#one even claimed to have a major in economics and that. racism somehow was not intertwined with colonialism.

[mx-paint]

Idk man maybe if you're only defense as to why something isn't racist is "some people that aren't part of the minority group that it's being racist towards are racist towards me so it means it's okay" maybe. you aren't the correct person to answer the question that is being asked

[antoine-roquentin]

I think one of the major problems with the modern left is a focus on cultural analysis instead of economics. When I say culture I EXPLICITLY DON'T MEAN racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and Indigenous rights/decolonization.

Stupidpol and their ilk are reactionaries and should be treated as such. What I'm talking about is the focus on things like analyzing TV shows or picking over the latest issues of the NYT op-ed column, the sort a caricatures you see on Chapo.

Zizek is emblematic of this syndrome. He's a theorist of ideology, a film critic, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and complete reactionary on gender and immigration issues, and he's widely considered to be one of preeminent Marxist scholars alive. And, and this is important, Zizek does fuck all actual economic material analysis. Mark Fisher, who was an excellent Marxist theorist, covers almost exactly the same ground from a different perspective, and you can repeat this across academia.

Inside academia the problem has gotten so bad that the best economic analysis is being carried out by the fucking post-humanists. Take, for example, Anna Tsing's excellent Supply Chains and the Human Condition. Tsing is a brilliant theorist but she spends most of her time writing about multi-species interactions between humans and mushrooms. Carbon Democracy, one of the best theories of the carbon economy ever written, is by a left-Foucaldian.

There are some exceptions to this, Andreas Malm's Carbon Capital is wonderful, Riot Strike Riot is great and I have to mention the group I call The Other Chicago School, Endnotes, whose infrequent analysis is a breath of fresh air. But Endnotes isn't particularly well read even inside the academy, which takes back outside the ivory tower in the dismal mess that is what passes for popular left "economics."

I want to go back to Occupy for a second because what happened there is indicative of the problem. Occupy, at least technically, actually had a theory of economics that went beyond "neoliberalism bad, welfare state good." And it's really not as bad as its critics have since accused it of being. Graeber's "the 1% meme" was supposed to be part of an MMT analysis of the ability of banks to create money out of nothing, see Richard A. Werner. The theory then goes with the ability to create money out of nothing the question becomes who should actually have that power. The 1% are the people who control that power and use that it to gain wealth and their wealth to gain power.

This is essentially what happened after 2008 and it relates to an entire analysis of the politics of debt and war that's captured really well in the last chapter of Debt, The First 5000 Years, drawing from Hudson's excellent Super Imperialism. Again, not bad, and not the disaster it became in Liberal hands. But note two things:

1, His work is intentionally detached from the production process- Graeber uses a value theory of labor about the social reproduction of human beings. That theory is really interesting and I'll leave a link to his It is Value that Brings Universes into Being here. But Graeber is an anthropologist, not an economist, and his recent work is mostly composed of a set of theories of bureaucracy.

And, don't get me wrong, I really like Utopia of Rules and Bullshit Jobs, and it's possible to build an economic theory out of them, but almost no one actually does. And this gets us back to my second point about Occupy and economics.

2, Not a single other person I have ever met, including people who were in Occupy, have ever actually heard the theory behind the 1%. Part of this has to do with Graeber’s rather admirable desire to not become an intellectual vanguardist. But, I cannot overemphasize how much of this is a result of the left's retreat into an analysis of consumerism instead of capitalism and its further insistence that the entire fucking global economy can be explained by chapters 1-3 of Capital and this just isn't a "read more theory" rant, it's not like reading the rest of Capital is going to help you here. But even that's better than what's actually happened, which is people reading Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the Communist Manifesto and trying to derive economic theory from that, or getting lost in a Gramscian or psychoanalytic miasma trying to explain why revolution didn't happen. But we can't keep fucking doing this.

If we do we're just going to keep getting stuck in endless fucking inane arguments, one of which is about which countries are Imperialist or not based on trying to read the minds of world leaders, and the other of which is a bunch of racists trying to argue that they're actually "class-first" Marxists and that if we don't say slurs and be mean to disabled people we're going to lose the "real working class," which is somehow composed only of construction workers banging steel bars.

