#a working class person and a marginalized folk who votes either way in the two party system and being lied to is not my enemy
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If you're a leftist and you're reacting with joy about climate cause disasters devastate the South your racism and classism is showing.
The South In comparison to other regions of Amerikkka Is home to the poorest counties in the nation. The South is also home of a majority of Black on brown voters of color.
The South also has corrupt politicians both Dems and Republicans alike. Both parties offer no alternative other than capitalism and grinding impoverished and marginalized people into the dust (E.x. Hurricane Katrina).
Demonizing the South further alienates working class and poor marginalized people in the south. This especially affects Black and Brown people In the South who are often the target of yt supremacy in state sanctioned violence.
If one discounts the South and all the hard-working leftists who are fighting the good fight against capitalism and against far-right politicians and government authoritarianism, and yt supremacy. It emboldens & allows far-right and neoliberal People to Target marginalized people even more.
Cuz who do you think will be first affected by climate change cause disasters? Not the rich GOP and damn politicians who take vacays to Mexico when SHTF in their states. It's ppl in trailers, disabled ppl, ppl w/o cars, BIPOC, unhoused ppl who are going to be affected.
Let's be honest here, fascism is already here. This country was built as a settler colonial state on the genocide and labour f indigenous and Black people. Just because you're from the north or from the cities or from the West Coast doesn't mean you get to look down upon ppl.
#us politics#politics#kasaundra talks#classism#racism#the deep south#southeast#america is a hellscape#anti capitalism#climate change#hurricane relief#hurricanes#hurricane helene#hurricane milton#hurricane katrina is just one of many examples and it's the biggest and most famous case of shit hitting the fan due to government neglect#and southern states have corrupt politicians and governments who are in the pocket of the uber wealthy who profit off of exploiting the poo#so keep that in mind when you decide to thumb your nose down at the south#a working class person and a marginalized folk who votes either way in the two party system and being lied to is not my enemy#like we need to pick and choose our battles and show some fucking class solidarity#and unlearn your racism and blatant Anti-Blackness for fuck's sake#anti racism
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Would you think that Rhea was a tyrant, or did Edelgard try to undermine the good things she's done and paint her only in a bad light?
What we see happening first-hand on-screen never left me any doubt that Rhea is a tyrant, and it’s obvious no matter what route you play, long before Edelgard even features into it. Just as importantly, she is glaringly incompetent.
It’s not just Edelgard saying it either, if anything Claude levels even worse accusations at Rhea. Heck even if you S support her she admits that, though you redeemed her, she definitely used to be a villain, she says word for word that she fabricated fake histories, abused her authority for selfish gain, was at one point gleefully hoping for the MC to suffer death of personality, and that the war was at least partially her fault. If you’re a bad ruler, people are going to revolt, and you’re responsible for that. It’s not like they could vote her out. Heck, they couldn’t even dispose of her the Feudalist way (getting enough lords to back a different ruler) since she derived her authority directly from the local deity. And any religious leaders who disagree on theological grounds get purged as heretics.
We see her kill dissenters without even asking questions or investigating (which is likely why she never caught the Agarthans), “purge” a whole branch of her organization, coverup unsavory facts regarding the relics and the nobility ( after the Miklan business), make young members of the ruling class take out these dissenters specifically to teach them not to question her (It’s almost like having to join “the party” to get higher education really) and she wants Sothis to come back and literally “rule this wayward land once more”, flat out telling Byleth (who she thought was Sothis at the time) how she has been doing the ruling in her place, ie she outright says in her own words that she’s the real ruler of Fodlan. The borders are literally arranged so that her stronghold is in the middle through the stronghold existed first.
And as for the additional information that Edelgard puts on the table she’s basically saying that she knows cause her own folks were complicit until a few generations ago, that her family was a bunch of traitors, that their claim to royalty was based on selling out humanity… not exactly the most self-serving thing to go around claiming. What also makes her credible here, at least in my eyes, is that she doesn’t really have interest in ruling. She never wanted to be the heir and never would have been if her older siblings weren’t murdered and says constantly how much rather she would be living an ordinary life, and how she’s going to abdicate and run off as soon as the work is done. She never asked for power, but power fell into her lap and with it, a lot of responsibility - she’s one of the very few people who are in any position to maybe stop this effect up system.
She’s certainly not above spins, secrecy and information control, and that might’ve worked against her in terms of making her manifestos look like a “he said she said” situation to the public, but this - this is her motivation. This is why she’s doing all the other stuff.
But even if you disregarded everything Edelgard says as not credible/likealy biased and looked just at what we see on screen in part 1 with no middlemen involved, and what Claude says, you could build a solid case for how she’s a tyrant. look at, say, Caspar’s and Bernie’s horrified reactions after the western church debacle, Dorothea wondering how exactly making them fight is part of the church’s teaching, anything involving Ashe and Catherine… even Sothis calls her out for the indoctrination and the sheer incompetence. (which is kinda sad cause she’d probably have been less harsh if she had known that that’s her daughter)
Edelgard is by far not the only person who objects to Rhea, you have two separate rebellions against her in one year, they’re regular enough that putting them down is practically part of the curriculum.
Everyone worships her because she’s a high-ranking religious functionary but I don’t see how she really does that much good. She takes in a bunch of poor people but that is not hard for her to do, costs her nothing and wins her adoration. It’s not like she’s personally caring for the orphans.
And given her role in maintaining the status quo, any “good things” she does come off like a billionaire donating to charity after they have supported politicians that are against wage increases and worker rights …maybe they care only about the tax breaks and don’t have anything against the poor or minorities, but they’re still perpetuating that system.
It may not have been her primary intention, but Rhea is the reason that these people are poor and discriminated in the first place. She’s not doing people kind favors, she’s badly and insufficiently mitigating the damage caused by her own actions, and you get no badge for that.
Out of the younger characters, Cyril, Mercedes, Raphael, Leonie, Ashe and Dorothea were all dirt poor at some point (that’s all the commoners bar Byleth, Ignatz and Dedue, and the latter’s idyllic village life childhood took place before Duscur was under Fodlanese rule) and only Mercedes and Cyril received any charity… and Cyril basically got a marginally less sucky job that he’s only grateful for because of how much his previous life sucked. (directly because of Rhea’s isolationism policies!)
Catherine, at least, was blatantly used. She turned to a trusted authority figure in a moment of doubt when she genuinely didn’t know what to do, was roped into doing dirty work, and her extreme loyalty is a result of her guilt; She can’t question Rhea because that might mean confronting the possibility that she killed her best friend for nothing.
Notably the one who seems to have been well-taking care of (Mercedes) lived at a small local church, not something controlled by the central organization.
Edelgard is basically a product of the effed up world Rhea created, the summation of all her errors comming back to haunt her. If you see her as part of the problem and not the solution, then she’s a problem of Rhea’s own making.
No one IRL is 100% a cartoonish villain all the time, even dictators and terrorists have, say, favorite colors and movies. But there’s a critical mass or percentage after which the word ‘evil’ is appropriate to use, and Rhea’s crossed it long before Edelgard was even born - and you could make a solid case for that even if you accepted the premise that every word out of Edelgard’s mouth is lies.
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Hong Kong: Anarchists in the Resistance to the Extradition Bill An Interview
Since 1997, when it ceased to be the last major colonial holding of Great Britain, Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China, while maintaining a distinct political and legal system. In February, an unpopular bill was introduced that would make it possible to extradite fugitives in Hong Kong to countries that the Hong Kong government has no existing extradition agreements with—including mainland China. On June 9, over a million people took the streets in protest; on June12, protesters engaged in pitched confrontations with police; on June 16, two million people participated in one of the biggest marches in the city’s history. The following interview with an anarchist collective in Hong Kong explores the context of this wave of unrest. Our correspondents draw on over a decade of experience in the previous social movements in an effort to come to terms with the motivations that drive the participants, and elaborate upon the new forms of organization and subjectivation that define this new sequence of struggle.
In the United States, the most recent popular struggles have cohered around resisting Donald Trump and the extreme right. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement drew anarchists, leftists, and far-right nationalists into the streets against Macron’s centrist government and each other. In Hong Kong, we see a social movement against a state governed by the authoritarian left. What challenges do opponents of capitalism and the state face in this context? How can we outflank nationalists, neoliberals, and pacifists who seek to control and exploit our movements?
As China extends its reach, competing with the United States and European Union for global hegemony, it is important to experiment with models of resistance against the political model it represents, while taking care to prevent neoliberals and reactionaries from capitalizing on popular opposition to the authoritarian left. Anarchists in Hong Kong are uniquely positioned to comment on this.
The front façade of the Hong Kong Police headquarters in Wan Chai, covered in egg yolks on the evening of June 21. Hundreds of protesters sealed the entrance, demanding the unconditional release of every person that has been arrested in relation to the struggle thus far. The banner below reads “Never Surrender.” Photo by KWBB from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
“The left” is institutionalized and ineffectual in Hong Kong. Generally, the “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers have a chokehold over the narrative whenever protests break out, especially when mainland China is involved.
In the struggle against the extradition bill, has the escalation in tactics made it difficult for those factions to represent or manage “the movement”? Has the revolt exceeded or undermined their capacity to shape the discourse? Do the events of the past month herald similar developments in the future, or has this been a common subterranean theme in popular unrest in Hong Kong already?
We think it’s important for everyone to understand that—thus far—what has happened cannot be properly understood to be “a movement.” It’s far too inchoate for that. What I mean is that, unlike the so-called “Umbrella Movement,” which escaped the control of its founding architects (the intellectuals who announced “Occupy Central With Love And Peace” a year in advance) very early on while adhering for the most part to the pacifistic, citizenist principles that they outlined, there is no real guiding narrative uniting the events that have transpired so far, no foundational credo that authorizes—or sanctifies—certain forms of action while proscribing others in order to cultivate a spectacular, exemplary façade that can be photographed and broadcast to screens around the world.
The short answer to your question, then, is… yes, thus far, nobody is authorized to speak on behalf of the movement. Everybody is scrambling to come to terms with a nascent form of subjectivity that is taking shape before us, now that the formal figureheads of the tendencies you referenced have been crushed and largely marginalized. That includes the “scholarist” fraction of the students, now known as “Demosisto,” and the right-wing “nativists,” both of which were disqualified from participating in the legislative council after being voted in.
Throughout this interview, we will attempt to describe our own intuitions about what this embryonic form of subjectivity looks like and the conditions from which it originates. But these are only tentative. Whatever is going on, we can say that it emerges from within a field from which the visible, recognized protagonists of previous sequences, including political parties, student bodies, and right-wing and populist groups, have all been vanquished or discredited. It is a field populated with shadows, haunted by shades, echoes, and murmurs. As of now, center stage remains empty.
This means that the more prevalent “default” modes of understanding are invoked to fill the gaps. Often, it appears that we are set for an unfortunate reprisal of the sequence that played itself out in the Umbrella Movement:
appalling show of police force
public outrage manifests itself in huge marches and subsequent occupations, organized and understood as sanctimonious displays of civil virtue
these occupations ossify into tense, puritanical, and paranoid encampments obsessed with policing behavior to keep it in line with the prescribed script
the movement collapses, leading to five years of disenchantment among young people who do not have the means to understand their failure to achieve universal suffrage as anything less than abject defeat.
Of course, this is just a cursory description of the Umbrella Movement of five years ago—and even then, there was a considerable amount of “excess”: novel and emancipatory practices and encounters that the official narrative could not account for. These experiences should be retrieved and recovered, though this is not the time or place for that. What we face now is another exercise in mystification, in which the protocols that come into operation every time the social fabric enters a crisis may foreclose the possibilities that are opening up. It would be premature to suggest that this is about to happen, however.
In our cursory and often extremely unpleasant perusals of Western far-left social media, we have noticed that all too often, the intelligence falls victim to our penchant to run the rule over this or that struggle. So much of what passes for “commentary” tends to fall on either side of two poles—impassioned acclamation of the power of the proletarian intelligence or cynical denunciation of its populist recuperation. None of us can bear the suspense of having to suspend our judgment on something outside our ken, and we hasten to find someone who can formalize this unwieldy mass of information into a rubric that we can comprehend and digest, in order that we can express our support or apprehension.
We have no real answers for anybody who wants to know whether they should care about what’s going on in Hong Kong as opposed to, say, France, Algeria, Sudan. But we can plead with those who are interested in understanding what’s happening to take the time to develop an understanding of this city. Though we don’t entirely share their politics and have some quibbles with the facts presented therein, we endorse any coverage of events in Hong Kong that Ultra, Nao, and Chuang have offered over the years to the English-speaking world. Ultra’s piece on the Umbrella Movement is likely the best account of the events currently available.
Our banner in the marches, which is usually found at the front of our drum squad. It reads “There are no ‘good citizens’, only potential criminals.” This banner was made in response to propaganda circulated by pro-Beijing establishmentarian political groups in Hong Kong, assuring “good citizens” everywhere that extradition measures do not threaten those with a sound conscience who are quietly minding their own business. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
If we understand “the left” as a political subject that situates questions of class struggle and labor at the center of its politics, it’s not entirely certain that such a thing even properly exists in Hong Kong. Of course, friends of ours run excellent blogs, and there are small grouplets and the like. Certainly, everybody talks about the wealth gap, rampant poverty, the capitalist class, the fact that we are all “打工仔” (jobbers, working folk) struggling to survive. But, as almost anywhere else, the primary form of subjectivity and identification that everyone subscribes to is the idea of citizenship in a national community. It follows that this imagined belonging is founded on negation, exclusion, and demarcation from the Mainland. You can only imagine the torture of seeing the tiresome “I’m a Hong Konger, not Chinese!” t-shirts on the subway, or hearing “Hong Kongers add oil!” (essentially, “way to go!”) chanted ad nauseam for an entire afternoon during recent marches.
