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delphinescarol · 4 years ago

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Okay so I have some thoughts about the whole Kat and Ava pairing that is now forming in the bold type...

First of all, I am TOTALLY here for it, I’m a sucker for enemies to lovers and they honestly have more chemistry in one scene (like the bar thing???? 🔥🔥🔥) than Ryan and Jane in all four seasons. BUT I am a die hard liberal, I honestly can’t stand conservatives and as much as I kind saw it comment and wanted it to happen, I was really morally confused about it because... Kat is a woman of colour, she’s bisexual and she’s so passionate about... everything that Ava is against. BUT hear me out.

1) so obviously we know that RJ supports the conversion therapy (and I think Ava mentioned that she doesn’t?) so we can assume that she was raised in a conservative home. And yes, she said openly to Kat that she was a lesbian (ok the way Kat got intimidated and Ava enjoyed seeing her like??? I LOVE), I think she might still have a lot of internalised homophobia, mostly because she doesn’t want to acknowledge that being a lesbian can in some way define her. And yeah I agree, being gay is not a personality trait and it’s not everything a person is, but for everyone I’ve met so far (myself included) being gay had some influence on how you are, what you do etc. And I think Ava rejecting this kind of shows that maybe she has some issues with it, because yes she says she should be able to claim the space in the LGBT community, but if she doesn’t want to associate herself with it to what extent is she okay with being a lesbian? I think there’s definitely something there that she has to explore

2) I saw some people saying that it’s not Kat’s job to educate Ava and make her better, and I totally agree. It’s not her job, but I feel like just by associating herself with Kat Ava might realise some things. She might be able to observe and listen and learn and maybe eventually do some educating on her own. And now as to WHY I’m willing to give her, an ugly (I mean ugly in terms of personality, because she is fucking hot) republican a chance to grow. Call it naive (or call me an apologist, I’m not going to deny it lol), but I really want to believe that not all conservatives are inherently bad, they just have bad views, but views and ideologies can be changed and altered if a person is really willing to do the changing and learning. Don’t get me wrong, most conservstives don’t deserve anything (like Trump can honestly go to hell), but we’re talking about a fictional character in a tv show. And I don’t think Ava would engage with Kat as much as she has so far if she didn’t want to listen to Kat’s point of view as well. Like with everything that’s been going on in the world recently (mostly because of conservatives, they’re to blame for most of world’s problems) I just REALLY want to have some faith in people changing and growing and learning. Because if we don’t give people the chance to do that, if we don’t let them learn from their mistakes and make themselves into better people, what’s the point? We will always be split into two opposite camps, and we will never see change in the world. If we keep cancelling everyone just because of their wrong views without letting them learn and decide if they want to change, then we’re not any better than them. And if they show no interest in learning and changing, then fair enough, they can stick to their views and we can keep seeing them as bad, ugly conservatives that maybe just are bad people. And I think that’s where Ava is at the moment, we’ve literally just seen these two having some romantic interest in each other, and I think everyone knows that sometimes your heart desires what the mind rejects. But I think we have to wait and see how this storyline will develop before we make any firm judgement, and I think it does have some potential for being interesting and true to Kat’s character without necessarily pushing the idea that not all republicans are bad.

And I mean fair enough, I am looking at this from a perspective of a white lesbian cisgender woman and I don’t want to invalidate the voices of people of colour who aren’t happy with Kat falling for a white republican. And I do still have mixed feelings about that, because I can’t just ignore Ava being a white conservative, but I just don’t want to immediately cancel the whole show and the character without first seeing how the storyline will play out. So yeah, if anyone wants to discuss their opinions I’ll be happy to!

#the bold type #kat edison #ava rose #kat and ava

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beyond-far-horizons · 6 years ago

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fireeaglespirit said: This is like a global trend. We were right.. BTW how is the brexit thing going? Are people around you happy about it?

Okay before I start this I will just say - I don’t intend to do this often as I and others come to this part of tumblr/fandom as an escape from RL and Politics.

Also this is my opinion so I’m not tagging it in the main tags but if it does get there then I’m not apologising for it as it’s from my observations and research.

Okay briefly...this sums Brexit up and the depths (avoidable depths) to which it will sink -

As for the question you had about what people around me think...it’s honestly hard to get a real definitive answer as so many are in their own echo chambers and each camp has their own news sources and spin that has of course been mercilessly used by nefarious groups to continue to confuse and split people and generate apathy and despair.