So let's stop letting them do that. One of the reasons Supply Chains and the Human Condition is so great is that it describes how the performance of gender and racial roles creates the self super-exploitation at the heart of global capitalism. Race and gender cannot be ignored in favor of some kind of "class-first" faux-leftist bullshit. THEY ARE LITERALLY THE DRIVER OF CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

Most of the global supply chain has been transformed into entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs (see the countless accounts of Chinese garment factory workers who dream of getting into the fashion industry and who attempt to supplement their meager income by setting up stalls in local marketplaces to sell watches and clothes).

The fact that global supply chains have reverted to the kind of small family firms that Marx and Engels thought would disappear is a MASSIVE problem for any kind of global workers movement, because it means that the normal wage relation that is supposed to form the basis of the proletariat isn't actually the governing social experience of a large swath of what should be the proletariat, either because they're the owners of small firms contracted by larger firms like Nike who would, in an older period of capitalism, have just been workers or because the people who work for those firms are incapable of actually demanding wage increases from the capitalists because they're separated by a layer from the firms who control real capital, and thus are essentially unable to make the kind of wage demands that would normally constitute class consciousness because the contractors they work for really don't have any money. These contractors are in no way independent.

Multinational corporations set everything from their buying prices to their labor conditions to what their workers say to lie to labor inspectors. The effect of replacing much of the proletariat with micro-entrepreneurs is devastating.

The class-for-itself that's supposed to serve as the basis of social revolution has decomposed entirely. Endnotes has a great analysis of how this happened covering more time, but the unified working class is dead. In its place have come a series of incoherent struggles: The Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares, the current wave of revolutions and riots stretching from Sudan to Peru to Puerto Rico- all of them share an economic basis translated into demands on the state. We see housing struggles, anti-police riots, occupations, climate strikes, and a thousand other forms of struggle that don't seem to cohere into a traditional social revolution and WE HAVE NO ANSWER.

I don't have one either, but we're not going to get out of this mess by trying to read the tea leaves of the CCP or analyzing how Endgame is the ruling class inculcating us into accepting Malthusian Ecofascism.

I want to emphasize YOU DON'T NEED TO SHARE MY ECONOMIC ANALYSIS to develop one, I'm obviously wrong on a lot of things and so is everyone else. The point is that we need to start somewhere.

There are other benefits to reading economics stuff even if it can be boring sometimes, like being able to dunk on nerd shitlibs and reactionaries who do the "take Econ-101" meme by being able to prove that their entire discipline is bunk. Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is absolutely hilarious for this, he literally proves that perfect competition relies on the same math that you use to "prove" that the earth is flat.

Or learning that the notion that markets distribute goods optimally is based on the assumption that what is basically a form of fucking state socialism exists, and that the supply demand curve is fucking bullshit. Here's a page from Debunking Economics looking at the socialism claim, it fucking rules, and it's the result of the fact that neo-classical economics and central planning were developed together. Kantorovich and Koopmans shared a Nobel Prize.

But wait, there's more! We can PROVE that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST. Do you have any idea how hard you can own libs with facts and logic if you can demonstrate that THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS DOESN'T EXIST?

But seriously, if you go outside of the Marxist tradition there are all sorts of fun and useful things you can find in post-Keyensian circles and so on and so forth. I'm a huge fan of Karen Ho's Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street/Liquidated_%20An%20Ethnography%20of%20Wall%20Street%20-%20Karen%20Ho.pdf) which looks at how the people at banks and investment firms actually behave and, oh boy, is it bad news (they're literally incapable of making long-term decisions which is wonderful in the face of climate change).

Oh, and also, all of the bankers are essentially indoctrinated into thinking they're the smartest people in the world, so that's fun.

This may sound like I'm shitting on Marxism, and I sort of am, but there's Marxist stuff coming out that I absolutely love! @chuangcn is a good example of what I think the benchmark for leftist economics and historical analysis should be.