It should interest readers from abroad to know that the word “left” in Hong Kong has two connotations. Obviously, for the generation of our parents and their parents before them, “Left” means Communist. Which is why “Left” could refer to a businessman who is a Party member, or a pro-establishment politician who is notoriously pro-China. For younger people, the word “Left” is a stigma (often conjugated with “plastic,” a word in Cantonese that sounds like “dickhead”) attached to a previous generation of activists who were involved in a prior sequence of social struggle—including struggles to prevent the demolition of Queen’s Ferry Pier in Central, against the construction of the high-speed Railway going through the northeast of Hong Kong into China, and against the destruction of vast tracts of farmland in the North East territories, all of which ended in demoralizing defeat. These movements were often led by articulate spokespeople—artists or NGO representatives who forged tactical alliances with progressives in the pan-democratic movement. The defeat of these movements, attributed to their apprehensions about endorsing direct action and their pleas for patience and for negotiations with authority, is now blamed on that generation of activists. All the rage and frustration of the young people who came of age in that period, heeding the direction of these figureheads who commanded them to disperse as they witnessed yet another defeat, yet another exhibition of orchestrated passivity, has progressively taken a rightward turn. Even secondary and university student bodies that have traditionally been staunchly center-left and progressive have become explicitly nationalist.
One crucial tenet among this generation, emerging from a welter of disappointments and failures, is a focus on direct action, and a consequent refusal of “small group discussions,” “consensus,” and the like. This was a theme that first appeared in the umbrella movement—most prominently in the Mong Kok encampment, where the possibilities were richest, but where the right was also, unfortunately, able to establish a firm foothold. The distrust of the previous generation remains prevalent. For example, on the afternoon of June 12, in the midst of the street fights between police and protesters, several members of a longstanding social-democratic party tasked themselves with relaying information via microphone to those on the front lines, telling them where to withdraw to if they needed to escape, what holes in the fronts to fill, and similar information. Because of this distrust of parties, politicians, professional activists and their agendas, many ignored these instructions and instead relied on word of mouth information or information circulating in online messaging groups.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the founding myth of this city is that refugees and dissidents fled communist persecution to build an oasis of wealth and freedom, a fortress of civil liberties safeguarded by the rule of law. In view of that, on a mundane level, it could be said that many in Hong Kong already understand themselves as being in revolt, in the way they live and the freedoms they enjoy—and that they consider this identity, however vacuous and tenuous it may be, to be a property that has to be defended at all costs. It shouldn’t be necessary to say much here about the fact that much of the actual ecological “wealth” that constitutes this city—its most interesting (and often poorest) neighborhoods, a whole host of informal clubs, studios, and dwelling places situated in industrial buildings, farmland in the Northeast territories, historic walled villages and rural districts—are being pillaged and destroyed piece by piece by the state and private developers, to the resounding indifference of these indignant citoyens.
In any case, if liberals are successful in deploying their Cold War language about the need to defend civil liberties and human rights from the encroaching Red Tide, and right-wing populist calls to defend the integrity of our identity also gain traction, it is for these deep-rooted and rather banal historical reasons. Consider the timing of this struggle, how it exploded when images of police brutalizing and arresting young students went viral—like a perfect repetition of the prelude to the umbrella movement. This happened within a week of the annual candlelight vigil commemorating those killed in the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 1989, a date remembered in Hong Kong as the day tanks were called in to steamroll over students peacefully gathering in a plea for civil liberties. It is impossible to overstate the profundity of this wound, this trauma, in the formation of the popular psyche; this was driven home when thousands of mothers gathered in public, in an almost perfect mirroring of the Tiananmen mothers, to publicly grieve for the disappeared futures of their children, now eclipsed in the shadow of the communist monolith. It stupefies the mind to think that the police—not once now, but twice—broke the greatest of all taboos: opening fire on the young.
In light of this, it would be naïve to suggest that anything significant has happened yet to suggest that to escaping the “chokehold” that you describe “scholarist” liberals and “citizenist” right-wingers maintaining on the narrative here. Both of these factions are simply symptoms of an underlying condition, aspects of an ideology that has to be attacked and taken apart in practice. Perhaps we should approach what is happening right now as a sort of psychoanalysis in public, with the psychopathology of our city exposed in full view, and see the actions we engage in collectively as a chance to work through traumas, manias, and obsessive complexes together. While it is undoubtedly dismaying that the momentum and morale of this struggle is sustained, across the social spectrum, by a constant invocation of the “Hong Kong people,” who are incited to protect their home at all costs, and while this deeply troubling unanimity covers over many problems,1 we accept the turmoil and the calamity of our time, the need to intervene in circumstances that are never of our own choosing. However bleak things may appear, this struggle offers a chance for new encounters, for the elaboration of new grammars.
Graffiti seen in the road occupation in Admiralty near the government quarters, reading “Carry a can of paint with you, it’s a remedy for canine rabies.” Cops are popularly referred to as “dogs” here. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
What has happened to the discourse of civility in the interlude between the umbrella movement and now? Did it contract, expand, decay, transform?
That’s an interesting question to ask. Perhaps the most significant thing that we can report about the current sequence that, astonishingly, when a small fringe of protesters attempted to break into the legislative council on June 9 following a day-long march, it was not universally criticized as an act of lunacy or, worse, the work of China or police provocateurs. Bear in mind that on June 9 and 12, the two attempts to break into the legislative council building thus far, the legislative assembly was not in session; people were effectively attempting to break into an empty building.
Now, much as we have our reservations about the effectiveness of doing such a thing in the first place,2 this is extraordinary, considering the fact that the last attempt to do so, which occurred in a protest against development in the North East territories shortly before the umbrella movement, took place while deliberations were in session and was broadly condemned or ignored.3 Some might suggest that the legacy of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan remains a big inspiration for many here; others might say that the looming threat of Chinese annexation is spurring the public to endorse desperate measures that they would otherwise chastise.
On the afternoon of June 12, when tens of thousands of people suddenly found themselves assaulted by riot police, scrambling to escape from barrages of plastic bullets and tear gas, nobody condemned the masked squads in the front fighting back against the advancing lines of police and putting out the tear gas canisters as they landed. A longstanding, seemingly insuperable gulf has always existed between the “peaceful” protesters (pejoratively referred to as “peaceful rational non-violent dickheads” by most of us on the other side) and the “bellicose” protesters who believe in direct action. Each side tends to view the other with contempt.
Protesters transporting materials to build barricades. The graffiti on the wall can be roughly (and liberally) translated as “Hong Kongers ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit’.” Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
The online forum lihkg has functioned as a central place for young people to organize, exchange political banter, and circulate information relating to this struggle. For the first time, a whole host of threads on this site have been dedicated to healing this breach or at least cultivating respect for those who do nothing but show up for the marches every Sunday—if only because marches that number in the millions and bring parts of the city to a temporary standstill are a pretty big deal, however mind-numbingly boring they may be in actuality. The last time the marches were anywhere close to this huge, a Chief Executive stepped down and the amending of a law regarding freedom of speech was moved to the back burner. All manner of groups are attempting to invent a way to contribute to the struggle, the most notable of which is the congregation of Christians that have assembled in front of police lines at the legislative council, chanting the same hymn without reprieve for a week and a half. That hymn has become a refrain that will likely reverberate through struggles in the future, for better or worse.
Are there clear openings or lines of flight in this movement that would allow for interventions that undermine the power of the police, of the law, of the commodity, without producing a militant subject that can be identified and excised?
It is difficult to answer this question. Despite the fact that proletarians compose the vast majority of people waging this struggle—proletarians whose lives are stolen from them by soulless jobs, who are compelled to spend more and more of their wages paying rents that continue to skyrocket because of comprehensive gentrification projects undertaken by state officials and private developers (who are often one and the same)—you must remember that “free market capitalism” is taken by many to be a defining trait of the cultural identity of Hong Kong, distinguishing it from the “red” capitalism managed by the Communist Party. What currently exists in Hong Kong, for some people, is far from ideal; when one says “the rich,” it invokes images of tycoon monopolies—cartels and communist toadies who have formed a dark pact with the Party to feed on the blood of the poor.
So, just as people are ardent for a government and institutions that we can properly call “our own”—yes, including the police—they desire a capitalism that we can finally call “our own,” a capitalism free from corruption, political chicanery, and the like. It’s easy to chuckle at this, but like any community gathered around a founding myth of pioneers fleeing persecution and building a land of freedom and plenty from sacrifice and hard work… it’s easy to understand why this fixation exerts such a powerful hold on the imagination.
This is a city that fiercely defends the initiative of the entrepreneur, of private enterprise, and understands every sort of hustle as a way of making a living, a tactic in the tooth-and-nail struggle for survival. This grim sense of life as survival is omnipresent in our speech; when we speak of “working,” we use the term “搵食,” which literally means looking for our next meal. That explains why protesters have traditionally been very careful to avoid alienating the working masses by actions such as blockading a road used by busses transporting working stiffs back home.
While we understand that much of our lives are preoccupied with and consumed by work, nobody dares to propose the refusal of work, to oppose the indignity of being treated as producer-consumers under the dominion of the commodity. The police are chastised for being “running dogs” of an evil totalitarian empire, rather than being what they actually are: the foot soldiers of the regime of property.
What is novel in the current situation is that many people now accept that acts of solidarity with the struggle, however minute,4 can lead to arrest, and are prepared to tread this shifting line between legality and illegality. It is no exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the appearance of a generation that is prepared for imprisonment, something that was formerly restricted to “professional activists” at the forefront of social movements. At the same time, there is no existing discussion regarding what the force of law is, how it operates, or the legitimacy of the police and prisons as institutions. People simply feel they need to employ measures that transgress the law in order the preserve the sanctity of the Law, which has been violated and dishonored by the cowboys of communist corruption.
However, it is important to note that this is the first time that proposals for strikes in various sectors and general strikes have been put forward regarding an issue that is, on the surface of it, unrelated to labor.
Our friends in the “Housewives Against Extradition” section of the march on September 9. The picture shows a group of housewives and aunties, many of whom were on the streets for the first time. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
How do barricades and occupations like the one from a few days ago reproduce themselves in the context of Hong Kong?
Barricades are simply customary now. Whenever people gather en masse and intend to occupy a certain territory to establish a front, barricades are built quickly and effectively. There is a creeping sense now that occupations are becoming routine and futile, physically taxing and ultimately inefficient. What’s interesting in this struggle is that people are really spending a lot of time thinking about what “works,” what requires the least expenditure of effort and achieves the maximum effect in paralyzing parts of the city or interrupting circulation, rather than what holds the greatest moral appeal to an imagined “public” watching everything from the safety of the living room—or even, conversely, what “feels” the most militant.
There have been many popular proposals for “non-cooperative” quotidian actions such as jamming up an entire subway train by coordinating groups of friends to pack the cars with people and luggage for a whole afternoon, or cancelling bank accounts and withdrawing savings from savings accounts in order to create inflation. Some have spread suggestions regarding how to dodge paying taxes for the rest of your life. These might not seem like much, but what’s interesting is the relentless circulation of suggestions from all manner of quarters, from people with varying kinds of expertise, about how people can act on their own initiative where they live or work and in their everyday lives, rather than imagining “the struggle” as something that is waged exclusively on the streets by masked, able-bodied youth.
Whatever criticisms anybody might have about what has happened thus far, this formidable exercise in collective intelligence is really incredibly impressive—an action can be proposed in a message group or on an anonymous message board thread, a few people organize to do it, and it’s done without any fuss or fanfare. Forms circulate and multiply as different groups try them out and modify them.
In the West, Leninists and Maoists have been screaming bloody murder about “CIA Psyop” or “Western backed color revolution.” Have hegemonic forces in Hong Kong invoked the “outside agitator” theme on the ground at a narrative level?
Actually, that is the official line of the Chief Executive, who has repeatedly said that she regards the events of the past week as riotous behavior incited by foreign interests that are interested in conducting a “color revolution” in the city. I’m not sure if she would repeat that line now that she has apologized publicly for “creating contradictions” and discord with her decisions, but all the same—it’s hilarious that tankies share the exact same opinion as our formal head of state.
It’s an open secret that various pro-democracy NGOs, parties, and thinktanks receive American funding. It’s not some kind of occult conspiracy theory that only tankies know about. But these tankies are suggesting that the platform that coordinates the marches—a broad alliance of political parties, NGOs, and the like—is also the ideological spearhead and architect of the “movement,” which is simply a colossal misunderstanding. That platform has been widely denounced, discredited, and mocked by the “direct action” tendencies that are forming all around us, and it is only recently that, as we said above, there are slightly begrudging threads on the Internet offering them indirect praise for being able to coordinate marches that actually achieve something. If only tankies would stop treating everybody like mindless neo-colonial sheep acting at the cryptic behest of Western imperialist intelligence.
That said, it would be dishonest if we failed to mention that, alongside threads on message boards discussing the niceties of direct action tactics abroad, there are also threads alerting everyone to the fact that voices in the White House have expressed their disapproval for the law. Some have even celebrated this. Also, there is a really wacky petition circulating on Facebook to get people to appeal to the White House for foreign intervention. I’m sure one would see these sorts of things in any struggle of this scale in any non-Western city. They aren’t smoking guns confirming imperialist manipulation; they are fringe phenomena that are not the driving force behind events thus far.
Have any slogans, neologisms, new slang, popular talking points, or funny phrases emerged that are unique to the situation?
Yes, lots, though we’re not sure how we would go about translating them. But the force that is generating these memes, that is inspiring all these Whatsapp and Telegram stickers and catchphrases, is actually the police force.
