering the fan when it’s only slightly polluted can reduce pollution levels quicker than just letting it blast away. Which is one product niggle.

When viewed in the app the sustained elevated pollution level did look pretty obviously wrong — to the human brain at least. So, like every ‘smart’ device, this one also benefits from having human logic involved to complete the loop.

Concluding thoughts after a month’s use

A few weeks on from the first algorithm malfunction the unit’s sensing capacity at first appeared to have stabilized — in that it was back to the not-so-hair-trigger-sensitivity that had been the case prior to balcony-door-gate.

For a while it seemed less prone to have a sustained freak out over relatively minor domestic activities like lifting clean sheets out of the cupboard, as if it had clicked into a smoother operating grove. Though I remained wary of trying the full bore Saturday balcony door.

I thought this period of relative tranquility might signal improved measurement accuracy, the learning algos having been through not just an initial training cycle but a major malfunction plus correction. Though of course there was no way to be sure.

It’s possible there had also been a genuine improvement in indoor air quality — i.e. as a consequence of, for example, better ventilation habits and avoiding key pollution triggers because I now have real-time air quality feedback to act on so can be smarter about when to open windows, where to shake sheets, which type of cat litter to buy and so on.

It’s a reassuring idea. Though one that requires putting your faith in algorithms that are demonstrably far from perfect. Even when they’re functioning they’re a simplification and approximation of what’s really going on. And when they fail, well, they are clearly getting it totally wrong.

Almost bang on the month mark of testing there was suddenly another crazy high PM 2.5 spike.

One rainy afternoon the read surged from ‘good’ to ‘highly polluted’ without any real explanation. I had opened a patio on the other side of the apartment but it does not open onto a street. This time the reading stuck at 400 even with the fan going full blast. So it looked like an even more major algorithm crash…

Really clean air is impossible to mistake. Take a walk in the mountains far from civilization and your lungs will thank you. But cleaner air is harder for humans to quantify. Yet, increasingly, we do need to know how clean or otherwise the stuff we’re breathing is, as more of us are packed into cities exposed to each others’ fumes — and because the harmful health impacts of pollution are increasingly clear.

Without radical policy interventions we’re fast accelerating towards a place where we could be forced to trust sensing algorithms to tell us whether what we’re breathing is harmful or not.

Machines whose algorithms are fallible and might be making rough guestimates, and/or prone to sensing malfunctions. And machines that also won’t be able to promise to make the air entirely safe to breathe. Frankly it’s pretty scary to contemplate.

So while I can’t now imagine doing without some form of in-home air purifier to help manage my urban pollution risk — I’d definitely prefer that this kind of smart hardware wasn’t necessary at all.

In Blueair’s case, the company clearly still has work to do to improve the robustness of its sensing algorithms. Operating conditions for this sort of product will obviously vary widely, so there’s loads of parameters for its algorithms to balance.

With all that stuff to juggle it just seems a bit too easy for the sensing function to spin out of control.

10-second take

The good

Easy to set up, thoughtful product design, including relatively clear in-app controls and content which lets you understand pollution triggers to manage risk. Embedded air quality sensors greatly extend the product’s utility by enabling autonomous response to changes in pollution levels. Quiet operation during regular conditions. Choice of automated or manual fan speed settings. Filtration is powerful and since using the device indoor air quality does seem cleaner.

The bad

Sensing accuracy is not always reliable. The algorithms appear prone to being confused by air pressure changes indoors, such as a large window being opened which can trigger unbelievably high pollution readings that lead to an extended period of inaccurate readings when you can’t rely on the automation to work at all. I also found the feedback in the app can sometimes lag. App content/features are on the minimalist side so you may want more detail. When the pollution level is marginal an elevated fan speed can sometimes appear to challenge the efficacy of the filtration as if it’s holding pollution levels in place rather than reducing them.

Bottom line

If you’re looking for a smart air purifier the Blueair Classic 480i does have a lot to recommend it. Quiet operation, ease of use and a tangible improvement in air quality, thanks to powerful filtration. However the accuracy of the sensing algorithms does pose a dilemma. For me this problem has recurred twice in a month. That’s clearly not ideal when it takes a full week to reset. If it were not for this reliability issue I would not hesitate to recommend the product, as — when not going crazy — the real-time feedback it provides really helps you manage a variety of pollution risks in and around your home. Hopefully the company will work on improving the stability of the algorithms. Or at least offer an option in the app so you can manually reset it if/when it does go wrong.