However what IS clear is that it is a complete shambles (as we predicted), many people want a People’s Vote and I believe a majority (I hope) would vote Remain (in the EU). The issues are that Government (despite being crazy, weak and likely traitors in some form or another - by inaction if nothing else) can’t seem to be stopped because the Opposition is also divided and led by someone - Jeremy Corbyn - who I used to have a lot of respect for as a man of principle and the people, but who now has been shown to be backward, stubborn and small minded in his views and surrounds himself with Yes men. This has been frustrating in previous years but when this crucial vote has clearly been illegally funded and manipulated by R*ssia and the Far Right and only they and elitist hedge-fund managers are profiting, then I feel it is a complete dereliction of duty on behalf of Corbyn and as such I now want him gone. There is also disturbing links between a senior advisor of his and R*ssia and these have yet to be investigated (nothing is being f*cking investigated like it is in the US) and I don’t think Corbyn is a traitor, I do think his character means he can be manipulated (a bit like Eddard Stark if you will.)

I know his and his camps argument (although they are not being honest about it) is that they think the EU is bad for rebuilding Britain on socialist lines and they want to take into account the many dis-enfranchised parts who vote to Leave. I know the EU isn’t perfect and I also believe in idealist causes like dismantling Capitalism - I’ve created both a social enterprise model and a storytelling model to help do that - but when a) the result was done illegally b) it directly helps R*ssia, the Far Right, Trump etc and c)puts us in such a terrible position then that is not the way to go.

The previous (decent) Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a great point that basically this ‘taking back control’ nonsense is a fantasy. However they see it there are undeniable facts in the world today - there are 3 main trading law-makers - EU, the US and China. If you aren’t a lawmaker then you are a lawtaker - the UK will have to take what it is given and will have given away all its power - fact. Plus I don’t want chlorinated chicken from the US just cos Tory scum are making fat-cat deals with Trump. Seriously these people would sell their own grandmas to make a profit!

Another thing is the despair we feel. It’s like we can’t do anything against this runaway train. All the elements in the US that are being investigated by Mueller are present here in the UK and in fact Bannon said they used Brexit as a petri dish for Trump. But we have no Mueller, and we have no Blue Wave Democrats now elected to hold our shit government to account as they get progressively worse and worse. Some people try their best but it’s not enough.

I really hope that things take a change for the better. I try and see it as the Hegelian dialectic I talked to you about or the Alchemical stages of Nigredo and Albedo when the two opposites come up and fight only to be transmuted into something better. As a Jungian I have seen the beginnings of that in the world and in my dreams so I have faith but it is very hard, hard because all this is avoidable but these people on all sides are pushing us towards this terrible own goal.

Finally I just feel so sad because so many here saw this in 2016 and voted Remain. My generation in particular (who will be the worst affected) overwhelmingly sees itself as European and I and many feel this awful Tory party have treated our colleagues and allies in Europe shamefully. TBH I think they have dealt with the UK with a lot more grace and respect than they deserve but I stress so many of us did not and do not want this to happen. All I can say is that P*tin must be laughing so hard at all this - well played - very Caesar divide and conquer.

Anyway I try not to think about it too much and just do what I can do day to day. In my deepest heart I do feel that this is part of a world transformation - the bad is being exposed and hopefully transmuted but it will take time and a lot of pain that could have been avoided. Until then I will keep one of the British things I am proud of - our self deprecating humour. It has had a lot of chances to be exercised in the last couple of years!

#personal #fireeaglespirit

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dieselpunk-progressive-blog · 7 years ago

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Let’s You and Him Fight

The last week has been a real eye-opener for me, regarding the rift currently splitting the people who consider themselves the legitimate opposition to the reactionary government currently running the United States at almost every level, in almost every local. Although the best known, most publicized conflict is between those people generally labeled as being the “Bernie wing” and the “Clinton wing” of the current Democratic Party, there are fractures along lines of race, sex and class which seem to run very, very deep. In an age of ever more selectively available media, it’s easy (perhaps even unavoidable, now) for these various camps to see their differences and quarrels through a lens which distorts them to Wagnerian heights of drama. Meanwhile, the people generally regarded as the ��bad guys’ (the Steve Bannons and Robert Spencers of the nationalist Right) continue to advance their agenda and gain a stronger grip over the institutions of the United States, through the actions of men like Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions and Scott Pruitt, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

So why is it so hard for people, who all see themselves as the champions of the opposition, to unify and present an effective, organized front? Largely, it is because they can’t agree on what, exactly, they are actually fighting for. They can’t even agree on what they are fighting against, beyond the most generic platitudes about white nationalist fascism.