Between shooting people in the eye with plastic bullets, flailing their batons about, and indiscriminately firing tear gas canisters at peoples’ heads and groins, they also found the time to utter some truly classic pearls that have made their way on to t-shirts. One of these bons mots is the rather unfortunate and politically incorrect “liberal cunt.” In the heat of a skirmish between police and protesters, a policeman called someone at the frontlines by that epithet. All our swear words in Cantonese revolve around male and female genitalia, unfortunately; we have quite a few words for private parts. In Cantonese, this formulation doesn’t sound as sensible as it does in English. Said together in Cantonese, “liberal” and “cunt” sounds positively hilarious.
Does this upheaval bear any connections to the fishball riots or Hong Kong autonomy from a few years ago?
A: The “fishball riots” were a demonstrative lesson in many ways, especially for people like us, who found ourselves spectators situated at some remove from the people involved. It was a paroxysmic explosion of rage against the police, a completely unexpected aftershock from the collapse of the umbrella movement. An entire party, the erstwhile darlings of right-wing youth everywhere, “Hong Kong Indigenous,” owes its whole career to this riot. They made absolutely sure that everyone knew they were attending, showing up in uniform and waving their royal blue flags at the scene. They were voted into office, disqualified, and incarcerated—one of the central members is now seeking asylum in Germany, where his views on Hong Kong independence have apparently softened considerably in the course of hanging out with German Greens. That is fresh in the memory of folks who know that invisibility is now paramount.
What effect has Joshua Wong’s release had?
A: We are not sure how surprised readers from overseas will be to discover, after perhaps watching that awful documentary about Joshua Wong on Netflix, that his release has not inspired much fanfare at all. Demosisto are now effectively the “Left Plastic” among a new batch of secondary students.
Are populist factions functioning as a real force of recuperation?
A: All that we have written above illustrates how, while the struggle currently escapes the grasp of every established group, party, and organization, its content is populist by default. The struggle has attained a sprawling scale and drawn in a wide breadth of actors; right now, it is expanding by the minute. But there is little thought given to the fact that many of those who are most obviously and immediately affected by the law will be people whose work takes place across the border—working with and providing aid to workers in Shenzhen, for instance.
Nobody is entirely sure what the actual implications of the law are. Even accounts written by professional lawyers vary quite widely, and this gives press outlets that brand themselves as “voices of the people”5 ample space to frame the entire issue as simply a matter of Hong Kong’s constitutional autonomy being compromised, with an entire city in revolt against the imposition of an all-encompassing surveillance state.
Perusing message boards and conversing with people around the government complex, you would think that the introduction of this law means that expressions of dissent online or objectionable text messages to friends on the Mainland could lead to extradition. This is far from being the case, as far as the letter of the law goes. But the events of the last few years, during which booksellers in Hong Kong have been disappeared for selling publications banned on the Mainland and activists in Hong Kong have been detained and deprived of contact upon crossing the border, offer little cause to trust a party that is already notorious for cooking up charges and contravening the letter of the law whenever convenient. Who knows what it will do once official authorization is granted.
Paranoia invariably sets in whenever the subject of China comes up. On the evening of June 12, when the clouds of tear gas were beginning to clear up, the founder of a Telegram message group with 10,000+ active members was arrested by the police, who commanded him to unlock his phone. His testimony revealed that he was told that even if he refused, they would hack his phone anyway. Later, the news reported that he was using a Xiaomi phone at the time. This news went viral, with many commenting that his choice of phone was both bold and idiotic, since urban legend has it that Xiaomi phones not only have a “backdoor” that permits Xiaomi to access the information on every one of its phones and assume control of the information therein, but that Xiaomi—by virtue of having its servers in China—uploads all information stored on its cloud to the database of party overlords. It is futile to try to suggest that users who are anxious about such things can take measures to seal backdoors, or that background information leeching can be detected by simply checking the data usage on your phone. Xiaomi is effectively regarded as an expertly engineered Communist tracking device, and arguments about it are no longer technical, but ideological to the point of superstition.
This “post-truth” dimension of this struggle, compounded with all the psychopathological factors that we enumerated above, makes everything that is happening that much more perplexing, that much more overwhelming. For so long, fantasy has been the impetus for social struggle in this city—the fantasy of a national community, urbane, free-thinking, civilized and each sharing in the negative freedoms that the law provides, the fantasy of electoral democracy… Whenever these affirmative fantasies are put at risk, they are defended and enacted in public, en masse, and the sales for “I Am Hong Konger” [sic] go through the roof.
This is what gives the proceedings a distinctly conservative, reactionary flavor, despite how radical and decentralized the new forms of action are. All we can do as a collective is seek ways to subvert this fantasy, to expose and demonstrate its vacuity in form and content.
At this time, it feels surreal that everybody around us is so certain, so clear about what they need to do—oppose this law with every means that they have available to them—while the reasons for doing so remain hopelessly obscure. It could very well be the case that this suffocating opacity is our lot for the time being, in this phase premised upon more action, less talk, on the relentless need to keep abreast of and act on the flow of information that is constantly accelerating around us.
In so many ways, what we see happening around us is a fulfillment of what we have dreamt of for years. So many bemoan the “lack of political leadership,” which they see as a noxious habit developed over years of failed movements, but the truth is that those who are accustomed to being protagonists of struggles, including ourselves as a collective, have been overtaken by events. It is no longer a matter of a tiny scene of activists concocting a set of tactics and programs and attempting to market them to the public. “The public” is taking action all around us, exchanging techniques on forums, devising ways to evade surveillance, to avoid being arrested at all costs. It is now possible to learn more about fighting the police in one afternoon than we did in a few years.
In the midst of this breathless acceleration, is it possible to introduce another rhythm, in which we can engage in a collective contemplation of what has become of us, and what we are becoming as we rush headlong into the tumult?
As ever, we stand here, fighting alongside our neighbors, ardently looking for friends.
Hand-written statements by protesters, weathered after an afternoon of heavy rain. Photo by WWS from Tak Cheong Lane Collective.
In reflecting on the problems concealed by the apparent unanimity of the “Hong Kong people,” we might start by asking who that framework suggests that this city is for, who comprises this imaginary subject. We have seen Nepalese and Pakistani brothers and sisters on the streets, but they hesitate to make their presence known for fear of being accused of being thugs employed by the police. ↩
“The places of institutional power exert a magnetic attraction on revolutionaries. But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.” –The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends ↩
Incidentally, that attempt was a good deal more spontaneous and successful. The police had hardly imagined that crowds of people who had sat peacefully with their heads in their hands feeling helpless while the developments were authorized would suddenly start attempting to rush the council doors by force, breaking some of the windows. ↩
On the night of June 11, young customers in a McDonald’s in Admiralty were all searched and had their identity cards recorded. On June 12, a video went viral showing a young man transporting a box of bottled water to protesters who were being brutalized by a squad of policemen with batons. ↩
To give two rather different examples, this includes the populist, xenophobic, and vehemently anti-Communist Apple Daily, and the “Hong Kong Free Press,” an independent English online rag of the “angry liberal” stripe run by expatriates that has an affinity for young localist/nativist leaders. ↩
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But Where’s the Legislation?!
Is it just me, or are other PoC uncomfortable with the white discoursers obsession with legislation as the One True Form of Systematic Oppression? Not only is that not true, but expecting legislation in a 21st century western country to specifically mention a group completely misunderstands how oppression actually works.
Black people are still oppressed in America, and it’s not because there is specific legislation mentioning us to keep us from getting houses or marrying. That’s not what oppression looks like in America. (For the most part. Not even the bathroom bills that target transness specifically mention trans people.)
What you should look for in legislation, when you’re looking at legislation, is disproportionate impact. You are looking to see if how the law is crafted, regardless of if it was the crafter’s intent, disproportionately impacts one group over another.
The reason for marriage equality isn’t because it specifically targeted LGBT+ folks, but because it disproportionately affected(basically entirely affected) the community. The reason the voter ID laws are getting struck down right now isn’t because it specifically mentions PoCs, but because it disproportionately affects us.
And this is a specifically white problem and outlook. It’s the same as when white racists scream about how “Jim Crow is over and there’s no segregation and there’s no oppression now!” It’s the same with the white liberal obsession with legal rights, like marriage equality, meaning that LGBT+ oppression is over. It’s the same when exclusionists and inclusionists center their whole goddamn arguments about whether this or that legislation actually does fucking whatever to ace people. (Show me the country where it’s ILLEGAL to be ace?????!)
That’s a damn smoke screen. Oppression, systematic oppression, isn’t based around explicit marginalization from society. Marginalization in this case being the society in question is trying to force the group out of society itself. To be “marginalized” here isn’t the same as what most people in the discourse use the word to mean. Being kicked out of your home, denied housing, fired from your job, ect. are forms of marginalization. They seek not to exploit members of the class, but drive them from society itself.
The most basic forms of oppression involve economic exploitation. So, you’ll see members of this class concentrated in positions that allow their labor to be extracted from them without fair(or with no) compensation. This is why, one of the reasons why, LGBT+ people are disproportionately poor. (The same with PoC. There’s a longer, semi-related post, about how race was created and maintained to craft a social class of proles to be economically exploited for the norm’d classes benefit.)
There are other forms of (systematic) oppression of course, but marginalization is the most severe form of physical material oppression. When Marginalization takes place, the society has “decided” this crafted class is so “abhorrent” they aren’t even worth economically exploiting. (Think of the genocides of indigenous people’s around the world.)
Therefore, it’s possible, and in fact entirely probable that systematic oppression is taking place without Marginalization.(the final form of Marginalization is attempted or completed genocide btw.) By the time legislation comes into play that is specifically crafted to curtail the rights, movement, freedom, ect of a crafted class, you are in the beginning stages of Marginalization.
Most oppression these days(ableism is an exception), isn’t in a Marginalization stage. It’s in less extreme stages of oppression(this includes against PoC, including fellow black people.)
That being the case, how can we conclude systematic oppression is taking place before we get to the extremes of Marginalization?
I mentioned Economic Exploitation, and considering we’re living in a Capitalist fun house of death and suffering, that’s a good place to start. There’s also Systematic Violence. I consider all forms of oppression systematic violence, but in this cause I mean physical(and emotional) violence and abuse. Increased deaths, sexual assault, physical assaults, arson, defacing of property, ect. You’re looking at people burning down or bombing religious centers(or the attack on the LGBT center that happened recently). This will happen at the individual and larger levels of an identified group. So, disproportionately violent interactions accruing to a certain group is an example of systematic oppression.
For systematic oppression absent Marginalization, we would expect to see Economic Exploitation and Systematic Violence.
So discoursers, on both sides, should be asking:
- Are aces disproportionately targeted for physical violence? - Are aces disproportionately poor? - Are aces disproportionately homeless? - Are aces exposed to increased violence against their property?(i.e. someone torching your home for being ace)
Ect.
Another form of systematic oppression is “powerlessness” and this comes from the group in question being forced away from positions of power in society. This is open LGBT+ people being removed from office or not voted for. This is, in an internalized way, members of the group thinking they will never end their own oppression(I’ve seen discourers say this, all of them exclusionists, but this is a common sentiment among the oppressed). Radical liberation thinking involves the idea you can accrue power and dismantle the system oppressing you, and one of the more insidious ways that oppression works to keep the oppressed buying into the system itself is forcing them to believe their oppression is inevitable and unchangeable.
One of the biggest results of “powerlessness” on a personal level is psychological disorder. Feeling you have no control over your life or power to protect yourself/do things, causes psychological distress. For groups affected by oppression which takes the form of powerlessness(and powerlessness is a psychological campaign taken up by the norm’d group in power), you’d expect to see increased mental illness. You also expect feelings of brokenness, worthlessness, self-esteem problems, comparing themselves to the norm and hating that they deviate, ect.
So discoursers on both sides should be asking:
- Do aces experience higher than average rates of depression? - Do aces experience higher than average rates of anxiety? - Are they more likely to be suicidal or self harm? - Is this psychological distress used to signal that they are ‘unfit’ or inherently ‘sick’? - Are aces disproportionately barred from positions of power in society?
As a final semi-related note, there is a difference between visibility, hypervisibility, and invisibility, that isn’t really talked about in discourse. Neither hypervisibility or invisibility is good or a privilege. Black people are hypervisible(and invisible), trans people(especially trans women) are hypervisible. NDN people’s and Asian peoples and Ace people are invisible. People who are hypervisible often see invisibility as a gift or proof of lack of oppression. It’s not. To be invisible is to be rendered not just unseen, but silenced. Your pain, suffering, oppression isn’t just ignored, it is denied. Both the “model minority” myth for Asians and “all NDNs are extinct” myth exist to deny, ignore, and (at the most extreme) silence the experiences and oppression of these two groups. Hypervisibility requires being surveilled but not seen. It means being viewed as an object, being fetishized, being treated as rhetorical device instead of human. It means being viewed as a threat, as an walking stereotype and example of a group instead of a person. It is depersonalization through means of obliterating personal identity.
That ace people are “unknown” isn’t invisibility on its own, however, enforcement of invisibility requires certain things. It requires the denial of examples of systematic ill-treatment. It requires the silencing of attempts of the group to organize, to create language to describe their own experiences, to accept their experiences as having happened or valid examples of prejudice against them. To enforce invisibility is ultimately about silencing. So examples of invisibility will mostly be focused around attempts to deny the reality of or redefine the reality of the groups in question. Truscum rhetoric is based around enforced invisibility as an example.