Original Article

This is one smart device that every urban home could use

This is one smart device that every urban home could use Natasha Lomas @riptari / 1 day …

This is one smart device that every urban home could use This is one smart device that every urban home could use Natasha Lomas @riptari / 1 day …

[duaneodavila]

Jussie Smollett’s Lies Will Not Make Me Trust Law Enforcement

(Photo by Chicago Police Department via Getty Images)

Withholding judgement is an act of faith, not logic. Logic is what allows you to make conclusions based on the information you have available. Deductive logic is what allows to you overcome gaps in that information. But it is faith that makes you believe more information will present itself, and that your restraint will be rewarded with a more accurate set of facts on which to base your conclusion.

My mistake in the Jussie Smollett saga was a common one, but not the one a bunch of white people think I made. My mistake was that I impugned my standards of logical rigor on a man I didn’t know, facing issues I couldn’t imagine, operating with a moral center I’ve never tested. I imagined Smollett to be a rational actor, without any evidence that he was one. It’s a particularly stupid mistake for me to make, I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking about how the assumption of “rational” behavior, despite tons of evidence to the contrary, is the threshold mistake made by many right wing judges and economists. No “rational” person would invent an attack by MAGA bros in this political climate and expect to get away with it, but my assumption that Smollett was a rational person was a critical logical failure. I can’t speak for everybody, but I’m smarter than that. Next time, I won’t be so quick to make my thinking contingent upon the common sense of people whose records I don’t know.

But there will be a “next time.” And while I will try to rest my judgments based on more solid reasoning, there’s nothing that’s going to hold back the speed of those judgments That’s because nothing in the Smollett situation has restored my faith in: the police, law enforcement generally, or the white people who rove around this country in MAGA hats. Nothing that’s happened here makes me believe that police are interested in even finding more or accurate information about their own misdeeds. Nothing that’s happened here makes me think MAGA is now committed to having “full investigations” of alleged crimes. And nothing that’s happened here makes me believe that white guy naysayers on Twitter take seriously the threats and incidents of violence that are visited upon minorities, LGBTQ people, and women in this country.

I have no faith in these people. The police aren’t interested in keeping me safe, they’re interested in keeping some unreconstructed white lady safe from me. MAGAs aren’t interested in justice, social or otherwise, they’re interested in preserving white supremacy. The next time somebody comes forward claiming they are a victim of a hate crime, these people can brand themselves with “Remember Jussie Smollett” tattoos for all I care. Their cries to pump the breaks on a “rush to judgement” will mean nothing to me, logically, because I’ll have “Remember LaQuan McDonald” etched on my black ass.

Trevor Noah (who I feel is criminally underrated as a comic and social commentator) says that I shouldn’t conflate the two cases. From Slate:

“The Chicago P.D. has lied about many things when it includes themselves. Cops have lied to further their own goals. This had nothing to do with them. It wasn’t a story about police. They lied about Laquan McDonald,” reminded Noah. “But this is a completely separate thing where they had nothing to gain or lose by him being proved right or wrong.” He finished up with a joke: “Either way they were going to arrest the black person, so they were winning”.

Here, Noah is wrong. It’s not a “completely separate thing.” He’s making the mistake I just admitted I made myself: he’s imagining rational self-interest guides the actions of Chicago police. I’d sooner anthropomorphize a damn candelabra that impute “rationality” to C-P-freaking-D

Police sussed out and arrested Smollett in less than a month. Smollett made the allegedly false report on January 29th, and he turned himself in today, February 21st. In contrast, police took 13 months to arrest Jason Van Dyke, the officer who murdered LaQuan McDonald. And they had the dash-cam footage showing the crime the entire time. Van Dyke was eventually convicted, but the three officers who allegedly tried to cover up the murder were eventually acquitted.

These incidents are connected because it’s evidence that I cannot trust CPD to do a full and transparent investigation of crimes when the victim is black. It’s evidence that police treat a potential false police report from a black man more seriously than a potential murder of a black man.