My eyes were first opened to the scope of these divisions in the last week. When the Women’s March organization, which is recognized as being largely the product of women of color, announced that they’d secured Bernie Sanders to be one of the key speakers at their coming conference, a great many people, myself among them, were thrilled. Aside from being an indication that Senator Sanders’ agenda of economic justice was continuing to gain further support, it seemed to show that the divisions caused by the 2016 Democratic primary contest were, finally, beginning to heal and fade. Then came the cold water, in the form of a statement from the leadership of the pro-Clinton EMILY’s List. It seemed the group was ‘disappointed’ with the Women’s March for inviting Sanders. They were also ‘reaching out’ to ‘help improve the program’. Across social media a debate broke out, which seemed to split women into two factions: those who wanted Sanders there and those who didn’t.

The camp which wanted Sanders to address the Women’s March felt that the organization was perfectly capable of deciding for itself who to invite. They pointed out that Sanders’ economic agenda includes strong support for issues which women should be universally in favor of: wage reform, expanded child care, universal health care and body autonomy, free of the ‘religious objections’ which are only thinly veiled misogyny. They also argued that an organization primarily oriented around women of color did not need, or want, white women telling them how to go about being feminist. My personal experience in this first twenty-four hours or so, was that the majority of women of color I was exposed to in social media wanted Sanders there. They saw his agenda as reinforcing the agenda of women generally, and found his economic priorities complimentary to their social priorities.

On the other side of this particular skirmish, were those women who said very clearly that no man has a right to address a women’s group. They held that inviting Sanders was either a tragic mistake made by wayward sisters, or outright treachery against the cause of all women. In any event, the message was clear that popular feminism, noticeably lead by pro-Clinton groups, was appalled. They insisted that the Women’s March had failed, by not inviting a prominent woman leader (such as Hillary Clinton!) to speak in the slot occupied by Sanders. It was, they insisted, demeaning to all women to have to sit quietly and be spoken to by a man at their own event. In all, the impression was given that Senator Sanders had somehow manipulated his way into delivering a patronizing lecture about women’s issues to women, as if they needed to be told what their priorities were.

Setting the larger conflict between Sanders people and Clinton people aside, the point here is that these two groups of women are not talking about the same things. Those who supported Sanders speaking were focused on concrete economic policy, and those who opposed it were focused on unity among feminists. Obviously these two strains of thinking do not have any kind of mutual exclusivity, and should be able to coexist. Nonetheless, this became part of the continuing conflict over the soul of the opposition to the current regime.

Now it would be easy to focus on this fight, and no doubt someone should go into the details, but the point here is that this conflict, and a hundred others, aren’t being resolved. Instead they continue to fester and drive wedges, furthering the isolation of people who should be allies against a greater, and very real threat. But instead, people bunker down, raising up walls of selectively chosen media around themselves. And the real problem with echo chambers isn’t that they enable our solipsism, it is that they deny us allies.

By isolating and insulating ourselves from the ideas, convictions and voices of those who do not automatically reinforce our existing opinions, we are cutting ourselves off from even the possibility of collective effort. We like to quote the platitude that there is strength in numbers, and this is a true statement but, in order to access that strength, we must gather the numbers. And that means that a lot of people in this country are going to have to develope something which targeted media and social media have largely robbed us of in the last twenty-some-odd years. The ability to tolerate things that make us uncomfortable.

This doesn’t mean agreeing to support policies that we disagree with; not, in any case, at the street-level of organization, which is where the rifts need to be mended first. No, in this case, tolerance means simply not alienating ourselves from someone who mostly agrees with us. It mean that when someone at the PTA meeting says they’re more concerned about feeding their family than maximizing relative economic advantages, you don’t assume they’re uneducated technophobic Luddites and avoid them. It means that when a woman who’s family is struggling to keep their home says that wages are more important to her than the gender of a candidate, you don’t call her Suzy Homemaker and put her on mute. It means you don’t vilify the person of color who thinks that universal public college is more beneficial than increasing enrollment quotas and making it easier to take on large amounts of debt.

No doubt some people are offended at the phrasing in the last paragraph, and that is the point. Note the phrasing, the deliberate use of the word ‘you’. Some readers, who already agree with these perspectives, are cackling and feeling empowered and mentally wagging their fingers at the caricature of those who found it accusatory, presumptuous or just insulting.

Now let me put the shoe on the other foot.

Unifying in opposition is going to demand a certain amount of tolerance for people and ideas that are less-than-perfect. It means that you don’t walk away because a candidate has to work with business leaders. It means that when a woman tells you she feels ignored when discussion of the minimum wage doesn’t explicitly mention the pay gap, you don’t call her an economically privileged sell-out. It means that when a woman of color says she doesn’t feel represented by a white male, you don’t lecture her about prioritizing identity over policy.