Chuang responded to the call put out by Endnotes to cut "The Red Thread of History," or essentially to stop fucking arguing about 1917, 1936, 1968 and so forth and look at material conditions instead of trying to find our favorite faction and accuse literally everyone else of betraying the revolution, and then imagining what we would have done in their shoes. The present is different from the past and we need to organize for this economic and social reality, not 1917's.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBIVhXYAYlVfj.png

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBM3CXoAA7Qmx.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBvBP0SWkAEl6OX.jpg

Chuang produced an incredibly statically and sociologically detailed account of the Chinese socialist period in issue 1 and the transition to capitalism in the soon to be put online issue 2 that focuses on shifts in production and investment and shifts in China's class-structure and how urban workers, peasants, factory mangers, technicians, and cadre members reacted to those movements and shaped each others decisions and mobilizations. They largely avoid discussions of factional battles of the upper level of the CCP, which dominate liberal and communist accounts of the period and produce, in supposed communists from David Harvey to Ajit Singh, a Great Man theory of history.

Instead, they trace how strikes and peasant protests shaped the CCP's decision making and how the choices of people like Mao and Deng Xiaoping were limited by material conditions, in this case by their production bottleneck.

What's great about Chuang is that their work is so rich in sociological detail that you don't need to agree with them at all about what communism is and so on for their account to be useful, and they force us to think about the world from the perspective of competing classes bound by economic reality, instead of the black-and-white "good state/bad state," "good ruler/bad ruler," discourse that dominates our understanding of both imperialism and the global economy.

I'm just going to end this with a TL;DR: Cut the read thread of history and stop fucking arguing about 1917, use economic theory to dunk on Stupidpol and shitlibs. When you talk about "material conditions" talk about the production process, supply chains, capital movements and so on, not which states are good and bad (the bourgeoisie is a global class friends), recognize that strategies need to be built around current economic and social conditions, WHICH ARE INSEPARABLE FROM RACE AND GENDER, climate change is more complicated than the 100 companies meme (I only touched on this but please read Fossil Capital and Carbon Democracy), and in general try to learn more about different schools of economics and social theory, I swear reading something that wasn't written in 1848 isn't going to kill you.

[stereostevie]

“I sacrificed the quality of my life to help people experience something that had been unreachable before then,” Grammy winner says in rare interview

In the late Nineties, the story of popular music became the story of Ms. Lauryn Hill. She first rose to fame as an actress and a member of the Fugees, whose second and final album, 1996’s The Score, remains one of that decade’s biggest albums. Then, at just 22 years old, Hill took a huge leap and decided to go solo. Released in 1998, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill filled clubs, radio stations, and MTV with her smooth voice and biting rhymes. Hill herself became as big as her music, appreciated in the fashion world and sought after by movie executives for roles she would eventually decline.

Miseducation took home five Grammy Awards and led to a huge tour. But by the early 2000s, Ms. Hill left behind the fame and the industry almost entirely. She has never released another studio album; her last full-length release was MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 from 2002, where she performed new songs in an acoustic style to a largely tepid reception.

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill lives on. More than 20 years after its release, it is still regarded as one of the best albums ever made, landing at Number 10 on Rolling Stone’s voter-based 500 Greatest Albums of All Time List this past fall. Many of her songs continue to permeate culture, like the single “Ex-Factor,” which has been sampled or interpolated on major hits by Drake and Cardi B. Beyond that, the album’s impact on multiple generations of musicians is unmistakeable. Everyone from Rihanna to St. Vincent has cited Hill as having heavily influenced their own music.  

The years that followed Miseducation have been complicated. After the album’s release, some of Hill’s collaborators filed a lawsuit claiming she did not properly credit them for their contributions; that suit was settled out of court three years later on undisclosed terms. In 2012, she was charged with tax fraud, and went on to serve three months in prison. More recently, she has found herself back on the road more frequently, sporadically releasing music but mostly basking in the collective love and power of Miseducation through special performances of the album.

For the latest episode of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums podcast, Ms. Hill granted a rare interview on the making of Miseducation as well as what happened after. Over e-mail, she spoke candidly about protecting her family and the little support she had after her first album cycle ended. Excerpts from the interview can be heard in the podcast episode, available on Amazon Music, along with tales from several of the musicians who were part of those sessions, like “Commissioner Gordon” Williams, Lenesha Randolph, and Vada Nobles. Ms. Hill’s written responses are here in full.