And it’s evidence that the police can act pretty damn quickly when there is intense media scrutiny and pressure on the case. Some people are acting like Smollett is an argument against a media circus. I view Smollett as additional evidence that media outrage is the only way to make these cops do their freaking jobs.

Chicago police Superintendent, Eddie Johnson, crushed Smollett today, but had a little something extra for the media:

“Before I get started on why we’re here, you know, as I look out into the crowd I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention,”

If Johnson thinks it would help, I certainly hope the media obliges. I hope the entire national media stays in Chicago and keeps its foot up the ass of CPD until ALL perpetrators of violence are brought to justice, whether those perpetrators be out on the streets or working for the police. I hope this wished for attention on gun violence builds momentum for federal gun restriction laws. If media attention is what Chicago police need, then media attention is what it should receive.

If right-wing Twitter heroes want to make this issue bigger than Jussie Smollett, LET’S MAKE IT BIGGER. We’ve been treated to thousands of stories about how alienation from institutions makes rural white people vote for Trump. Let’s have the stories about how the history of murder, brutality, and lies makes many non-whites reflexively distrust the police. Let’s ask what the police can do about it. Let’s talk about the rise of hate crimes under Trump, and how the police are doing nothing to stop that, but busted down Smollett in four weeks. Let’s talk about how black LIES seem to matter, but black LIVES do not.

It appears Jussie Smollett was full of crap. That’s new information, to me. That the police are full of crap is old information I’ve already baked into my logical processes. I won’t be pumping the breaks or self-censoring until the police spend half as much time investigating their own bullshit as they did investigating Smollett’s.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Jussie Smollett’s Lies Will Not Make Me Trust Law Enforcement republished via Above the Law

[piilukko]

Electoral Shenanigans II – Finnish Municipal boogaloo

Finnish Municipal Election of 2017 is over and the votes have been cast and counted – at last, one might say after seeing months of campaigning and advertising.

Note: if you are entirely unfamiliar with Finnish politics and political culture, you might want to start here, for example, for a crash course how we got to this point and about the so called The Finns Party, our version of the right-wing populist movement. You might also want to check what a Finnish municipality actually it and what does it do. 

Worth noting is that those things are not entirely fixed. In the past municipalities were allowed to things like banning sales of all alcohol. They had the power to set regulations on public order – all of which was replaced by a state-wide Public Order Act in 2003. At moment government working removing healthcare and welfare from municipalities responsibilities and setting up county administration for them – but parties disagree and at the moment no one is 100% certain what a Finnish municipality is going to be in the future. And last and not least: not all Finnish people are entirely familiar with this either. Most of the candidates are ordinary people, not career politicians. The council members get financial compensation, but not salary, it is not their job. Sometimes people campaign and vote based on matters entirely beyond the scope of municipal politics.

Municipal elections are often seen as some kind of “half-way there” elections between parliamentary elections (both the parliament and city and municipality councils have four year terms and nowadays the municipal election really occur in the middle of the parliament term). Commentators often try find if policies on governmental level are having an effect on municipal level, if the voters are sending a message to cabinet ministers and the parties, but probably at least some voters are ignoring those factors altogether and voting purely on local matters. Especially in small town, where people know at least some council members personally – a Finnish municipality can be anything from Helsinki ,with its 600k residents,  to small villages of couple of hundreds residents – and the median is a couple thousands residents.

So, despite we kinda had like over 300 separate elections on the same day, with technically speaking nothing do with each other, maybe we can look some of the themes.

The True Finns lost big time. They are a populist party with a long history of as anti-establishment protest party for conservatives – anti-immigration, anti-European Union, anti-LGBT, anti-environmentalism, anti-whatever those damned hippies, liberals and bicyclists are trying this tme. A party for the honest heterosexual, white, meat-eating, house-owning. car-owning common man (and also the common woman, should she accept the traditional gender roles), we’ll also take good care your old mother struggling on her small pension, as long as you vote us and accept Carl G.E. Mannerheim as your lord and saviour.