The point here isn’t that ‘everyone is guilty’, but rather that ‘everyone is needed’. These days, we cannot afford to alienate or ignore potential allies. And that means that everyone, absolutely everyone is going to have deciding whether or not they can work with people aren’t going to either reinforce or leave unchallenged their biases, privileges, or assumptions. The fascists have the advantage here, because they pre-selected for uniformity. Despite the atrocious methods and goals, we can’t deny the fact that they do organization and solidarity very well. Those of us who value personal liberty and expression, by necessity, have to work a lot harder at getting along with one another.

That raises another point. What exactly is it that the opposition is actually opposing? There seems to be more than a little confusion about this. Some people are pushing back against the oligarchy run from Wall Street. Others are focused on fighting for reproductive freedom. Most seem more-or-less on board with supporting transgender Americans, but TERFs nonetheless demonize us and many women are afraid to criticize other women for these hateful behaviors. We have the Black Lives Matter people, but a lot of them don’t see a connection between economic empowerment and the ability to control and regulate the justice system. The list goes on.

It has often been said that nothing unifies people like a common enemy, but how do we identify the common enemy when there is so much factionalism, reinforced by so much selective media consumption? Is it possible to identify a common enemy when we no longer share a common language, a common discourse. Probably not.

On the other hand, perhaps defining ourselves negatively isn’t a very good strategy after all. After all, that’s what American politics has been doing for the last seventy years (at least) and where has it gotten us? Right where are. Still, an opposition has to be against something, but that doesn’t mean it should be defined by that statement in the negative. Instead, let opposition give us a general direction of movement (in this case away from chauvinistic white male nationalist fascism ) and let us be defined by what policy goals we are actually seeking to enact.

What that agenda will look like is going to be determined by speaking with, and listening to, one another. Even and especially people who make us uncomfortable. Nobody can reasonably expect to get everything their own way, and everyone needs to examine themselves to see if they aren’t, at least subconsciously, trying to do exactly that. Everyone needs to listen and observe, and be honest about the unintended consequences of their agenda might be. Globalization, as one example, may have been intended to improve economic conditions for all, but it nonetheless created an entire underclass of alienated, derided and dismissed economic ‘losers’. Each and every individual member of either ‘the revolution’ or ‘the resistance’, needs to start by getting over the idea that they either have all the answers, or that they have a monopoly on all the facts, let alone any universal truth or enlightenment.

The future will be a cooperative endeavor. That is an absolute fact, inasmuch as it will result from the simultaneous interactions of all the operations of all the participants, and all the interactions of second and third order consequences. The only actual question is whether or not we will also be working in opposition to ourselves.

#feminism #politics #bernie sanders #hillary clinton #womens march #emily's list #resistance #Our Revolution #intersectional feminism

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junker-town · 7 years ago

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How Donald Trump made the Penguins political, and why it barely matters in Pittsburgh

Rooting for the Penguins is easy. Rooting for Donald Trump’s political pawns is harder.

The Pittsburgh Penguins’ banner-raising ceremony is a trip.

My city’s hockey team is the best in the world, and last Wednesday night was the final celebration of back-to-back Stanley Cup wins before the puck dropped on a new season. The lights went dark at PPG Paints Arena a half-hour before game time against St. Louis, and what ensued was part EDM concert, part monster truck rally, part presidential inauguration, and part church service. It was all a monument to the franchise’s hockey greatness, and some 18,000 people were in their seats to witness it.

Fourteen days earlier, the Penguins found themselves in the middle of another Donald Trump-engineered culture debate. Two days after Trump called protesting NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem “sons of bitches” and one day after he “withdrew” a White House invitation from Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors (after Curry had said he did not want to go), the Penguins said they’d be visiting Trump in D.C. This was briefly a big local discussion, but it was not high on the fan base’s mind last Wednesday night.

The front office and coaching staff were introduced first. Eventually, the camera focused on Mario Lemieux, the greatest player in franchise history and the co-owner who kept the team from financial ruin and relocation several times over. The PA guy didn’t have to announce his name for a hero’s ovation to nearly bring the roof down. The same routine followed when Evgeni Malkin and Sidney Crosby skated out later.

I am in section 209, row B that night. One section to the left, four seats in and one row down from me, there’s a guy in his late 20s in an old Ulf Samuelsson jersey. When the Penguins’ best are introduced, he stands up and bows. When Crosby’s name is announced and he emerges from the tunnel, the man throws his hands up and looks upward like he’s prayed for rain and gotten it.

I have a weird feeling that Wednesday night. I’ve been thinking for two weeks about the Penguins’ choice to go see Trump. It bothers me that the team I care about is going to see this man at this moment. And I get it, but I don’t like it.