Proving that aces aren’t hypervisible isn’t proof on its own as a lack of oppression(as that’s not what oppression is/means). A lot of groups who are hypervisible define their experiences as the real oppression. And the same can be said of invisible groups. Every ace who has ever typed “well, at least people know what being gay is!” is mistaking hypervisibility for visibility.(visibility here being the state of being seen, acknowledged, understood, and listened to, the default state of the norm.) Most oppressed groups experience both forms of social oppression, but some experience only one or the other. (NBs for example suffer from being invisible, not hypervisible, and gay and lesbian people are for the most part rendered hypervisible not invisible.) But the fact one group is hypervisible and another is invisible does not mean that either group isn’t experiencing oppression.
You need to look at actual stats about the group in question.
This is aimed at everyone in the discourse, please please stop centering Systematic Oppression around legislation and legal rights. That’s not the only way oppression takes places. That’s not even the most common way oppression takes places in 21st century western countries. Branch out and actually talk about oppression and oppression dynamics rationally. Study the oppression of various groups outside of the LGBT+ family if you have to! The (basic) Dynamics of Oppression don’t change, just the target.
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Gut Feeling
A few years ago, I lost my best friend over an “I told you so” moment. She was one of those best friends that you feel--no, you know--is another part of yourself. It turns out she wasn’t, really, but lord, did we have some fun times.
Anyway, it wasn’t actually an “I told you so” moment. It was a “Maybe I told you so, but...” moment, which--because nobody, and I mean nobody likes to hear those four words--she interrupted in anger before I could finish with the part that mattered most: “there are some things we have to find out on our own.”
I have felt since late last spring, when it became clear that the DNC was to nominate Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, with utterly despairing certainty that Donald Trump would win the presidency. Disparage polling all you want--and surely many will, now--but the polls remained nearly the same from early on in the primary to general election results: by some forecasts of a Clinton-Trump matchup, Clinton could win by 1-2%, but by others, Trump by the same margin. The risk all along was too great, too uncertain so as to be certain in the opposite direction.
When I would tell a Clinton supporter during the primary that pitting Clinton against Trump in the general was a surefire way to give us, and the rest of the world, “President Trump” (and god, how terrible?), it was as if they had fingers in their ears, ostrich heads in the sand.
When you know a truth and no one is listening to you scream it, it is the loneliest feeling in the world.
But I am not here to say “I told you so,” even though that is what I hissed through my teeth that Tuesday night in November when I wasn’t leaking tears or throwing back whiskey. Wednesday’s 8:00am class the next morning was not easy--not least of all reckoning with the knowledge that some in that room were not in mourning for our country as I was. Instead, I am here to reckon myself with the fact that--and of course this is true--there are some things we all have to find out on our own. As a college teacher, this is at the center of my philosophy, but as a human, it is easier to forget.
What was not easy for me to forget throughout the entirety of this election cycle, however, was the anger palpable in the community around me. I could not forget Patrick’s Mexican-American students attending classes at the neighboring campus where he teaches who voted for Donald Trump--for reasons ranging from actual approval of his policies & ideas to a dislike of Clinton rooted not in her femaleness but in her perceived inability to be sincere, or in the case of one student, the release of the DNC emails that revealed a Clinton campaign reference to Latinx political outreach as “taco bowl engagement.”
I could not forget the kindest man we have met here in eastern Oregon, a dedicated first responder and Trump voter, who brought ten dozen farm-fresh eggs from his “ladies” to his classmates in Patrick’s class, who trades me bread for eggs like some kind of a socialist, and makes me blush with how good he makes the bread out to be. I couldn’t forget his son, either, who--when they invited us to a local rodeo and shared their box seats with us--at one point cited statistics of higher crime rates amongst black Americans, and when I told him those statistics were manipulated and actually showed quite the opposite if you looked at them another way, said to me, “Huh. Okay, I believe that.”
I could not forget my student, who wore a Make America Great Again hat to my class occasionally, who emailed me after I showed the class the documentary The Hunting Ground to say that he had been so moved by the message of the film that he was sitting down to show it to his girlfriend that same night.
I could not forget my “liberal” colleagues or the people whom I left Facebook to get away from, who disparaged these people constantly, who relegated them all to the same category of “racist” or “sexist” or “deplorable,” despite their very real and very human qualities, despite their brown skin or their defense of women’s rights and consent, despite the fact that their views & perspectives that are considered backward are largely built out of a lack of knowledge, a lack of awareness, a lack of access to the same experiences and information that you have.
What I became acutely aware during this past year, and perhaps since moving to Pendleton, is the fact that each American has a different set of information they are working with, and what that set of information contains depends on the media they consume and the people they surround themselves with, both virtually and physically. And no matter what the set of information contains, that is our only lens through which we view the world.
Do you see how complicated the political divide is? Do you see how we have become the way we have become? Blocking and unfollowing to curate our feeds perfectly to reinforce our own ideas and confirm our own biases? And how ineffectual it is to scream epithets of ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ when the people at whom you are screaming don’t understand history or current events in at all the same way that you do?
America’s problem isn’t that one half of Americans have completely different values than the other half. It isn’t that one half of Americans are sexists and racists, or even that one half of Americans think racism and sexism is okay.
America’s problem is with education and information. The problem is with insulation of ideas and beliefs. The problem is with a culture that does not encourage understanding, and instead encourages dichotomies. I don’t know about you, but I learned about the danger of binary thinking--red vs. blue, liberal vs. conservative, good politics vs. the other side--from my main man Jacques Derrida back in ENG313 at Western Washington University, and I never looked back.
Know this: You are not different from a Trump voter. Sure, perhaps you are different from the Trump voter who is actually a virulent racist.* But you are not different from a Trump voter like Patrick’s egg-sharing student. You just have a different set of information.
I began writing this post the day after the election, but it has sat, unfinished, in my Drafts folder since then. I haven’t wanted to think about politics much, or about what was going to happen today, on inauguration day, or for the next four years after. When I did, I felt sick to my stomach, and so I stopped reading the essays and articles and think pieces, stopped looking at Twitter and watching the news, unfollowed the blogs that were scapegoating varying voter demographics rather than placing the blame (where blame was due) with the Democratic Party who lost the election, and praised Obama that I had quit Facebook last June, so that I didn’t have to see what was going on in that unreality.
I expect that, while I will follow policy changes and resist threats to our nation’s core values of freedom, equ(al)ity, and democracy, I will not be paying much attention to the news over the next few years. The media played its own part in today’s dystopian farce, and in many ways has only served to further the political divide we have now the monumental task of facing down.
I believe very strongly that the only way to move forward is to actually reject the divisiveness. I may not have believed that before moving to an area where my ideas and beliefs were in the minority--or perhaps more accurately to an area where most of the people had access to an entirely different set of information than my own, unlike when I lived in Seattle amongst (mostly) like-minded folks.
But now that I have lived here, now that I have listened to friend after friend in insulated, liberal communities avow that they do not know a single Trump supporter and have felt confusion and disbelief since the election, I know that it is up to those of us who do feel sick with heartache and also fear in this moment to reach across the divide that is only there because of superficial reasons--reasons like access to information. And how sad, to let one’s access to information prevent you from thinking one is a good person, a person with whom it is worth working together toward a better future for our country.
The day after the election, I had a text exchange initiated by my father with the two words “We’re fucked.” We discussed the importance of learning history, and of critical thinking, and we joked about the inanity of it all. And then, at the end, I thanked him, for raising me to be a compassionate & kind human being first and foremost, and then a thinker second of all.
If these are our priorities--our true priorities, and in that order--then there is no chance that love won’t win. No chance at all.
*Perhaps, but I tend to think not even then.
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THE “WHERE’S MY ELEPHANT?” THEORY OF HISTORY
According to my dad, there are two major theories of history. The first, the “conspiracy theory,” holds that there exists a shadowy elite behind all the various outrages which constitute the whole grim story of mankind, deliberately manufacturing evil to suit their nefarious designs. The advantage of subscribing to the conspiracy theory is that if you were to find some way of unraveling the conspiracy, you would be able to make everything all better.But the second theory, which my dad personally would always say he subscribed to, is the “cock-up theory,” holds that all the bad things that happen are essentially just mistakes: that it is human to err and so, ultimately, nothing can ever really improve. Incremental gains, sure, can sometimes be made, but someone is always bound to cock things up again.My dad tended to raise the cock-up theory against my naïve attempts at teenage dinner-table Marxism, since he assumed that any sort of central state intervention — under which he included any attempt to make things better for people using politics — was likely to result in more cock-ups. So I guess the distinction between these two folk historiographies has always bugged me.Which is why I'm going to sketch a third one. Call this the “where’s my elephant?” theory of history (I got this phrase from someone who follows me on twitter who goes by “JamesFerraroFan”).The “where’s my elephant?” theory takes it name, of course, from The Simpsons episode in which Bart gets an elephant (Season 5, episode 17, to be precise). For those of you who don't know the episode: Bart wins a radio contest where you have to answer a phone call with the phrase, “KBBL is going to give me something stupid.” That “something stupid” turns out to be either $10,000, or “the gag prize”: a full-grown African elephant. Much to the presenters’ surprise, Bart chooses the elephant — which is a problem for the radio station, since they don't actually have an elephant to give him. After some attempts at negotiation (the presenters offer Principal Skinner $10,000 to go about with his pants pulled down for the rest of the school year; the presenters offer to use the $10,000 to turn Skinner into “some sort of lobster-like creature”), Bart finds himself kicked out of the radio station, screaming “where's my elephant?”The story is picked up by the news (Kent Brockman: “Isn't that what we're all asking in our own lives? Where's my elephant? I know that's what I've been asking.”), which leads to the presenters being threatened with the loss of their jobs, which leads to them to obtain the elephant for Bart. Bart has won his joke prize, but now he must deal with the joke's consequences. Predictably, the elephant proves impossible for the Simpson family to keep — it costs them a huge amount of money and does a significant amount of damage to local real estate. In the end, they give the elephant away to an animal sanctuary. A few seasons later (in the episode in which the Simpson family hosts Apu’s wedding in their back garden), Bart is barely able to remember that he even had an elephant at all.In short then, the “where’s my elephant?” theory holds the following:If you give someone a joke option, they will take it.The joke option is a (usually) a joke option for a reason, and choosing it will cause everyone a lot of problems.In time, the joke will stop being funny, and people will just sort of lose interest in it.No one ever learns anything.So what evidence is there that the question “where’s my elephant?” has somehow been in the background throughout the history of our species, the driving force behind all human events?Well, here’s one somewhat news-relevant example: On Friday, the UK will officially leave the European Union. In a sense, this event will conclude the almost four years of political turmoil that have raged in my home country following the June 2016 Brexit referendum. But of course “in a sense” is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting here. In truth, the agreement to withdraw passed by Boris Johnson's government only really settles a few formalities about what will happen the day the UK ceases to be an EU member state, with much of Britain's future relationship with Europe still to be agreed upon (questions of how trade will work, how the borders will work, etc.). Given the difficulties still to come, it is no surprise that the conservative Tory party — which most recently campaigned on a platform of pretty well ending Brexit, and indeed politics in general, forever — have moved to ban the word “Brexit” after January 31. Brexit will remain with us — and yet, even as it continues to happen, it will be forced into feeling like a distant memory, the after-image of some unpleasantness we no longer wish even to understand.And perhaps it was the same with Boaty McBoatface. In hindsight, everyone should have always known that people were going to vote for Brexit — because a few months before the referendum, a poll to name a new vessel owned by the British National Environment Research Council was topped, following a social media campaign, by the suggestion “Boaty McBoatface”. In the end though, the public were denied the opportunity to call a research vessel something manifestly very silly, with the then-Science Minister Jo Johnson (Boris’s centrist, anti-Brexit brother) intervening to ensure that the boat would be called “RRS Sir David Attenborough.” “Boaty McBoatface” still became the name of something — but only one of Attenborough’s remote-controlled submersibles. As with Brexit, the Boaty McBoatface poll saw the public voting en masse for the joke option, the option no-one ever expected them to choose — in part, one suspects, simply because the people in charge had not thought to plan for what would happen if they did so.The difference, of course, is that the Boaty McBoatface vote was trivial enough to be dismissed, but then-Prime Minister David Cameron had held the Brexit referendum in order to resolve an internecine conflict within his own party, which made that act of voting for the joke option significant enough to trigger a constitutional crisis.HOW THE PENTAGON MANAGED TO FORGET THAT PEOPLE WILL INEVITABLY CHOOSE THE JOKE OPTION WHILE TALKING TO PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP IS BEYOND ME.Similar forces were at work when Donald Trump was elected towards the end of the same year. In part, “similar forces” here mean a resurgent nativism, but it’s also significant that for more than a decade, the idea of “President Trump” had been used as a punchline by comedies like The Simpsons. “Donald Trump has been saying he will run for president as a Republican,” quipped Seth Myers at the 2011 White House Correspondent's Dinner, “which is surprising, because I just assumed he was running for president as a joke.” Trump was never supposed to become the president; the mere idea of him doing so somehow upset the order of reality, and that was a huge part of his appeal. In almost exactly the same way, Boris Johnson, Trump’s UK analogue, first rose to prominence via his appearances on the BBC panel comedy show Have I Got News For You?, where he excelled at playing a blustering, upper-class twit Tory MP character called “Boris Johnson.” By the mid-2010s, Johnson was widely presumed to be a future Tory leader — but only because people had first had the idea “what if Boris Johnson was the Prime Minister?” pop into their heads as a joke.Meanwhile, earlier this year, Trump (allegedly) decided to have Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani assassinated because Pentagon officials tacked on the option of doing so in a briefing to “make the other options seem reasonable”. How the Pentagon managed to forget that people will inevitably choose the joke option while talking to President Donald Trump is beyond me.In my dad’s “conspiracy theory,” the driving force behind history is malice; on his “cock-up theory,” history is propelled by incompetence. But according to the “where’s my elephant?” theory, history is shaped by something rather more positive: desire. Specifically, the desire operative behind the “where’s my elephant?” theory is the desire for transgression. Humor, after all, exists at the limits of our world: the comedian Stewart Lee’s theory of clowning says that the purpose of jokes is to set out, and thus legislate, the boundaries of acceptable behavior. To make the “joke option” a reality, then, is to transgress the limits the joke itself sets out.Sometimes this can be joyous. Consider this oral history of the time the dog ate that guy's donor heart on the teen drama One Tree Hill, which happened (it seems) because the writers came up with it as a joke option, then essentially baited themselves into choosing it for real. But more often (and certainly when it comes to things more consequential than teen dramas), it’s a disaster — because now that the joke option has actually happened, it's no longer locatable at the margins of possibility, so it’s no longer particularly funny. Then all you’re left with is something that there were previously very good reasons not to let happen — and everyone is going to have to adapt around them. No wonder a public that was already bored enough with reality to vote for something as ridiculous as Brexit lost interest pretty quickly when it turned out that Brexit was in fact a very hard thing to do.So how should we respond to all this? Well, one major reaction to both Brexit and Trump was a sort of renewed call for everyone to be simply a lot more sensible. But this is strategically very stupid, like thinking the solution to your kid loudly demanding ice cream for breakfast is to offer them broccoli instead. Probably the closest we’ve yet come to using the “where’s my elephant?” theory for good instead of evil was in Britain in 2017, when we almost managed to get Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn elected prime minister using memes.Back then, the idea of a Corbyn premiership seemed, if not completely ridiculous, then at least fantastical — in large part, because the media had spent the past year and a bit making it seem so (indeed, Corbyn was only ever let onto the ballot for the 2015 Labour leadership election as a sort of joke option in the first place — endorsed by members of Parliament who never thought he would win). Unfortunately, by 2019, the quite-good 2017 result had lent the idea of “Prime Minister Corbyn” the smack of realism, and Labour was unable to capture the same utopian joy.Perhaps though there is still a clue here. If the “where’s my elephant?” theory is broadly correct, and history is driven by desire, then, well, not all of our desires are simply aimed at transgression for its own sake. In the “where’s my elephant?” theory, the world-spirit is rendered as Bart Simpson, perennially a 10-year-old scamp (if we wanted to historicize the historiography, perhaps we could speculate that the “where’s my elephant?” theory is the product that makes it impossible for everyone, regardless of age, to grow up).Bart can, yes, be mischievous and destructive, but not all his desires are anti-social ones. He is the kid who gets the principal fired after his dog runs loose in the school vents; who makes 900 dollary-doo collect calls to Australia; who responds to the command “go to bed” by going, instead, “to bread. ”But he is also a sweet boy who needs his family’s love and wants his mom and dad to be proud of him — the Bart of episodes like “Marge Be Not Proud”. If we are doomed to be Bart Simpson, then we must figure out how to be that Bart Simpson, instead.