Somewhat like Trump? Maybe, the main difference being a different political system and culture, the D’Hondt election system used here has it disadvantages but at least it’s not first-past-the-post and allows for a real multiparty system. True Finns chairman Timo Soini started building the party in the 90′s and started gaining more and more support election by election. 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union (which meant old school communism lost most of its appeal) Finnish politics have featured The Big Three of parties. Included are The Social Democrats – a moderate (very moderate) left-wing party). The Centre Party – a party started as the Agrarian League having moderate success in cities but absolutely ruling the rural areas. The National Coalition – the right-wing party, sometimes quite far on the right, I mean not as in nazi far-right, but on the political compass the they are scattered like some one fired a shotgun towards the right side of the chart – but at least they don’t hate people of color, they just hate people of no money. Especially their youth organization often sees no shame in literal minarchism (ironically they started as the monarchist party)

And at least for a moment, Soini was able to manage to transform this triumvirate into The Big Four, with the True Finns actually gaining more votes than the Social Democrats. And if you think I make this sound like a one man project, it truly is, in modern politics in Finland there are no other mainstream examples of the same person leading one party for twenty years.

Well, then they joined the government (as in were not in opposition anymore, if you are unfamiliar with consensus politics) in 2011 and their voters found out that not only they were unable to banish all foreigners (or at least the black people or at least the Muslims) like some of their voters must genuinely have believed. They also found no problem supporting the National Coalition’s and Centre Party’s austerity policies (remember the old mother and her pension) and also were unable to stop the loaning money to Greece (lost story short:most experts agree we are definitely not getting back, Greece is broke) and so their approval ratings made a historically bad dive. 

Not only their voters, many True Finn council members all around the nation lost their faith in the party, saw the writing on the wall or found out their party was full of brownshirts – be it ideological reasons or just hopes to be at least somewhat re-electable, they chose to switch parties mid-term. One famous example was Youtube celebrity Tykylevits, who as a very surprising move secede from True Finns and found the Green Party chapter of his small home town, gaining Greens two seats of 27, a significant feat in the middle of Centre Party country.

So, The True Finns lost roughly speaking one third of their support and I hope this is the start of their end as the natural lifespan of a populist party full of air reaches its finale. We cannot get rid of them altogether, but at least on the national level they will once again be a fringe party. They might go far-right (this time I mean nazi far-right) depending who will be elected as the chairman after Soini decided to not run for the position anymore – and most importantly who will remain, candidate-wise and voter-wise, when it becomes apparent the support for the “working man’s party” is fading. One of the main candidates for the seat is Jussi Halla-aho, a well known anti-immigration and anti-gun control zealot with very little opinions on anything else. Anway, the parliament election is in 2019 and I expect to see them losing similar amount of votes there.

The True Finns in Tampere were a great example of the mess the party is in. Their local chapter chairwoman was expelled from the main party, officially because of a minor economical mishap regarding travel expenses (which the party claim she did on purpose), I think it was really because she was too far-right for a party with parliament seats. Anyway, the chapter chose not to expel her (despite this being clearly against party rules) and instead chose her as one of their candidates. 

On the other hand they spent shitloads of money campaigning (on the local radio stations for example) against the Tampere tramway project, even though the council already voted green for it (48 votes against 18), they are already building the tracks and the city would have to pay reasonable amount of mount (I think 10% of the actual costs of the project?) to several companies if they scrapped the project at this point. And after all, the TF could have just said that they were against the project, the lost in the voting, they accept it and now they will concentrate on other matters.

This is not exactly how you get sensible people vote you, right, even if they agreed with you? They lost five of their ten seats.

The Big Three all got roughly 20% support each, nationwide, and there’s not much interesting to say about that. They all have lots of very loyal supporters and I would be surprised to see very rapid changes in their support nationwide, even thought this might happen in individual municipalities, where it all might be about whether some local popular person chooses to run for the next term or not. The same applies to the Swedish Party which is smaller but get’s the same amount of votes anyway every time.

The Greens won, about everywhere, getting their greatest share of votes in any Finnish election (Pekka Haavisto’s success in the presidential election of 2012 does not count) . They have branded themselves as the opposite of the True Finns – main themes include enviromental issues (including but not limited to climate change), LGBT rights, anti-racism and generally trying to keep the Finnish welfare state with free education and such from disintegrating. Bicycling activists and public transport advocates tend to join the party, first openly gay MP was Green, you get the idea.