I’ve talked to a few dozen other fans from Pittsburgh and its surrounding areas, and for the most part, they aren’t bothered at all. Many are surprised that I’d even ask about the White House on this celebratory night. That’s weird to me, given who Trump is and whom his worldview represents. Being a fan of this team used to come naturally. I find it more difficult now, but here I am, watching intently. It’s a hard feeling to reconcile.

After the banner goes to the rafters, the PA announcer calls on Jeff Jimerson, a man who’s famous for exactly one thing: singing the national anthem at Penguins games. We go wild for Jeff Jimerson. As he steps onto the ice, there is no one kneeling, obviously, either in the crowd or on either the Pittsburgh or St. Louis benches.

Jimerson is just about to start belting out Oh Say Can You See, and my eye shifts left again to the guy in the Samuelsson sweater. He’s now standing upright, yelling.

“Hockey players fucking stand for the national anthem!”

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

The Penguins’ visit with Trump is Tuesday. It’s a normal act in an abnormal time. The team visited with Barack Obama this time a year ago and in 2009, and with George H.W. Bush after wins in the 1990s. But this visit comes at a fraught moment between the sports world and the White House.

Rooting for the Penguins has always been easy. (It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done, since I fell in love with the Jaromir Jagr Pens in the late ‘90s.) They’re a charmed franchise that’s been blessed with transcendent talent for decades, winning five Cups in 50 seasons. Now, for the first time, caring about this team is a political choice.

The president and the Penguins both announced their visit on Sept. 24, right on the heels of Trump’s flaps with the NFL and the Warriors. Penguins co-owner Ron Burkle had indicated the team would go in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview in July, so this was more affirmation than unveiling. But its effect was the same. Trump immediately fell back on the Penguins to show that sports, somewhere, were still with him:

Please to inform that the Champion Pittsburgh Penguins of the NHL will be joining me at the White House for Ceremony. Great team!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 24, 2017

He has since tweeted a video of the national anthem at a St. Louis Blues game, praising “19,000 RESPECTING our National Anthem.” At an Indianapolis Colts game two days before the Penguins’ visit, Vice President Mike Pence executed a planned walkout after players kneeled during the anthem. Pence painted them as anti-American.

I left today's Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.

— Vice President Pence (@VP) October 8, 2017

The Penguins are the next athletes to be made into Trump’s props.

When the Penguins stand on a podium with the president, it’s possible he’ll applaud their standing for the anthem and praise hockey players in general for doing the song his way. Trump might use them to bolster his case that athletes (playing in majority-black leagues) who don’t are somehow un-American, perhaps lumping in players who don’t have the respect to visit him at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Even if Trump’s comments are tame, the Penguins will be doing him a service with their presence. They will smile behind him, completing a presidential photo op as he targets other athletes.

The Penguins’ role in Trump’s attack on NFL protesters or his dis-invitation of Curry seems lost on Pittsburgh. The city doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about NFL teams that aren’t the Steelers or a top AFC competitor. It spends almost no time on the NBA, which Pittsburghers regard as a more boring league than the old Big East. That Trump has chosen the Penguins to pit against the Warriors has largely not registered.

“You’re taking two leagues and putting them at odds against each other, and it’s pretty clear the dynamics of it,” said Josh Taylor, a KDKA sportscaster and weekend host on 93.7 The Fan. “You’re talking about a league that is a vast majority of African American players vs. a league that is a vast majority of all white players. And that probably didn’t really catch on with a lot of people here.”

In making the trip, the Penguins are insistent that they don’t mean any harm — actually, they insist that they don’t mean anything at all.

“There appears to be a perception out there that because our organization has made a decision to accept the invitation to the White House that we have taken a stance on the issue, when the reality is it’s just the opposite,” head coach Mike Sullivan told reporters days after the visit was announced last month. “We haven’t taken any stance. The Penguins as an organization and our players have chosen not to use this platform to take a stance. There appears to be a perception that we have. It’s wrong.”

No Penguins on the invitation list have publicly criticized the trip or said they’d avoid it. Winger Ryan Reaves was acquired in the offseason, so he wasn’t invited, but he said he’d skip the visit if he were over his personal disagreements with Trump. Former enforcer Georges Laraque called the visit an “embarrassment.” Reaves and Laraque are two of the five black players to suit up for the franchise in the last decade.

Crosby, the captain and face of the team, echoed the organizational line.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion," he told reporters. "I think we've said before, this isn't us taking a stance. It's totally with the spirit of keeping politics out of it, and it's unfortunate that people want to try to twist it to become that, but it's really not, and I think that's really the truth of it all."

Late in training camp, Sullivan said the Penguins would “answer questions that revolve around hockey, because that’s where our focus needs to be right now.”