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Using Data to Protect Voting Rights in 2020 Part 2
I forget his name that he is that you know as your group basically is your group working with them to try to get some kind of equity and but the fair map in the way is drawn thank you for your questions the short answer is yes to all of the above definitely want to echo and lift up everything you just said we have an Illinois a law in place to require civics in high school and actually the governor just signed a law to require civics education in middle school I believe just a few days ago and we see that as being really encouraging I can't take any credit for any of those bills but we do see it as encouraging we also hear feedback from folks at times that teaching that kind of information in it could totally depend on the classroom as far as whether that's an effective way to get the message across there are gonna be some there's some really phenomenal engaging civics educators who have figured out ways to I mean we all want to know the secret to civic engagement and we all want to know how we can empower community men our own community members and people who we care about and some folks have figured that out and then there are other places where there's a disconnect where the person giving a message I may not be effective in all settings if I'm going and telling someone how important voting rights are and what we think is really important is the peer led model as much as possible and so it was actually incarcerated community members and students who came up with the idea of the civics in prison bill that soon to be signed into law and who said you know this has to be peer led this has to be on the inside someone like me is not gonna be as effective in that setting as someone with a life experience to talk about the importance of civics and importance of voting not just voting talking to our elected officials finding other ways to empower our communities and make a positive impact on our communities and there are great organizations like McCormick Foundation and others who have been at the forefront of civics education in the classroom to directly answer your question but as you can tell I also think that civics conversations outside of the classroom are super important as well the census is something that's going to affect us all in Illinois more gravely than in other parts of the country you've probably heard that we have a very strong chance of a severe undercount in Illinois of losing one or more congressional districts and because that is has been set into motion because of nonsense conversations and back-and-forth about a possible citizenship question because of you know real infringement to our community members rights we all stand and lose in Illinois regardless of our race unfortunately because if we have fewer members in Congress which is what is set to happen we all are going to suffer from less funding and and less of a count of our voices now it's not too late to try to make an impact in that regard you mentioned some local elected officials who are trying to make a difference at the state and county and city level that's really encouraging Illinois officials and I have a lot of critical things to say about Illinois candidates and elected officials but I have to say they've really put themselves out there to say that community groups need to have funding to do the hard work of knocking on doors of making sure that their community members are counted and that people who are commute trusted community leaders are probably going to have a lot more success doing that then a random official who's detached from the neighborhood daily life so really encourage anyone who's involved with the community organization to think about getting involved in applying for funding to help with census outreach or to get involved in the census counting effort in one way or another but it is also this the fights that have been happening about advocacy relating to census I think are foreshadowing some of the fights that we could expect when it comes to redistricting which would likely be happening after the census count is done and unfortunately it's been census has been one of the recent excuses for some of our elected leaders to pit Communities against each other and to pit communities of color against each other and I think that's a false choice I don't think we have to choose either having robust just as an example either having robust black representation or having robust Latino or Asian representation we're all gonna rise and fall together when it comes to being counted and and Illinois hopefully being represented well in the future okay so I'm going take a question from the agenda it says do you work with any people with disabilities because it's also an issue for people with disabilities thank you I want to put a spotlight on the work of a great partner organization of ours equip for equality that has been doing some groundbreaking work to negotiate with the Chicago Board of Elections to improve access ability in Chicago polling places in particular every election we also do get questions as Chicago lawyers Committee from community members with disabilities but the folks who are doing this work day in day out like equip for equality I really want to make sure to mention them because we learn from groups like that as well as National Disability Rights Network about how to improve access for all marginalized community members including voters with disability with disabilities including people of color with disabilities so it's all we also don't see it as necessarily just one distinct group or another in regard to the previous question I also wanted to mention a partner of ours Chicago votes who's been doing parades to the polls to walk with high school students from their classes to an early voting site and have a party and that's also helped to boost high school civic participation especially on the south and west sides of Chicago students graduate you should happen to pull they should have a diploma in one hand and a voters registration card in the other if anybody thought of that or you know it seemed like it I don't know I seem like it's not really it shouldn't be a real hard thing because when I was in high school which was a long time you know we had like civics in high school and I've got my first registration card it in high school and I've voted every sense and I using it as example that you know I think the public school system or the school system period should do something to try to get you know students before they graduate to at least get a voter to register for voters registration card I don't know it you know have y'all ever looked into you know something like that one of the things related to that that we are working on and certainly not just us a broader coalition of community members called just democracy Illinois all nonpartisan organizations is automatic voter registration so it's something technically that's part of Illinois law although it's in the very early and unfortunately flawed stages of implementation and the concept behind automatic voter registration is that if our state government already has our information in a database either through getting a driver's license or public benefits or another state system if we've already given documentation of our age and our citizenship status then why not add us to the rolls unless we wanted to opt out and so that's something that the Illinois politicians the Illinois members of the House and Senate all approved unanimously in 2017 and then Governor rauner signed it into law but making it a reality so that there are actually large numbers of people who are eligible but not yet registered added to the rolls again unless they wanted to opt out getting it to be a reality has been difficult and I think part of the reason has been state government systems changing because change is hard and change can be expensive and I definitely respect the incredible work that many of our government leaders and personnel do but we also think that the excuses aren't enough and there needs to be more to put laws like that into action because there was some really sound policy that work that went into putting those laws together so that it would ideally make our election system more secure and voter rolls more up-to-date so that when there is someone who becomes eligible or if someone's moved or their status changes so that that's all updated as seamlessly as possible but in practice that hasn't much been happening yet I think's again for presenting so my question is gone around the the the story told about the poll worker who intimidated that voter and also kind of your answer you just gave to the that previous question around sort of seems like I'm detecting a theme around there's there's putting laws into place and then there's actually like following through and making sure that they're actually like followed through and like implemented tying those two together like what is your sort of broad like strategy for following through on that like what do you do like what are the repercussions to a poll worker who is like behaving perhaps illegally right in that situation and like what are the ways that in which you engaged to actually do that follow through in these different cases for issues at the polling place as much as possible we try to address it real time by collaborating with election officials so that ideally the voter can vote that day that's our primary goal is to try to figure it out from a problem-solving point of view making phone calls going in person to the election officials we have people planted there at there and I don't mean planted and like a surreptitious for hope door but we have people who are stationed there all from our staff all day long which is I when I ask that question to election officials of whether they were okay with that and they said yes I thought is there a catch or something but actually we've been doing that the last few election cycles and I really admire them for letting us do that again given that we complain about them and complain to them I think it's a really good sign of a sign of good faith that they're willing to do that so that as much as possible real time if we can address something that's the best situation so that we're not why on earth would we want to fight a lawsuit about that later if it means someone can't vote that just is not the most efficient way to try to tackle it so what we try to do is advocate to the election officials who are going to be the decision makers about is there grounds to fire someone or to mandate retraining of someone who's disenfranchising people in that way the example that I gave to you from South suburb far south suburb what happened there is that the the top election official in that jurisdiction one of the county clerk's agreed with us that that practice that was happening at the polling place was wrong called the people who work at that polling place on that day and said look you've got to stop impermissibly asking people for ID there's a small minority of situations under Illinois law where someone should be asked for ID go ahead and ask them in that situation but don't just go asking everyone who comes in the door this is also a 90% black suburb it's not fair to ask everyone who comes in the door for their ID but that phone call happened late in the day so there probably were many people who were excluded earlier on so then we try to be as preventative as possible the next time around talking to those clerks talking to this staff about these are the I mean as as robust as our data can be in our tools to share the data like that mini website or other tools then we could hopefully effectively persuade the decision makers about practices they need to improve before the next time around we see litigation as a last resort there are some times we have to file a lawsuit and we hope that we could resolve the issue in some other way if as much as possible you'll have to excuse any ignorance of why we don't vote just online like what are the barriers to that and why like are there legit reasons from I guess I don't know your perspective of why that would be not good at this point in the homework I've done thus far and I am really hungry to learn more about this topic because something about the system or various parts of the system definitely need to be more easy and accessible to eligible voters but in the research I've done thus far I haven't seen compelling information that we're there yet in terms of the technology and the systems to make that happen securely and I I hope that I could be proven wrong eventually but when I'm seeing nonpartisan civic organizations like verified vote who we've worked with before national lawyers Committee for civil rights others who have been monitoring the election security scene and conversations and Washington DC and Beyond I'm not convinced yet that people's information and choices would be secure I'm coming around to the idea that our Illinois election officials are keeping our are making strides to better protect our voter registration information after that infamous hacking that has been you know it's all over the headlines about Illinois in particular and I do think that the State Board of Elections and other local election officials in Illinois are trying to learn from those vulnerabilities and do better for the future elections but that's just our voter registration information like for me it would be my name my address certain bare-bones information about whether I voted before but not who I voted for that's not who I voted for is not something that's stored right now but if we're talking about online voting and there there are organizations there are some advocates out there who feel differently and who are looking at certain kinds of technologies that they hope could overcome the security worries and so I think it always should be part of the conversation to evaluate those with rigor but I haven't seen compelling information that were there yet from a security point of view but online voter registration does exist and definitely want people to use that I think that everyone weren't um hello thank you for presenting a newly effective way to do voter suppression is through coordinated disinformation campaigns you only need to get a few thousand voters in let's say Michigan or Pennsylvania to not vote in order to have a substantial effect on an election is this terrain that your organization has a policy position on and is this something that even has a legal approach that would help to remedy some of the prevailing concerns I would love to learn more about that area because I think my ex Bertie's Evette areas at the level of reading we're all reading the same similar headlines about that and it's scary I can tell you that there's missin there are misinformation campaigns and voter intimidation that happen every single election in Chicago and Illinois I'm not trying to be alarmist because I'm I do think our voting system is overall good here and I encourage people to participate so I'm not trying to scare anyone or suggest that our elections are invalid but every election especially hotly contested elections in Chicago and Illinois we see things come up that if a national reporter heard about it they would be up in arms and it would make that that news cycle but because it affects fewer number of people and it's especially if it occurs in an odd number year where there are elections that affect our daily lives for a village trustee or an alderman or other positions like that is just not something that as many people pay attention to we as a voting rights and civil rights organization do pay attention and we've have found that those elections are the times in Chicago and Illinois where we have to be even more ready with non-partisan poll Watchers with attorneys who are trained up in other volunteers who answer the phones or help voters in person because that's just a constant threat my theory has been that that happens anytime there's a close election like the data point you shared about when it really comes down to not that many votes people have more at stake and they're more likely to try to a campaign our candidate is more likely to cross the line in terms of what's allowed to get a few voters because it could make the difference about whether they win or lose I still think my theory is is pretty much correct about you know we all heard about elections in 2019 in the city and suburbs where people elected officials literally won by a few votes but another theory I heard recently from a lobbyist is that when there are jobs to be handed out that in thinking about the context of Chicago and Illinois politics especially that's when there is this vulnerability to misinformation of voters and manipulation of voters or outright vote buying or forcing which happens today unfortunately probably at a much more miniscule level than it happened in the history of Chicago but it still happens today so we have to remain vigilant if there are players out there who are eager for a certain person to get elected into office so that they have some sway about who gets on the payroll that's another very real sort of political pressure that's out there
https://youtu.be/O78jCdLCHsg
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Lesson 15, Task 3: Who am I?