For many urban dwellers who don’t care about politics that much, they are becoming the default party – “the Good Guys you should vote if you’re on the side of the Good Guys”. The transformation of a pure nature preservation society to a political party fighting for wide range of issues has alienated some of the hardcore environmentalists but was, I think, absolutely necessary, because the great masses (and not even yours truly) are not willing to accept the strict “eco-fascism” of likes of Pentti Linkola. I’d say they are the 21th century version of the Social Democrats. (The Social Democrats on the other hand, are still the 20th century version of themselves and will gradually lose MP seats because their voters die. Of old age)

One of the biggest surprises was Jyväskylä, where Greens become the biggest party, I think for the first time any city, ever. Might be because it’s midsize city with a rather big university, might be because some very popular candidates with personal following.

...and then there’s the Left Alliance, which started from the ashes of former communist parties but has reform itself to basically “we are just like the Greens, but we are also socialists” – emphasizing the old cliche that while The Greens refuse to define themselves on the traditional left-right scale, many see them as the “park and forest department of National Coalition”. As a challenge, The Left has it “industrial wing”, labour union activists, some of them who might not be willing to sacrifice jobs on the altar of environmentalism, should these two factors be at odds.

And at last, an election where the Left got more votes than last time, hooray! A moderate victory, but a victory nonetheless. Under the lead of very charismatic Li Andersson, it is possible the party may see similar success in the parliamentary election –hopefully the party will never again choose to enter the government with the together National Coalition, a move that was seen by many as selling-out, motivated by the party elite’s lust for “the backseat of a black Audi”, a common phrase symbolizing the prestige, luxury and financial compensation of a cabinet minister. 

(Yours truly voted for the Left so there might some bias in this post)

And then there’s the Christian Democrats, who changed their name to match a certain German mainstream party but are a fringe party still. They’re mostly from certain fundamentalist sects, liberal mainstream Christian usually joining other parties. They managed to get some more votes this time, perhaps because of their new chairwoman, an Olympic medalist in race walking and thus a former national hero. On the other hand, her predecessor was so unpopular she became one of the main memes in Finnish Tumblr and other social media.

Feminist Party, a newcomer, gained one seat in Helsinki, I suppose mainly because their chairwomen was invited to the fringe party panel on the TV and as one might guess, for a good public speaker it’s rather easy to look sane and professional, the other participants usually including libertarians and several communist parties unable to co-operate. 

I have mixed feelings about the party, I think there’s a lot of work to do in animal rights (a newly formed Animal Rights Party participated the same panel), ethnic minorities rights, feminist issues, QUILTBAG issues, environmentalism, city planning, not to mention class struggle, what else, and within this political system and D’Hondt voting, separating all these issues to their own separate parties sounds like the worst possible outcome. But what can i say if some-one feels that no other party is feminist enough? 

On the municipal level there’s always space for smaller players – Helsinki council has 85 seats and it’s all one voting distinct (no gerrymandering is possible) and many councils have local movements not participating in the state-level politics at all. On the parliament level, I fear the Greens, The Lefts, The Feminists and The Animal Rights Party will compete from the same votes and for example in Tavastia Proper only 14 MP seats are available and this might even mean none of them getting any seats. Satakunta and Lapland Distincts are even smaller. Hopefully they at least agree on electoral alliances.

Yarrr, The Pirates managed to get one seat in Helsinki and one in Jyväskylä (see the notion of Jyväskylä being a university town). I don’t share their idea of entire abolition of copyright, but they have a snowball change in hell in implementing it and otherwise many of them offer a welcome addition to politics. Many of them are IT professionals, municipal expertise in those issues (like buying infrastructure and support) has traditionally been scarce.

And finally, the Communists lost. After the mainstream communist parties (yes, that was a thing in Finland) crashed, burned and rose like the Phoenix as the Left Alliance, several people were unhappy with this, mainly because LA was not, well, communist, and promptly founded the Communist Party of Finland again. In the post-Soviet atmosphere, they have never got any MP seats or anything like that, but the municipal councils are another thing for them too and they actually have managed to have several seats in council, most famously in the big cities of Helsinki and Tampere.