ERIC BARADAT/AFP/Getty Images

It’s not surprising that the Penguins think they’re in an apolitical bubble as they visit the most political person in the world. Usually, they have been in an apolitical bubble, and that’s been important, given the varied politics of this region.

Pittsburgh, the city, is mostly progressive — it voted 75 percent for Hillary Clinton. The rest of Allegheny County is more conservative, and you can drive 40 minutes in any direction from the city and be in deep red territory. The surrounding counties are all conservative, and the Penguins are a regional team with followings in all of them, as well as in West Virginia and Northeast Ohio.

Every team has fans of different political stripes, but Pittsburgh’s fan bases are probably among the most ideologically divided. Recent research by FiveThirtyEight found the Steelers’ fan base had the second closest split in the NFL between Democratic and Republican fans. I imagine the Penguins’ is similar, though their footprint isn’t as wide as the Steelers’.

Generally, Penguins fans’ political differences haven’t surfaced. Fans poured into the old Civic Arena from the city, its wealthy suburbs, its less wealthy ex-mining communities, and all over Western Pennsylvania. They’ve done the same at the new arena, where the Penguins have played since 2010, and built up an announced sellout streak that’s closing in on 500 games. For hockey, they are a TV ratings juggernaut.

When politics have animated Penguins fans in the past — at least, in the context of their hockey fandom — it’s been unifying. Not in the new, say-nothing way that we now seek “unity” in sports, but in the sense that most Penguins fans were actually on the same side. We wanted taxpayers to pay up for a new arena when the team threatened to relocate to Kansas City a decade ago, and eventually the taxpayers did. The state agreed to pay $7.5 million for 30 years, though it’s worked out to be more than that. Personally, at the time, I felt this was a fine use of government money.

I talked with a few dozen fans at that Wednesday opener. Most didn’t want to discuss Trump or the Penguins’ visit with my recorder out. A significant majority of ticket-buyers I spoke to didn’t have a problem with the visit, but it’s a fool’s errand to try to quantify the fan base as feeling one way in particular. If one opinion prevailed on a truly broad scale, this discussion would be different and smaller. I thought it was notable that while people didn’t want to talk much about the trip, everyone knew about it. It’s not as if the Penguins and Trump have gone under the radar.

“I’m disappointed that they’re going. I understand why,” Candace Woods, a 25-year-old who fell in love with the team while attending nearby Washington & Jefferson College, said. She thought players were going along with an ownership diktat, which was for the best to avoid a rift. Some of her friends, she said, had sworn off the franchise as “racists, fascists, misogynists, all of it,” which Woods found an overreaction.

“All professional athletes are just entertainers, and we’re not there to see them take one view for or another,” said Ryan Martino, who’d come in from Youngstown, Ohio, for the opener. “We’re just here to see them do their trade and their craft and make sure that they do their sport to the fullest and extreme.”

Alex Kirshner

Penguins fans standing for the national anthem during the season opener on Wednesday, Oct. 4.

One man I spoke to from the city’s South Hills, in his mid-20s, said he’d recently returned from a year abroad with the Army National Guard. He said he wouldn’t allow me to use his name because he’s now a local police officer, but he’d take any players not showing up at the White House as an act of disrespect.

“If they don’t go, they should all be fired,” his dad told me as we parted.

Wherever I ate during my few days home, I scavenged for an indication that this was a big deal. I walked laps around the concourses throughout the night and camped out in bathroom lines in a way that would’ve gotten me weird looks if anyone had noticed. I tried to find any hint that this was a discussion topic by the water cooler. It was not.

“People just wanna drink. They don’t wanna be aggravated,” a bartender told me on the South Side the next night, a Thursday, amid a 10-1 Blackhawks drubbing of the Penguins. He didn’t mind that I’d asked. Customers just didn’t discuss it much.

The harshest criticism of the Penguins’ decision has not been local. A lot of it hasn’t even been American, with Canadian outlets taking the lead.

A Vice Canada columnist said Crosby “had a chance to speak up for black people who play and love hockey” but sided with Trump instead.

Another writer at The Athletic, from Montreal, criticized Lemieux over the visit. Penguins fans and some Pittsburgh media members shouted him down on Twitter in response. Lemieux is close to untouchable in this city.

A panel on TSN, the Canadian ESPN, universally disagreed with taking the trip.

It’s not that anyone in the Pittsburgh media’s been critical or offered warnings. The Post-Gazette’s Sean Gentille warned that the Penguins should be ready to become props. Several local radio hosts have argued that the Penguins can’t be apolitical.

But Pittsburgh is like a lot of places in two regards. One, it’s tribal, and the people here don’t care for it when local teams are criticized from elsewhere. There are few things they could do that wouldn’t lead us to defend them from outside criticism. Two, it prefers its sports and politics separate, no matter how impossible that is.