Text to recording:“I'm Cris, I'm 27 years old and yes I am one of those “self-entitled Millennials” you hear about. One of those young folks who loves luxury, has bad manners, has contempt for authority, disrespects his elders, and loves talking instead of exercise. I think nothing but of myself and have no reverence for my parents or people of old age. Do these things sound like the descriptions of millennials you often hear of?
Well, I’m actually paraphrasing a quote often attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates in the 4th century BCE. You see, these types of generalizations aren't new. If your older than someone in my generation, than I'm sure the same types of things have been said about your own generation. But is there any truth to these words?
Well, maybe. It's not hard to imagine that someone living in a generation that has more access to a good standard of living will search for more, even if that is luxury, it's simply human nature to strive for a better life.
As to having contempt for authority, well we are a more educated generation due to the resources accessible to us, we know of and have more exposure to what authority can lead too if it’s not questioned. We see the effects of totalitarianism and police brutality, so we speak against these unhinged forms of authority.
I completely understand the assertion that we don't care for or disrespect the elderly, however, we must consider the fact that social attitudes have changed and that maybe we as a younger generation feel that not every elderly person is entitled to undue respect, simply because they're elderly. Maybe we don't find it just to excuse or refuse to question older people when they say prejudice things, because we believe everyone should be held accountable for their actions.
Oh, and have I mentioned that according to a study done by the Pew Research center... the vast majority of 18- to 29-year-olds polled — 84 percent — said adult children have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to an elderly parent if he or she needs it.
Lastly, do we come off as being the most self-entitled and egocentric generation in history? Possibly. However, we're also the generation most passionate about the environment and saving our world. We vote for green legislations and are outraged by environmental injustices committed by big corporations. We don't stand for social injustices. Masses of millennials go out in the streets protesting for gay, black, women, income inequality issues and rights - in numbers that have never been seen before around the world. So, if that's what you call only thinking about ourselves, so be it.
Hey, it's Cris again. In case you got lost in that tangent.
Not only am I a millennial, but I'm also a male. I don't know what to say about that exactly.
I guess, I hope I don't contribute much to behaviours that could be described as “toxic masculinity"…
Why you may ask? Because I see how those notions affect women, and not only women but most men like myself. You see I don't mind crying in front of people, I'm quite clumsy, and I'm drastically afraid of most insects. Those types of things didn't really help me from being picked on by my male peers, who'd call me things like a little girl. Because apparently the worse thing in the world is being a little girl...
Yeah, that's how I know toxic masculinity and misogyny affect not only women but also men in society. I do however play team sports like soccer. I like watching mma and ultra violent gangster movies, which unfortunately probably have impacts on some of those issues linked to toxic masculinity
On another note, I'm not quite the lady's man myself either. Probably not winning over any one of those delightful "alpha male" frat boys we hear of. That's because I'm gay (sorry ladies, I know I sound so…. appealing).
I’m also most likely not helping my case against stereotyping by admitting to those signs of “male weaknesses” I mentioned before. But then, I'm pretty sure being gay is enough for a lot of those guys concerned with policing others males’ masculinities, to see me as a "beta male".
I'm not quite concerned with being seen as either “masculine” or "effeminate", despite the fact that many people think its a compliment to tell me things like, "wow, you seem so straight. I would have never expected you to be gay!"
You know because all gay men are apparently the highly flamboyant caricatures you see on tv. Not that there's anything wrong with the one's who are. But just like there are heterosexual guys who aren't the most "masculine", there are gay guys who are and aren't themselves. And like I said, I don't mind embracing either "masculine" or "feminine" qualities.
Yes, I do like to play sports. I work in construction. I can be a slob. I'm quite physically fit and strong. And I’m good with tools as well.
But I also like to take care and nurture others. I'm interested in careers that are seen as female dominated such as social sciences. And like I said I don't mind expressing my emotions.
Actually, I think its important to encourage boys to express their emotions. We used to teach them to repress them, so that we could easily turn them to unempathetic killing machines.
Trust me, I know first hand... I was taught to salute to an image of Che Guevara and how to use a gun before I finished adolescence!
Yeah, I said Che Guevara... one of the "heroes" of the Cuba revolution. Did I mention that I'm from Cuba? My parents are Cuban and Brazilian, respectfully, and I was raised between the two countries for a good part of my life.
Yes, I do love futebol or how people here call it "soccer", and yes I do love to dance, which is probably a paradoxical notion in itself because I'm a pasty Latin American of European descent, and.. I think the notion goes white people can't dance?
Weird because white people in the Caribbean and Brazil are some of the best dancers I've met in my whole life, in addition to their black counter-parts.
That's another thing I've never got, why white North Americans are apparently representatives of all "white people"; given that most white people in Latin America and Europe are probably not speaking English in their everyday lives, unless necessary, and most probably don't love Jesus, Guns, and country music the way a lot of white Americans do.
Sorry, I'm stereotyping there myself.
Oh, and yes, I am a pale blond boy that speaks Spanish, and no, that's really not that odd. I mean the Spanish language was brought to Latin America, Africa, and Asia by European colonists from Spain. Last time I checked Spaniards were white Europeans in the same way the Welsh, Gascons, Greeks, and Latvians are, and quite often blond-haired at that. I mean if you've watched the world cup you’ve probably seen Nacho Monreal, Gerard Pique both who are blond.
Both of those footballers mentioned are Catalan by the way, which is coincidentally where part of my dad's family comes from in Spain. Catalonia. My mom's family on the other hand are a mix of Eastern Europeans and West Asians.
Yeah, fyi Brazil was doing the "country of immigrants" game way before Canada was, and so many of us are not named Dias, Martins, and Goncalves but also Dicker as in German Brazilian Cintia Dicker, Temer as in the Lebanese-Brazilian president Michel Temer, Roussef as in Bulgarian-Brazilian former president Dilma Roussef, Ambrossio as in Italian-Polish Brazilian Alessandra Ambrossio, and Suzuki as in Japanese-Brazilian Daniele Suzuki and so on.
Additionally, if you've noticed, the most common surnames in Brazil are names like Gomes and Pereira, not Gomez and Pujol. This is because Brazil was a Portuguese colony and not a Castilian one, and most Brazilians don't speak Spanish as a first language, but Portuguese.
Actually, because of the level of immigrants that came to Brazil (the second most in the Americas, between the U.S. and Argentina) many Brazilians, like my grandma who spoke mostly Polish and Ukrainian, did not learn to speak Portuguese until very recently. Unfortunately, due to forced assimilationist policies.
Another interesting thing about my own family history? My Lebanese great-grandmother was a Maronite Catholic, while my grandfather was a Crimean Tatar from Ukraine. Tatars like him are generally Muslims.
Yeah, I know I'm blowing the mind of some dude in rural Alabama; a blond, green eyed, white Latin American Muslim!? Well, actually I was raised in a mixture of Sufi Islam, Roman Catholicism, and something called Lukumi.
Lukumi or Santeria is an Afro-Cuban religion which originated with the Yoruba in Africa and was brought by enslaved Africans to the country. Its the most popular religion in Cuba, since the communist regime was not too fond of Catholicism, and these days its practiced not only by black and mixed Cubans, but also white Cubans.
Which, I won't lie, there's probably a quite a bit of problematicness with the descendants of slave-owners dressing up in Yoruban clothing and singing chants to the gods of the ancestors of the people their ancestors enslaved.
But I disgress, discussions of cultural appropriation have ironically not reached Cuba yet, because "we live in a racial paradise" and our dear saviour Fidel Castro put a stop to any trace of racism in our society. Trust me! (and his brother's government too!). Cuba produces the largest number of black doctors in the West! Despite the fact that doctors in the country get paid bread crums, and any chance of making decent money is in the tourist industry or being an elite in the communist government. Which funny enough both sectors are vastly occupied by white Cubans...
Anyways, back to Lukumi. Lukumi is greatly related to Afro-Brazilian Candomble and Haitian Voodoo, and yes, we do sacrifice chickens. However, it's no different than ritual sacrifice in Judaism and Islam, we do it humanely and we eat the meat after. However, no we do not use "Voodoo dolls" and no our religion, and Haitian Voodoo, both are not "evil". In fact, the European dichotomous concepts don't actually exist in these religions, but either way both promote treating your fellow man with love and respect. In fact, the association with witch-craft, satanism, and evil was invented by Spanish and French slave-owners by pure ignorance in order to demoralize the Africans in Cuba and Haiti.
Anyways, let's try to cure modern ignorance, and not define each other by stereotypes. Sure, you may label me as a 28-year-old, white Cuban/Brazilian, gay millennial dude, who was raised in array of religions, but at the end of the day I'm simply, Cris, a Hatsune Miku stan. (just kidding)”
*FYI I’m 27 turning 28 very soon, so that’s why I messed up my age, lol*
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Part II - The Academy: Issues of Class and Kingdom
For as difficult as it may be to find a calling in church, it may be equally difficult -- if not impossible -- for me to find it in the academy. Certainly, it is impossible to find it in the academy apart from the church. But as much as the church creates difficulties for a single woman with advanced degrees in Bible like myself, the academy is also tough. At the end of the day, it is not my world. I fear that it is not a world that I can ever fully belong to, and if I'm being honest, I fear it's not one I want to belong to either.
I have learned some unexpected things at Duke. I thought I would find a lot of people like myself, people who had the same interests and the same types of intelligences. I honestly thought that there would be a type of belonging I could enjoy in the academy that I could not enjoy elsewhere.
Yet, this has been far from the case. Someone asked me recently if I felt alienated at Duke. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that it is not so much a feeling that I have been alienated as that I am simply an alien. I think there are many reasons for this, reasons that I have only recently begun to fully grasp.
For one, I have learned that the academy is full of people from certain social classes, certain higher social classes. I did not grow up poor by any means; but, I think it is safe to say that my parents did, and I grew up around a lot of poor people, with a lot of what you might call "poor people perspectives". Because I grew up with security for my daily needs, this is not a perspective that I was aware I had. I was not aware that I would be one of the only people from my social class at Duke. I wasn't even aware that I had a social class. But there are significant differences between the way that I think and live in the world, and the way the average Duke person does. The Duke world is hardly intelligible to me sometimes, and it is not intelligible at all to the folks I grew up with.
Likewise, while people here at Duke think they know a lot about the world, there are aspects of life where I grew up that they could never comprehend. (A wonderful example is the absolute shock and horror of my classmates and professors after the election of Donald Trump. I was equally shocked at their collective shock!) There are a lot of things taken for granted here that I cannot imagine taking for granted, and that even my friends in undergrad would never have taken for granted. Some of these things are infuriating, some of them have been deeply hurtful, and some of them just make me feel lonely.
In spite of all this, it is the aspiration of so many in lower social classes to attain to this level, even as they are at the same time (often justly) suspicious of this world and what it promotes. A lot of my friends -- even friends far poorer and more marginalized than myself -- could have made it here if all it came down to was capacity. But they would never think to try. The possibility is not on their horizons.
Furthermore, I think there is something in many poor people which rightly discerns that they would not belong here, and that in order to belong here, they might have to change so much of who they are as to no longer be recognizable. And they are, in so many ways, right about that.
I've been caught up in it too. Without realizing what I was doing, I would help to make poor, ignorant, conservative, white America the butt of every joke, the background of every subtle jab, the gold standard of what not to be, the source of the world's ills, and what we as Christians must attempt to distance ourselves from as much as possible. In places like Duke Div there seems to always be this fear that if we claim Christianity, the world at large might think we are claiming those people -- and by "the world at large," I mostly mean the world of higher class, educated people. I mostly mean the academy. It has taken me two years to wake up to what this means.
So much of what happens here seems to be apologetics for the elites. We think we are in danger of being excised from the academy or thought poorly of because the name "Christian" might lump us in with so many undesirables. We must meet certain standards, standards for language and methods and style of writing, in order to prove that we belong here too, that we deserve our place -- from individual professors trying to get tenure, to PhD students defending dissertations, to master's students seeking affirmation for their dreams.
Poverty, ignorance, ignominy, and bigotry are viewed as contagions, and the way we sanitize and show our cleanliness to others is by publicly denouncing the people to whom these illnesses are believed to stick.
Now don't get me wrong: the folks I grew up with definitely think, in a certain way, that they are better than more educated people from higher classes. There is almost the sense, in some churches, that it is better for people not to pursue advanced education in Bible, even from more conservative institutions. But, I think the folks I grew up around also feel a certain amount of shame, failure, and disenfranchisement in the current social and political scene, and there is not a lick of that feeling here. Here, there is only success and the threat of losing it, of becoming like them. In certain ways, I'm convinced that both sides are right and both wrong. There are truths about each of these locations that can only be seen from a true outsider's perspective, and they are truths that the Evil One works to keep us from discovering. Because in discovering them, perhaps we would be reconciled, and in being reconciled, perhaps we would see where we stand before God.
When I came here, it was on the advice of my professors in undergrad. They thought I would flourish here, and that this was a place from which I could have a shot at getting a job in an ever more competitive field. I also think I honestly wanted to know what it was that my friends and family were so suspicious of. And, part of me actually hoped deep down that people here would, in light of their education, be more open and charitable to others than the folks I grew up with. I hoped I would have breathing room to be charitable that I didn't have in more fundamentalist spaces.