Yrj�� Hakanen, their former chairman, is popular character in the political life of our capital. I think not all his voters even are communists themselves, after all, in the city council he cannot seize the means of production, but he can and will speak for the poor, the old, the ill and the unemployed. Tampere, on the other hand, has historically been known as the “Red City” and only partly because brick-walled former factory buildings (these days used as museums and office space). But alas, in neither of the cities there were enough votes for the party and then something happened, something that in the 1970′s would have been bourgeoisie daydreaming and still in the 1990′s was hard to imagine – there will be no communists in the council.

The same happened in some smaller towns too and I haven’t checked all the election data, but it might be that last stronghold for literal communist will be Nokia (the city, not the phone company or the tyre company), and even there their seats we reduced from three to one.

(This didn’t not stop Timo Soini from announcing “bicycle communists”, whatever that means, have taken over Finland)

(There’s also “Communist Workers' Party – For Peace and Socialism”, yes, that is their official party name, but that’s an another story and not a very popular one)

EDIT: The Social Democrats lost support. With the True Finns collapsing and “freeing” 3.5 percent points and Coalition and Centre losing one point each. one would think, that one of the old “major” players, SDP, would gain support. No, they lost also a little from municipal election of 2012. Although they are bragging about a rise in popularity compared to the parliament election of 2015, I think that’s comparing apples with oranges.

So I went back in history and checked all the elections, checking all municipal, parliament and European parliament elections compared to previous one of the same kind – YLE and Wikipedia make this very easy – and the result is devastating: sometimes a party wins and sometimes a party loses, but last time SDP gained seats was in 2004. 13 years ago. That was before Youtube, several years before Finns started joining Facebook and so on. (I’m not saying this just for scale, SDP is definitely not a social media party).

This is beyond the scope of this post and this election, but I think, if no drastic changes of party image, organization and leadership are made, The Social Democrats will become a mid-size party, perhaps even a small party, someone has to fill the void and The Greens my guess who will fill a lions share of this void.

And then to the “I am not making this up”-section of this post.

Paavo Väyrynen is Finnish political legend, an MP and MEP for many terms, a minister of several cabinets, a long time Centre party chairman. He has always been and will always be – at least from my point of view, he was elected to the Parliament before I was born. He’s very hard to explain to any foreigner (after all, he’s from the Centre and that party itself is very hard to explain, why the agrarian party is often the most popular). 

He’s a dinosaur from the seventies, a player of games, the trickster of Finnish politics. He gets involved in scandals, is sometimes hit but them but surfaces again like a Whack-a-Mole. He has solid support in Northern Finland. He runs for parliament and refuses to accept the seat he won’t get a minister position. He’s chosen by the party on “suicide mission”, a disposable way past his “best before” candidate for a doomed campaign against Sauli Niinistö, he has fun and manages to bring himself back to spotlight of politics. The party gave him the title of “honorary chairman”, apparently because he was too valuable and popular to let go, but too dangerous and unpredictable to let to interfere with actual politics.

So he started his own party, which made the Centre Party expel him: except by the party rules, the main office cannot do that, the local chapter should expel him and he’s their hero. Party does not want to expel the entire local chapter and the situation remains stalemate.

However, while his new “Citizen Party” is already in official party register and should be able to appoint candidates to all elections, Väyrynen chose to enter the municipal election. In Helsinki. As an independent candidate on the candidate list of... Christian Democrats. Apparently he had composed an army of NIMBYs (mainly against building more apartments to Helsinki allowing it grow), including some far-right activist. The Christian Democrats found out about the nature of these candidates after the candidate list were already fixed, so they just chose to shun these people from their posters.

However, none of the problematic candidates were elected – Väyrynen himself was, with over thousand votes. Now we wonder should he accept the seat, after all, he might have technically difficulties attending council meeting, considering the fact that he is at the moment a MEP.

Finnish politics would be much, much more boring without Paavo Väyrynen.

Pictured: chairman of the Greens Ville Niinistö celebrating victory; Paavo Väyrynen

[lcohen35]

Assignment 9 First Draft: In Depth Analysis of Symphony of Soil and Food Inc.