It happened that the Steelers stayed in the tunnel during the national anthem in Chicago the same weekend the Penguins-Trump news cycle started, and there’s only so much appetite for Western Pennsylvanians to grapple with the non-sports things about their sports teams all at once. The matter of the Trump visit got back-burnered.

“In the first couple of days, it was something that really had legs to it,” Taylor said.

Around the time the Penguins declared they’d stop talking about the White House visit, everyone else stopped, too. By the week before the Penguins were set to be used as pawns against the country’s best black athletes, the visit was no longer a topic of local conversation. And afterward, it certainly won’t be, either.

Hockey is a bubble unto itself. It’s an expensive game to play: maybe $1,000 a year for ice fees, a few hundred bucks more to get equipment, and potentially several thousand more on travel. It’s also time-consuming. By the time I was 8 and playing hockey in the Pittsburgh suburbs, my parents were spending all that money and lugging me to 6 a.m. practices on Sundays and every Wednesday night, plus a game a week.

The author at age 5.

By the time my brother and I had finished high school, they’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on our hobby. They’d also replaced several garage door windows, knocked out by pucks. Most of the kids who grow up to play in the NHL grow up in comfort.

Many of them aren’t American, but their immigration status isn’t in danger during a Trump presidency. The sport’s culture prioritizes saying only the most vanilla things and not rocking the boat. When Tampa Bay forward J.T. Brown raised his fist during the anthem on Oct. 7, he was the first NHL player to make a statement on the level of many NFL players. Hockey was never going to lead the resistance.

Hockey is among the world’s whitest sports in general, and it’s lily-white in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have a black teammate from age 5 through 17. My brother had one. The Penguins’ fan base includes people of all kinds of backgrounds, but it’s overwhelmingly white, too. Looking out at the crowd at PPG Paints Arena it’s hard to spot a fan who isn’t white.

This administration’s racial politics are a matter of practicality at this point. Pittsburgh, meanwhile, is widely segregated by race and income. The result is an echo chamber of silence when fandom gets uncomfortable. Trump might use the Penguins to antagonize non-whites in sports and beyond, but the stakes for a large portion of Penguins fans — and all but one current player — are relatively small.

The back-to-back Stanley Cup champions will keep selling out their building every night and racking up huge ratings. The Penguins are holy here, and their choice to visit Trump won’t cost them a significant number of fans. With about half the fan base, it’ll endear them even further. Some won’t care, and some won’t think about it. There are still people who try not to think about politics at all. Probably more than I think.

I hate this visit because of what it means for sports teams to hang around Trump in this moment. Whether Trump takes explicit digs at the NFL while the Penguins are with him or not, their presence says it’s OK — or, at least, not that big a deal — for a president to target athletes less privileged, generally speaking, than hockey players.

Trump makes side-taking in this context virtually impossible, and in going, the Penguins are siding with him even as they assiduously claim they’re not. That the Penguins will stand with him and smile amid everything else he’s doing disgusts me more than anything else one of my favorite teams has ever done. And there’s a lot of competition there.

So I’m angry that the Penguins are playing this part. Mad enough to swear off a childhood passion altogether? I don’t know if I can start ignoring something I’ve loved since I was 3. I would lose something fun to watch with my family and my friends, something I’ve always done.

This calculation is why the Penguins had little reason not to go to the White House in the first place. I’m part of every problem I’ve just written about. Trump put stress on the bubble around Penguins fandom, but that bubble hasn't burst.

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Senate GOP holdouts split into rival camps on ACA overhaul

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has called H.R. 1628 “Obamacare lite.” (Photo: Paul)

(Bloomberg) — House leaders are racing to find enough votes to pass H.R. 1628, the American Health Care Act bill, this week, but, even if it passes, prospects in the Senate have only darkened.

Related: Freedom Caucus keeps heat on would-be ACA changers

More than enough Senate Republicans oppose the House bill to kill it — with rival camps insisting on pulling the bill in opposite directions to meet their demands. With just a 52-48 majority, the bill would fail if three or more Republicans vote against it.

Republican leaders face a conundrum: If they move the bill to the right, moderates go running; move it to the left, and conservative opponents dig in.

Whether Republicans would actually tank something they’ve promised for the past seven years is unclear. All of them say they want something to pass, and House leaders unveiled tweaks to the bill Monday evening.

A look at how Senate GOP opposition to the measure breaks down:

Conservatives demanding fuller repeal

A trio of Senate conservatives has attacked the bill vociferously and said they will not vote for it without changes. At least one of the three — Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah — has to vote for the bill for it to pass, given united opposition from Democrats.