When you began recording Miseducation, you were 22 and already experiencing immense success with the Fugees. What were you hoping to prove with this album? As far as proving myself goes, I think that’s a larger and more involved story best told at a later time, but I will say that the success of the Fugees absolutely set up The Miseducation to be as big and as well received as it was. When I decided that I wanted to try a solo project I was met with incredible resistance and discouragement from a number of places that should have been supportive, so that had a motivating factor, but it was less about proving myself and more about creating something I wanted to see and hear exist in the world. There were ideas, notions and concepts that I wanted to exist, I set off in a particular direction and kept going. Initially, I intended to work with other producers and artists but found that what I wanted to say and hear may have been too idiosyncratic at the time to just explain it and have someone else try to make it. It had to be made in a more custom manner. The team of people who would ultimately be involved, we all witnessed as it took form. It was unique and exciting.

You’ve said you found yourself especially creative during your pregnancy. How did that experience shape you as a songwriter?

It’s a wild thing to say but I was left alone during my pregnancies for the most part. It was like all of the people with all of their demands had to check themselves when I was pregnant. The resulting peace may have contributed to that sense of feeling more creative. I was pregnant with my first child during the making of The Miseducation and the situation was complicated, so I was motivated to find more stability and safety for myself and for my child, that definitely pushed me to disregard what appeared as limitations. If I struggled to fight for myself, I had someone else to fight for. This also introduced my first son’s father, Rohan Marley, into the picture, who at that time, was a protective presence. If there were people or forces attempting to prevent me from creating, he played a role in helping to keep that at bay.

During those times especially, I always wanted to be a motivator of positive change. It’s in all of my lyrics, that desire to see my community get out of its own way, identify and confront internal and external obstacles, and experience the heights of Love and self-Love that provoke transformation. I sang from that place and chose to share the joy and ecstasy of it, as well as the disappointments, entanglements and life lessons that I had learned at that point. I basically started out as a young sage lol.

When you look back on it now, is Miseducation the album you intended it to be? I’ve always been pretty critical of myself artistically, so of course there are things I hear that could have been done differently, but the LOVE in the album, the passion, its intention is, to me, undeniable. I think my intention was simply to make something that made my foremothers and forefathers in music and social and political struggle know that someone received what they’d sacrificed to give us, and to let my peers know that we could walk in that truth, proudly and confidently. At that time, I felt like it was a duty or responsibility to do so. I saw the economic and educational gaps in black communities and although I was super young myself, I used that platform to help bridge those gaps and introduce concepts and information that “we” needed even if “we” didn’t know “we” wanted it yet. Of course I’m referring to the proverbial “we.” These things had an enormous value to me and I cherished them from a very young age.

I also think the album stood apart from the types and cliches that were supposed to be acceptable at that time. I challenged the norm and introduced a new standard. I believe The Miseducation did that and I believe I still do this — defy convention when the convention is questionable. I had to move faster and with greater intention though than the dysfunctional norms that were well-established and fully funded then. I was apparently perceived by some as making trouble and being disruptive rather than appreciated for introducing solutions and options to people who hadn’t had them, for exposing beauty where oppression once reigned, and demonstrating how well these different cultural paradigms could work together. The warp speed I had to move at in order to defy the norm put me and my family under a hyper-accelerated, hyper-tense, and unfortunately under-appreciated pace. I sacrificed the quality of my life to help people experience something that had been unreachable before then. When I saw people struggle to appreciate what that took, I had to pull back and make sure I and my family were safe and good. I’m still doing that.

This album permeated culture in a way that few albums have before it existed and made you a massive star. How were you handling the public gaze at the time? There were definitely things I enjoyed about stardom, but there were definitely things I didn’t enjoy. I think most people appreciate being recognized and appreciated for their work and sacrifice. That, to me, is a given, but living a real life is essential for anyone trying to stay connected to reality and continue making things that truly affect people. This becomes increasingly harder to do in the “space” people try to place “stars” in.

The pedestal, to me, is as much about containment and control as it is adulation. Finding balance, clarity and sobriety can be very hard for some to maintain. For example, being yes’d to death isn’t good, and people fear stardom can only result in this, but if the actual answer is yes, being told no just to not appear a yes-man is silly. Never being told no if the answer is no by people afraid to disappoint will obviously also distort the mirror in which we view ourselves. On the other hand, a person with a vision can be way ahead, so people may say no with conviction and resist what they fear only to find out later that they were absolutely wrong.