The long-form documentary can be used to effectively tell stories that have been historically left untold. Symphony of Soil is an interactive documentary which relies largely on interviews from scholars in the field of geology and environmental studies. Food inc., on the other hand, is more of a reflexive documentary, which demands viewers to think about and criticize the current system. Both films strengthen the narrative that the current way in which most of the food–especially in this country–is farmed is unsustainable, unhealthy, and frankly, unsettling.

Documentation of The Dance Between Soil, Food and Humans

The first film, Symphony of Soil captured many images and videos of different types of soil. It also portrayed the connection that humans have made with nature through visuals of the doctors and scientists in the film digging into soil and holding it in the palms of their hands. In reality, soil supports all life and holds us. The main idea with these visuals is that soil is concrete, so concrete, in fact, that we can hold it in the palms of our hands. This is an important factor, as many environmental issues are not taken seriously since they are somewhat less concrete and able to be seen, like climate change. 

Every time a new expert talked about a new type of soil, the camera panned over different natural places, including but not limited to, Norway, Hawaii, India, California and New York. Paired with these landscapes were musical tracks that aimed to match the culture of the given setting. The film aimed to educate about soil as the foundation of human life, and this was achieved with visuals of man walking within nature beside scenes of animals walking within nature. These types of scenes helped curate the story of how nature is all connected–the ocean, the soil, animals, and organisms.

As the film progressed, it transformed into a story of how soil has been ruined by us, even though we think it exists for us. The viewer was told that older soil can support any kind of plant life, because it is very nutrient rich. However, agriculture requires constant tilling of the soil, which means it is reborn often. This is a result of the Green Revolution, which really wasn’t green at all; we began using chemicals on farms to increase output. We have increased the runoff of dangerous chemicals into waterways and onto other farms with unintended consequences of eventual decreased output. This lower output comes as a result of degraded soil by these chemicals. Organic farming, which is really just traditional farming, is the response to undo the green revolution and its effects on the soil. The film also suggests other solutions such as composting. But any solution serves as a means to the end of improving the quality of the soil. By the end of the film, the viewer is asked to change the way we think about soil: not as dirt, but rather as a material of life. 

The other documentary, Food Inc., featured many different kinds of clips outlining the relationship between people and food. These clips included those of different kinds of factories, farms, restaurants and grocery stores, which helped explain how much of the industrial food industry uses greenwashing, with images of systems that no longer exist. Moreover, the footage has a revealing nature to it, and is organized in such a way which tells a story that most people are not aware of. This lends itself to the nature of the film, which asks consumers to be more aware of how our purchases affect the food and farming industry. 

Food Inc. focuses on the fact that the way we eat has changed drastically in the last 50 years. Most of the food available to us is owned by a small group of national corporations. As the narrator tells us this, a scene of business men walking up to a factory in a field is played. Food Inc.’s purpose is to show the viewer how we have been distanced from our food, what we don’t know about it, and what we can do to make a difference. We are told over and over again in this film how big business has cut costs to produce the food put on our plates. Interviews are conducted with farmers stuck under the stronghold of these companies, with organic farmers, food experts and ethical corporations. 

The narrative is split into nine digestible sections: fast food to all food, a cornucopia of choices, unintended consequences, the dollar menu, in the grass, hidden costs, from seed to supermarket, the veil, and shocks to the system. In the first section, the ethics of industrial farming are first called into question with information about the conditions of the animals and the workers. In this section, there were also captions of the fact that two of these companies (Tyson and Perdue) declined to be interviewed for the film. In the second section, the topic of corn was rampant, as it is in our food, though we are convinced otherwise through the illusion of diverse ingredients on our food labels. In the third section, e-coli was highlighted as a result of corn feed in animals, and if animals get e-coli, so do the crops which are fertilized by their wastes. Though the simple solution of using grass feed for 5 days would reduce e-coli in animals by 80%, the corporations prefer to invest in technological innovation, rather than taking it back to basics. In the fourth section, the unfortunate reality of price came into play with the fact that many people have to balance the cost of buying vegetables with the cost of medication for diseases that occur as a result of eating unhealthy. This idea is always crazy to me; when we talk about the fact that the people living in one of the most agricultural states in the country (California) can’t afford vegetables it sounds like a developing country, not one of the most developed ones. In the fifth section, more ethical issues were discussed, this time dipping into government subsidies working against the environment and supporting unsafe practices. In the sixth section, business was blamed for pollution, but also portrayed as a possible part of the solution. In the seventh section, Monsanto was featured as a company who has found legal ways to own certain crops, which endangers the livelihood of farmers. They also declined to be interviewed for the film. In the eighth section, the corruption of the American government by the aforementioned large corporations was revealed. In the final section, consumers were empowered to vote with our dollar when possible by purchasing organic products. 