Paul, who has libertarian leanings, has slammed the bill as “Obamacare lite.” He criticizes it in part as too generous to people who don’t make enough money to pay income taxes, and has urged conservatives in both chambers to withhold their support for negotiating leverage, citing tactics from Donald Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal.” Trump, in turn, has called Paul on more than one occasion as part of what Paul calls a mutual-wooing operation.

Cruz complains the bill could actually lead to higher premiums next year because it doesn’t repeal Obamacare’s insurance mandates — the most costly of which is a ban on pre-existing conditions — and has tried so far without success to get Republicans to embrace a bolder repeal that would include Vice President Mike Pence overruling the Senate parliamentarian on what can be included in the package under the rules.

“I cannot vote for any bill that keeps premiums rising,” he said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation.

Defenders of Planned Parenthood

If McConnell and Trump manage to win over at least one of the members of the conservative trio, they still have numerous hurdles to clear among the party’s moderate camps.

Two Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, oppose the House bill’s provision defunding Planned Parenthood — enough to bring the bill to the brink.

Defunding Planned Parenthood has been a major Republican priority for years, and losing that provision could cost conservative votes.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., shown above at a Health Agents for America meeting, says an ACA replacement should cover more people, not fewer. (Photo: Allison Bell/LHP)

Protecting Medicaid expansion

A broader group has expressed concerns about the House’s plans to phase out Medicaid expansion money for their states, including Murkowski, Rob Portman of Ohio, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Cory Gardner of Colorado.

Dean Heller of Nevada — the Democrats’ No. 1 target in 2018’s midterm elections and the only Republican running in a state won by Hillary Clinton — declared Friday in a statement he couldn’t vote for the House bill as written because of Medicaid concerns expressed by four Republican governors, including Nevada’s Brian Sandoval.

The House bill would phase out that expansion starting in 2020 — part of an larger plan to cut Medicaid by $880 billion and taxes by $883 billion over a decade.

Some conservatives have demanded an earlier phaseout, something that could make it even harder for those senators to support the measure. It also makes potential swing voters out of senators from Arkansas, Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Ohio and Louisiana — all states that expanded Medicaid.

Other holdouts

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana says he wants to radically reshape the House bill so that it covers more people, not the 24 million fewer estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.

“Society is going to pay for health care whether it is through insurance or not,” he said last week. “Society will pay for it either through cost-shifting to the privately ensured or it will pay for it through enhanced disproportionate payments” to hospitals that treat indigent patients.

A doctor who worked for decades in a charity hospital, Cassidy crafted a bill with Collins that would keep most of the Affordable Care Act’s taxes and allow states to choose between keeping Obamacare largely as is or transition to a new system with more flexibility.

Cassidy has spoken emotionally and in depth about the importance of coverage, saying society pays one way or another when people go to the emergency room because they don’t have insurance, and criticizes the House bill for failing to meet President Trump’s campaign promise of insuring more people at a lower cost.

And then there’s Tom Cotton of Arkansas, normally a staunch conservative, who has emerged as a surprising wild card. He has warned House Republicans to go back to the drawing board because he thinks the bill could endanger the House majority and won’t pass the Senate.

Notably, Arkansas also has an enormous Medicaid expansion population and is one of the poorer states in the union.

State of play

The two toughest votes to get on each side may be Collins and Paul. Paul blitzed the bill even before it was released, when it was being drafted in secret and kept under lock and key, and he has shown repeatedly in the past he’s willing to be the only one in his party to oppose something on principle.

And it’s hard to square the House bill with the rhetoric Collins has used to describe it. She’s noted her state skews old, and the House bill hits older Americans now on Obamacare with premium hikes as high as 759 percent, according to the CBO, to pay for skimpier insurance. She told a local paper last week she couldn’t vote for the House bill as is.

If Paul and Collins both end up voting no, GOP leaders would have to win over everyone else. Leadership hopes could hinge on convincing Cruz and Cassidy to vote for the bill after getting a chance to amend the health bill, even if their amendments ultimately are defeated.

It’s also not clear how much of the House bill will be able to withstand the so-called Byrd rule, which prohibits provisions that aren’t principally budget related. That would potentially require parts of the bill to be rewritten on the Senate side anyway, and then sent back to the House. Final House passage also would be needed if broader amendments pass in the Senate.

Despite the obstacles, Senate Republican leaders say they’re still optimistic they can pass a bill — with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell noting last week that changes could be made during a “vote-a-rama” on amendments. He hopes to pass it before the April recess, bypassing Senate committees and going straight to the floor.

3 reasons Congress could approve an ACA change bill (with video)

HAFA urges agents to keep fighting

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