But there is a big difference between me and many of my classmates from evangelical backgrounds: I am not bitter against the people I grew up with. I am not bitter against my parents. I may disagree with them on a few things, but we agree far more than we disagree. There are plenty of people here who do not even know a Trump-voter or a "climate denier" personally, and for many it would be unthinkable to actually take them seriously and listen deeply to them; certainly, they would not allow themselves to be personally critiqued or challenged by them.
Here, there are as many unforgivable sins as in fundamentalism. There is a legalism as harsh and exacting as Puritanism. And this semester it suddenly dawned on me: there are actually some people here who would want some people in my family dead. In the perfect world of many at Duke, my family might not exist.
I type these words through tears, because as wrong as they may be, I love them. I love all of them.
But no matter how much I take from this place, when it comes to my family, I have no choice but to listen to them. I have no choice but to be challenged by them, critiqued, to hear their concerns and perspectives. And I've started to realize how right they are about a lot of things. They're just not in the position to express those critiques in a way that will make any sense to the people who need to hear them. And yeah, they don't wanna hear critiques on their end either.
I get it. There are times when the flip-flop between break and school has felt intolerable. There are times when I have just really not wanted to be asked if I drank the liberal kool-aid, or how I navigate my faith at a "secular" school like Duke Divinity. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of liberals.
There are times when I haven't wanted to come back to school and hear people make fun of the simple, uneducated faith of old church ladies -- ladies who have been to hell and back again and who love others in radically Jesus-like ways, ladies who I am sure will gain crowns in heaven far out of our reach. There are times when I haven't wanted to sit through another tirade about how the church has contributed to systemic poverty from people who think they're really sacrificing for Jesus by taking a job where they'll only make a starting salary of 40k. There are times when I haven't wanted to hear about how the world is going to hell because of evangelicals.
Here, being a Christian seems to equal voting for Hillary. Back home, it seems to equal voting for Trump. But I'm starting to think it equals loving God and your neighbor, and that maybe we need to talk more about how to do that personally than about how to vote. I don't know what this so-called Christian madness is that thinks a vote is more important than a cup of cold water. Oh if only we could get back the time we spent watching the news and debating each other about the election, and give it back to God and our neighbors! If only we could cleanse our eyes and our hearts from their disease! If only we could return to the Lord our God, and He would have compassion on us.
I'm exhausted. I have seen how exhausting it is to seek after success, to care so damned much what people think. I have seen the utter vanity in riches and prestige. I have seen demonic things here. God has opened my eyes to some crazy stuff. And I think I have cracked just enough under all the pressure to let at least a little bit of the light in.
In the words of Kendrick Lamar, I have seen that love may get you killed, but that pride's gonna be the death of you, and you, and me, and you, and you, and you, and me. I have come out realizing that "in a perfect world. . .I'd take all the religions and put 'em all in one service, just to tell 'em we ain't shit, but He's been perfect, world."
The "perfect world" for many of the folks I grew up with, and the "perfect world" of the folks I've gone to school with do not agree. The visions that seem to dominate both of these spaces are fractured, damaged visions. I believe that both of them, in certain ways, approximate the Kingdom, but both of them also fall far short. And neither of them have room for undesirables. Neither of them have room for all of the children of God, for all of the ones for whom Christ died. The Kingdom, on the other hand, is so much greater than these visions. The Kingdom includes the reconciliation of all things. The Kingdom calls us to true, personal repentance, repentance that will cause us all to listen to the ways in which the other side is being used by God to show us our wrongs.
If I am an academic, I will not stop being an evangelical, and I will not stop being loyal to the village of people who raised me and made me who I am. I have no problem with being poor, with having just enough to get by. And I hope I have no problem with being despised and being spoken ill of. If I am an academic, I need to see how my work matters to the people I grew up with and to the church in general, as much as it matters to the world's elites. I want to satisfy the requirements of the Kingdom, not the academy, and certainly not the economy. But is that even possible? How does one preach a gospel that is despised, in a place so dominated by prestige? Can a path to career advancement also be a path to repentance, and if so, how?
Does my repentance involve me going on for doctoral work and living into "the dream"? Am I supposed to serve the church (as some of my friends have suggested) by being a light of some much-needed truth in academic circles? Or is this the suggestion everyone makes because it makes sense according to the world's standards? Because we think that Christians should seek worldly influence to make the gospel effective?
The gospel is found first in weakness, but the academy holds itself up as a bastion of meritocratic strength. And sometimes Christian higher ed is the worst.
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Expert: Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight. And the single most important characteristic of government is its willingness to use force, at home and abroad, to protect the interests of the property classes. — Chris Hedges, “Corpses of Souls” Here’s a thought experiment for social workers assisting homeless, recovery (drug, alcohol), re-entry (coming out of prison), and those diagnosed with mental and physical health challenges: Take a college educated “professional,” George, and then a “homeless” person, Julia, and put them in the same tattered clothes, take away phone, ID, money, credit cards, blindfold them, transport them from say Portland, Oregon, and to Toronto, Canada, or Buffalo, NY, and drop them off in an alley in a run-down part of town at 3 am on a Monday. Then challenge them to get back to square “go.” We know the homeless person, or the former incarcerated person, or the recovering addict will be home — Portland – within 48 hours. The professional, either in FIRE (finance insurance real estate) or any number of elite fields, will tank quickly. Especially if we were to drop that person off outside of town into a homeless camp. In my field of social work, many employers I talk to would rather have a former inmate, a former felon, who has gotten his or her life back on track, on the job. Really. There are even Harvard (who cares that it’s Ivy League, by the way?) studies to that effect. Of course, the rationale is based on company loyalty; an ex-con would really appreciate his freedoms now; hard work – workaholic – since all that time in the lobotomizing prison system would kick in an obsessiveness toward keeping busy, keeping moving. Then, some employers I talk to think most workers or potential workers are the problem, would steal time, money, goods, and things from the company. So, the felon has already done time, knows the depravity of prison systems, and would stay on the up and up without jeopardizing incarceration. Plus, in the US, companies get a tax break for hiring former felons! The fields of social work are growing, yet the pay is shrinking, the work conditions are ramped up, the management are bizarre examples of former social workers themselves (very anti worker, very hard on outside-the-box thinkers, and completely blank on what radical social work is and how to even apply the principles of that form of social work). Most non-profits do the dirty work of what a society is looking more and more to not provide for – mental health care for a bigger and bigger share of the USA population; disability services for a larger and larger swath of Americans mentally, psychologically, intellectually, socially, physically, and spiritually broken or disabled; financial, employment, education, housing assistance for an ever-growing population of humans who are not able to work and live and transport and find health care for themselves in this New Gilded Age. The non-profits I have worked for are top-heavy, have very little money put aside or earmarked or grant-provided for the workers; many of the non-profits hire development associates, upper management shills, PR folk, marketing and events coordinators; many are in shining and remodeled digs while casting shadows on the street people they supposedly care about. Some of us in social services have come from other professions, and like me, many are former teachers. Very few are radical thinkers, and many are just trying to hang on. When you work in an at-will state, where organizing and workplace coordinating is akin to communism, and when you work for people younger and the same age as yourself who once had their lives more or less put together but who are today on the streets, in shelters, in vans on the side of the road, and who have to pay for legal debts – hospital bills, legal financial obligations, debts coming at them via mean-assed debt collectors and repo men — the idea of Six Degrees of Separation comes cold like melting glaciers as really Only One Degree of Separation. Manfred Max Neef calls this country, USA — richest, biggest land rip off abusing, military mightiest, vastest financial thieving, culturally insanest — underdeveloping. I mean, your country is the most dramatic example that you can find. I have gone as far as saying — and this is a chapter of a book of mine that is published next month in England, the title of which is Economics Unmasked. There is a chapter called “The United States, an Underdeveloping Nation,” which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And your country is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans, you know, are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations. People living in their cars now and sleeping in their cars, you know, parked in front of the house that used to be their house — thousands of people. Millions of people, you know, have lost everything. But the speculators that brought about the whole mess, oh, they are fantastically well off. No problem. No problem. This short piece – rare for me at DV, LA Progressive, and other places, since I still believe that concision is not a favorable tool to understanding the complexities of our society and systems thinking – is all tied to really what many Americans WAY WAY before Trump’s family set foot in this country have always believed about Mexico or New Orleans or Dominican Republic or South Africa or Philippines or Afghanistan (just replace a country like Haiti with any number of 120 countries in the world) have said, stated, written and professed undiplomatically and through the Economic Hit Men: They are ALL shitholes. I have had plenty of people in my 61 years living on this planet, after being in dozens of countries (I have lived and worked in), fellow (sic) Americans (sic) who thought my white skin and my little lists of three college degrees and my male status entitled my fellow Americans to rant on and on about how dirty, backward, primitive, slow-witted, poor, inefficient, shady, criminal this or that country is — countries from which I lived, traveled and worked and those many have not stepped foot in, beyond FOX News and Hollywood propaganda. That Trump now voices what Americans have believed, and economists have practiced, and our military branches have reflected – America is Great, and the rest of the rabble (well, maybe not Norway or Finland — that’s about it for that pure white race places) are part and particle the shitholes Trump so undiplomatically states the world is. In reality, though, if we look at the definition of “shit”/”hole,” it all comes back to this warring, militant, earth-killing, global lording over country called the United States of America. Infantilized, lobotomized, one-paycheck/broken bone/auto accident/employment termination/criminal justice involved/foreclosure AWAY from shithole status. This poor white and now multi-race co-opting country of people who have zero idea how and why its more or less isolated little status among the global actors is set in their minds as “okay . . . Great/Yes We Can/Make It Great Again/Numero Uno” because of the shit we serve up to the rest of the world vis-à-vis military and economic and resource plundering insanity. While our own country is full of shit-holes– full of systems of penury and debasement and depravity and delusion and destruction and increasing wrath upon its own populations – we see this spasm of protestations from the Liberal Democrats Who Support All Those Democratic Party apparatchiks of regime change and collateral damage carried out on what Bush or Obama see as the “shit hole Iraqis and Afghans and Libyans and Yeminis and Somalis.” Imagine, the democrats crying about Trump and his redneck Americanism. Which party said we had to bomb them back to the stone age? Which party wrapped up Japanese Americans in barbed wire luxury? Which party helped to wipe out 3 million Vietnamese? Who bombed, razed, illegally mined, economically double-triple tapped the world’s other shit holes? Way-way before two-bit The Apprentice got raves and ratings and millions. It’s Trump who is still on record ranting about the Central Park Five, found to be falsely convicted and held in prison (now released), stating months ago, after the five men were acquitted, found to be innocent and released, that “they are guilty of the rape, man.” His Trump Faulty Towers Corp. paid or two full page ads in the NYT ranting about “their guilty” after they were found innocent. Again, a reset button is necessary when looking at the big billionaire’s motley mind and fourth grade thinking style: who is he, how did he get here, where did he learn, how did he exist in this country, what is his American soul made of . . . . The who, why, when, what, where and how are questions Americans of all political stripes never ask. We can tap dance around those “deplorables” voting for George Wallace or Barry Goldwater or George Bush or Donald Trump, or dance around those millionaires who see other shitholes producing other super predators, or two-step into more delusion when Super Rich Hollywood defines You and Me and Success and Failure, or when Amazon dot com comes crashing into your local bricks and mortar, or how the millionaire media or celebrities come into your living rooms via cable or iPhone and kidnap your loved ones, young and old. Seriously, which shithole shall we concentrate on in the US of A, the engine of shit holes, the Mother of All Shitholes, coming to a neighborhood nearby, or Flint Michigan, or Charlottesville, or Fortune 1000 boardroom or dis-education college faculty and administration? Who in your group of friends and acquaintances even knows what economics is for? Manfred Max Neef again: One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy. Two, development is about people and not about objects. Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth. Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services. Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible. And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life. I am sorry to say in my years as a journalist, college teacher, union organizer, social worker, environmentalist, urban planner, etc., I have run into more shithole thinkers in this country than all the countries I’ve been to combined, by far. If you want to run into real thugs, real criminals, real depravity, delusional thinking, disgusting thinking, real retrograde philosophy, real illiteracy, real infantilism, come to a town near me – Pacific Northwest, or Texas or Arizona, or anywhere I have done my time in. Not many anti-Trump people would question the root cause of his shithole role running this shithole country, and the mirror is not large enough for self-reflection: biggest military in the world, biggest land mass stolen from original nations, biggest area cleared of natural ecosystems, biggest group of la-la-land thinkers. Magical thinkers, the lot of us, really. Let the knee-jerking go on and on as Americans attempt to parse out who they are in that mirror mirror on the wall! Unless you have ended the mythical belief in this country’s prowess and greatness and stopped hiding from this society’s advanced malignant cancer called predatory and consumer capitalism, then you are the Trump in that mirror, without or without the orange glow! Max-Neef: First of all, we need cultured economists again, who know the history, where they come from, how the ideas originated, who did what, and so on and so on; second, an economics now that understands itself very clearly as a subsystem of a larger system that is finite, the biosphere, hence economic growth as an impossibility; and third, a system that understands that it cannot function without the seriousness of ecosystems. And economists know nothing about ecosystems. They don’t know nothing about thermodynamics, you know, nothing about biodiversity or anything. I mean, they are totally ignorant in that respect. And I don’t see what harm it would do, you know, to an economist to know that if the beasts would disappear, he would disappear as well, because there wouldn’t be food anymore. But he doesn’t know that, you know, that we depend absolutely from nature. But for these economists we have, nature is a subsystem of the economy. I mean, it’s absolutely crazy. http://clubof.info/
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You can be a Progressive, and you can win.