Reviews 

Reviews of the Symphony of Soil included one by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, which claimed that the film “put faith in her viewers’ intelligence by allowing science to play a central role in her film, avoiding the tendency of many environmental films to build their argument by demonizing the ‘other side’” (Macgregor 2013). Another review by Variety described it as, “a seemingly endless procession of organic farmers from Washington state to Wales to India wander their flourishing fields, displaying the fruits of the ‘dance with nature’ that is organic agriculture. With minor variations, all make the same strong case for a simple solution to soil exhausted by plowing, chemical fertilizers and pesticides: Give back to the soil what was taken from it and it will endlessly replenish itself” (Scheib 2013). I would agree with this review that the film was a bit repetitive, but definitely got the point across. The documentary aims to educate about what can be done for soil, and what soil does for us. There is no direct call-to-action, per say, but it is clear cannot ride the current path, as it will lead to an “imminent agricultural Armageddon, with its attendant barren soil, polluted waters and birth defects” (Scheib 2013). I wasn’t completely captured by the film, but I know the issues presented are important and the information seemed accurate based on the presentation of the facts by educated professionals.

Of Food Inc., one reviewer at the New York times said it was, “an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch” (Dargis 2009). However, the same reviewer also claimed it was “also over before the issues have really been thrashed through. And while I appreciate the impulse behind the final checklist that tells what viewers can do for themselves and the world (er, eat organic), given everything we’ve just seen, it also registers as far too depressingly little” (Dargis 2009). In another review by the Washington Post, a reviewer states, “Those expecting an unfair broadside against the food industry will be pleasantly surprised by “Food, Inc.” Instead of scoring cheap points by disgusting viewers with the messy inside workings of a slaughterhouse, director Robert Kenner sticks to relaying the facts” (Bunch 2009). The same review claimed that though “the documentary sometimes feels a little one-sided, lack of participation by companies such as Monsanto Co. and Tyson Foods Inc. ensured such a result” (Bunch 2009). I think both of these reviews are valid, as I felt similarly. I thought the documentary did a good job of bringing attention to the issues at hand in an organized and accessible manner. However, we can always say they could have done more. Personally, I found Food Inc. not only effective, but also entertaining.

Closing Thoughts

In conclusion, both films supported the narrative that the current way in which we are farming is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unsettling. Symphony of Soil used science to bring light to the basics of life and how humans have disrupted them. Food Inc. revealed lesser known facts about the way in which our food has changed in the past 50 years, and what we should do to change that. I preferred Food Inc., as I felt the narrative was easier to connect with and follow. It also had a clear call-to-action approach, which Symphony of Soil lacked. The problems outlined in Food Inc. feel more relevant than those in Symphony of Soil, and I think that is increasingly important in mobilizing public opinion and activism. 

Word Count: ~1800 Words

Question: How can film/documentary be more widely accessible forms of knowledge?

Works Cited

Bunch, Sonny. 2009. “MOVIE REVIEW: 'Food, Inc.'” Accessed March 29, 2020. 

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/19/movie-review-food-inc/

Dargis, Manohla. 2009. “Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant.” Accessed March 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html

Garcia, Debora K.[กรมพัฒนาที่ดิน แชนแนล LDD Channel]. (2018, November 23). Symphony of Soil [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDZVKMe2FTg

Kenner R. (Producer & Director). (2009). Food Inc. [Film]. Magnolia Pictures.

Macgregor, Marnie. 2013. “Film Review: Symphony of the Soil.” Accessed March 29, 2020. https://www.bard.edu/cep/blog/?p=4155

Scheib, Ronnie. 2013. “Film Review: ‘Symphony of the Soil.’” Accessed March 29, 2020. https://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/film-review-symphony-of-the-soil-1200725684/