In one of Philip Dick’s novels, I think possibly Our Friends from Frolix 8, two guys are sitting in a bar on another planet, talking to each other. The first one says to the second one that he remembers him fondly. The second one, embarrassed, confesses to the first one that he doesn’t recognize him. The first one explains that that’s because when they were together previously, he had a different head.
I had that on my mind when I was introduced on local TV a few years ago by a news anchor who had invited me to do something that I often am asked to do, to wit, defend Obamacare. The anchor said that I had a reputation for speaking that aforesaid mind. With that in mind, the following speaking ensued:
Greg Warmoth: Hi folks, and welcome back to Central Florida Spotlight. Today, I’m joined by Congressman Alan Grayson, an Orlando Democrat from Florida’s 9th Congressional District with a reputation for speaking his mind, and being very clear about his position on the issues. Congressman, thanks for joining us again today. With that intro, would that be accurate?
AG: Thanks. You know, I speak my mind because who else’s mind would I speak, right? It’s got to be my mind, nobody else’s.
GW: Having that outspoken nature, has that gotten you good publicity? Bad publicity? The publicity you want?
AG: I don’t think that much about it, but I do think people appreciate someone who’s a straight talker. That much is clear. I think that voters are entitled to know what’s on your mind. If you’re going to ask for their vote, they need to know what’s honestly on your mind, what you’re going to do for them. And people know that, when I make a promise, I’m going to keep it.
GW: Let’s talk about what happened [in Congress recently]. Congratulations on being re-elected, by the way.
AG: Thanks – by a double-digit margin, in a very bad year for my party.
GW: That’s my next point.
AG: Yes.
GW: It was not a good year. Republicans are now solidly in control. How will you reach across the aisle?
AG: The same way that I have [reached across the aisle]. Slate magazine said that I was the most effective Member of Congress, Democratic or Republican, in the past two years. And I passed more amendments on the Floor of the House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans, than anyone [else], either Democratic or Republican. Over thirty amendments in the course of two years.
GW: It was not a good run for the Democrats. A lot of your fellow Democrats are not back in Washington now. [Was that] a wake-up call?
AG: No, I don’t think so. I think the other side successfully vilified the President and made it seem like the President had been ineffective, when in fact the country is better off than it was when it was on the precipice of a Great Depression six years ago. And now we have 10 million people who have health coverage who didn’t have it a year ago. So there was a lot that was accomplished, but the Republicans, without putting forth any positive program of their own, nevertheless vilified the President, and they did so successfully.
GW: Let’s talk about that, Obamacare. Some would call it successful, from your vantage point. Others would say it’s nothing but an expensive way of forcing people into health care, and yet there’s a gap with millions of people still uninsured.
AG: Well, let’s look at some of the things that have been accomplished. There are 40 million people who had a pre-existing health condition and couldn’t get private insurance. Now they can. We have 170 million women in the population; they used to have to pay more for their health coverage, because they are women. Now they don’t have to pay more for their health care any longer. We have dramatically expanded Medicaid in those states that were open to it, and we’ve put, as I said earlier, 10 million people in a position where now they can see a doctor when they’re sick, and before, they couldn’t afford to do so. I think those are very important accomplishments. If you can show me someone who has been forced to buy health care, I’d like to meet that person. I think that’s a bum rap.
(file footage of “Die Quickly” speech plays in background)
GW: You had that outspoken moment on the Hill with your sign, the Republicans’ [healthcare] plan. I saw you smile when I brought that back up. It became a viral moment for you.
AG: Oh, without any question, sure. And the reason why it was is because it hit on a deep truth. Republicans need to learn that you can’t fight something with nothing. And one of the most offensive elements of their continuing obsession with repealing Obamacare is the fact that they want to replace it with nothing. We need to make health care universal in this country. We need to make sure that sick people can see a doctor. We need to make it affordable. We need to make it comprehensive, so that it actually covers the things that you need to have covered.
GW: You’ve also worked with taxes. How are you going to ensure the extension of certain tax provisions?
AG: I think that’s one of our big accomplishments, one of my big accomplishments…I passed nine bills in the last week [of the Congressional term], unchanged from the form that I had submitted them, in a Republican-controlled legislature, to dramatically extend middle-class tax cuts for Americans. Let me give you an example: a lot of people don’t realize this, but as of [Dec. 31, 2014], we were facing repeal of the tax break that you get on your taxes because [in Florida] we have state sales taxes but not income taxes. That was going to end as of December 31st. I extended that. Let me give you another example. Do you own a home?
GW: Yes.
AG: Okay. Do you pay mortgage insurance?
GW: No.
AG: Okay. Many people do. There is a deduction for mortgage insurance that was due to lapse, expire on December 31st. I extended that for a year.
GW: That’s the PMI?
AG: That’s right. We passed a total of nine of these that I introduced back in January, after I lobbied heavily with the Republican majority in order to get them extended. The Republicans were initially resistant; they wanted to have tax cuts only for businesses. Eventually, they relented, and we saw nine of those passed in the order that I introduced them back in January, unchanged word for word. That was a tremendous accomplishment.
See the full video of the interview here >>
I mention these things as often as I can because I’m trying to make a point: You can be a Progressive, and you can win. Not just win elections, but also make the world a better place.
You won’t find me feeling sorry after a bad election. You will find me scratching and clawing, with all ten fingers, to improve the lives of ordinary people, any way that I can.
Please join the thousands of people across the U.S. who are donating to our campaign for justice, equality and peace >>
Courage,
Alan Grayson
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Charles Barkley's Wise Words to Democrats on Alabama by Richard Eskow
Before he became one of the great basketball players of his time, Charles Barkley was a son of the Alabama soil. He went home to help Doug Jones pull off his upset victory against Roy Moore in this week’s special Senate election. Here’s what he had to say on CNN after Jones was declared the winner:
This is a wake-up call for Democrats. Democrats, I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they’ve taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It’s time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor. They’ve always had our votes and they have abused our votes .. This is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.
Professional Democrats were not nearly as insightful. They overlook some of the most critical lessons of this election, including this one: They might not have won this election at all if Alabama Republicans like Richard Shelby had not encouraged voters to write in other names rather than vote for Roy Moore. As of this writing, the number of write-in votes is greater than Jones’s margin of victory.
In other words, Democrats were rescued by a conservative Republican politician. How often is that likely to happen?
And instead of acknowledging this vote as a “wake-up call” for their party after a decade plagued by losses, however, centrist insiders are seizing on it as an opportunity to fortify their hold on an institution they’re slowly strangling – and to take cheap shots at the left.
The Cornerstone
Charles Barkley is right: Black voters did play a critical role in Jones’ victory. Without them, an accused pedophile would be preparing to assume one of the highest offices in the land. But this begs the question: Why did African American voters turn out in such heavy numbers, despite the barriers thrown in their way by Republicans eager to thwart democracy?
The answer is not yet entirely clear, but a clue can be found in an observation by Washington Post reporter Eugene Scott:
More than two dozen black voters here said they did not feel inspired to show up for a candidate who they felt did not aggressively pursue their vote. They were moved to wait in line — some people for hours — with the goal of keeping Moore from winning.
Their antipathy for Moore certainly understandable. The defrocked judge commented in the runup to the election that the last time America was great was “at the time when families were united – even though we had slavery – they cared for one another. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”
He went on to say he thought all constitutional amendments except the first ten should be repealed – including the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship and equal rights to former slaves. And Moore said he had doubts about President Obama’s citizenship, echoing Donald Trump’s racist “birther” theory.
African-American voters were also aware of the well-documented claims that Roy Moore sexually abused teenage girls, and they undoubtedly heard his bigoted remarks against Muslims and Jews. Black Alabamians turned out in impressive numbers to save the country from the scourge of a Sen. Roy Moore, and they undoubtedly did so for a number of reasons.
Thank you.
The Poor Vote
Barkley is also right when he says this vote is a “wake-up call” for Democrats. They will not always have the good fortune to run against a candidate who reaches Moore’s staggering levels of venality, ineptitude, and moral perversion.
Barkley’s meaning couldn’t have been clearer: Democrats can’t take black voters, or poor voters of any race, for granted. They must offer concrete policies to improve their lives. There’s not much time to waste, either, either in Alabama or nationwide.
More than 40 million Americans live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. has a higher rate of poverty than any other Western, developed country. And Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, recently told a reporter that Alabama’s sewage disposal conditions were the worst he’d seen in a developed country. As AL.com reported:
On Thursday, Alston visited communities in the Black Belt’s Butler and Lowndes counties, where residents often fall ill with ailments like E. Coli and hookworm – a disease of extreme poverty long eradicated in most parts of the U.S. – in part because they do not have consistently reliable access to clean drinking water that has not been tainted by raw sewage and other contaminants.
Jones carried that part of the state decisively. But how long can Democrats count on being rescued by the very people our government is failing?
Suburban Surprise
Interestingly, Alabama’s GOP-friendly suburbs also went for Jones. Is that a sign of their growing discontent with Donald Trump, or was it a one-time effect — the result of Moore’s views, which are extreme even by Republican standards, and the impact of the stories of his sexual predation on family voters in these areas?
It’s too early to know for sure, but Democrats shouldn’t rush to assume this is a sign of victories to come. Some of them did anyway.
Throwing an Elbow
And yet, despite Barkley’s clarity, a few short minutes later Democratic politician Bakari Sellers offered a completely different interpretation of his words. Sellers insisted that he and Barkley were friends, affirmed the former athlete “spoke the gospel,” and added that he wanted to shout “amen” as Barkley spoke. But then Sellers said:
You have, you know, the Bernie Sanders, the Elizabeth Warrens, Joe Biden who are focusing specifically on the Trump-Obama voters and white working class voters, saying bring them back into the fold. There’s a group of us who think we need to make sure that we’re speaking to the base and giving them a reason to come out, because the country’s getting browner and the way to electoral victories is through that.
That’s a gross mischaracterization of Sanders, Warren, and Biden. None of them are “focusing specifically” on Trump-Obama voters or white working-class voters. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Democratic Party’s progressive wing has taken the lead in addressing the social issues that plague black and brown Americans, as well as the economic issues that are hurting middle-and lower-income people of all races.
If any faction of the party places too much emphasis on Trump-Obama voters, it’s the so-called Blue Dog Democrats who lean right on economic issues ranging from the minimum wage to Wall Street reform. They consider the Sanders/Warren wing of the party their nemesis – and they’re right.
The Left Side of the Road
Sellers had already taken a swipe at the party’s progressive faction earlier in the CNN broadcast, when he said, “What Doug Jones showed tonight is that there’s a wing in the party that wants a litmus test. And Doug Jones doesn’t fit anybody’s litmus test.”
That’s not entirely accurate. Jones did say that he won because he was “center of the road,” but that’s a ritual disclaimer for any red state politician. While he wouldn’t represent the leftmost wing of the party in Vermont or California, Doug Jones is quite progressive for a Southern Democrat.
His website includes this declaration, for example, which comes straight out of Bernie Sanders’ platform: “Health care is a right, not a privilege limited to the wealthy and those with jobs that provide coverage.” It celebrates the New Deal’s impact on Alabama, while touting Jones’s support for the Lily Ledbetter Act and a higher minimum wage.
Sellers appears to be defending his own faction within the party, but he does a disservice to progressives – and to Charles Barkley – in the process.
Waving Goodbye
But Sellers isn’t the only professional Democrat to read this election result incorrectly. “The recriminations have been tough and stupid,” says longtime Democratic operative Robert Shrum, “(and) the Bernie Sanders people arguing with the Hillary people has been counterproductive. Jones sends a powerful signal not to do that.”
Does he? Jones’ victory was by a far narrower margin than it should have been, because the national party has neglected states like Alabama for years. Part of the intraparty struggle that Shrum dismisses is a struggle to ensure that the party fights for all voters, in all states, with policies that will appeal to precisely the kind of white/black alliance Charles Barkley describes.
“We’re looking at a wave election next year,” says Shrum. But then, he has lost so many races that people sometimes talk about the Democrats’ “Shrum curse.”
Sadly, Shrum is far from the only party insider peddling bad advice to Democrats.
Double Negative
Writing for Fox News on the morning after Jones’ victory, the serially incorrect Douglas Schoen asserts that if they want to win, “Democrats will need more than a message of resistance or opposition. They will need a centrist, pro-growth agenda of their own.”
Schoen correctly notes on Alabama that “early indications from exit polling indicate deeply negative favorability and approval ratings for both major parties.” This is also true at a national level, where Republicans are unpopular and support for Democrats recently fell to a 25-year low.
A reasonable person might conclude that these low approval numbers reflect a lack of faith in either party’s ability to improve people’s lives. But Schoen, like other veterans of the party’s failed leadership, has yet to learn this lesson.
Insanity
Instead, Schoen proclaims Democrats will only “succeed in 2018″ if they implement an alternative governing strategy that is fundamentally different from what the most progressive voices in Washington are advocating.”
That’s exactly what Democrats have been doing for the last ten years. In the process, they’ve lost two thirds of state houses, two thirds of governorships, both houses of Congress, and the presidency. These failures were produced by 25 years of “centrist” leadership. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
To hear these folks talk, you’d think they’ve been out of power for decades. But they’ve been in charge, and they’re the ones who got us into this mess. Sure, they might win the day in 2018 or 2020 – but only if Republicans cooperate by running a slate comprised entirely of proslavery advocates and accused child molesters. Otherwise, Democrats better be prepared to learn how to win.
One thing’s for sure: These aren’t the people who can teach them.
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