The idea of artist as public property, I also always had a problem with that. I agreed to share my art, I’m not agreeing necessarily to share myself. The entitlement that people often feel, like they somehow own you, or own a piece of you, can be incredibly dangerous. I chafe under any kind of control like that and resist expectations that suggest I should somehow dumb-down and be predictable to make people feel comfortable rather than authentically express myself. I also resist unrealistic expectations placed on me by people who would never place those same requirements on themselves. I can be as diplomatic and as patient as I possibly can be. I can’t, however, sell myself short through constant self-deprecation and shrinking.

“The entitlement that people often feel, like they somehow own you, or own a piece of you, can be incredibly dangerous.”

Is there a version of “Lauryn Hill” that you feel people expected of you, and how did that compare to how you saw yourself? Absolutely, which I touched upon in the answers before this one. Life is life, to be lived, experienced and enjoyed with all of its dynamism and color. If you do something well that people enjoy, often they want the same experience over and over. A real person can be stifled and their growth completely stunted trying to do this without balance. It’s not a fair thing to ask of anyone. We all have to grow, we all have to express ourselves with as much fullness and integrity as we can manage. The celebrity is often treated like a sacrifice, the fatted calf, then boxed in and harshly judged for very normal and natural responses to abnormal circumstances.

I saw someone lambasted once for discussing episodes of anxiety before going on stage, as if anxiety was only a condition of the non-famous. It was absurd, like someone with a record out can’t get a common cold. Someone in love with the art doesn’t not experience fear or anxiety, they just do their best to transcend it or work beyond it so that the art or the passion can be made manifest. Some days are better than others. For some people it gets easier, for some it doesn’t. The unfairness, the harshness was excessive to me. I didn’t like how I was being treated at a certain point. I just wasn’t being treated well and definitely not in accordance with someone who’d contributed what I had. I had a ton of jealousy and competitiveness to contend with. That can exhaust or frustrate your efforts to make anything besides primal scream music, 😊.

Provoking that kind of aggravation was probably intentional. You have to find reasons to still do it, when you’re exposed to the ugly.  People often think it’s ok to project whatever they want to on someone they perceive as having “it all” or “having so/too much.” Hero worship can be an excuse for not taking care of your own sh#t. The flip side of that adulation can turn severely ugly, aggressive, and hostile if people make another person responsible for their sense of self-worth. You can either take that abuse or say no to it. After subjecting myself to it for years, I started to say no, and then no turned into hell no, then hell no turned into f#ck no…you get my point. 😊

If you could talk to yourself at 22 now, what would you say? I’d share the things I do now with my 22-year-old self. If I had known what I know now, things would probably have unfolded differently. I would have continued to invest in people but I would have made sure I had people with the love, strength, and integrity around me to really keep their eye on the prize and my well-being. The world is full of seduction and if they can’t seduce you, they go after the people you love or depend on in some way. I would have with greater understanding tried to do more to insulate myself and my loved ones from that kind of attack.

Looking back on that period of your life, do you have any regrets?

I have some periods of woe, some periods of sorrow and great pain, yes, but regret is tough because I ended up with a clarity I might not have been able to achieve any other way. I would have done a few things differently though if I could go back. I would have done my best to shield myself so that I could better shield my children.  I would have rejected the manipulation, unfair force and pressure put on me much earlier. I would have benefitted from having more awareness about the dangers of fame. I would have been more communicative with everyone truly involved with The Miseducation and fought hard for the importance of candid expression. I would have demanded what I needed and removed people antagonistic to that sooner than I did.

You have released music since Miseducation and have continued to play live. Do you ever foresee releasing another full-length studio album? The wild thing is no one from my label has ever called me and asked how can we help you make another album, EVER…EVER. Did I say ever? Ever! With The Miseducation, there was no precedent. I was, for the most part, free to explore, experiment and express. After The Miseducation, there were scores of tentacled obstructionists, politics, repressing agendas, unrealistic expectations, and saboteurs EVERYWHERE. People had included me in their own narratives of THEIR successes as it pertained to my album, and if this contradicted my experience, I was considered an enemy.

Artist suppression is definitely a thing. I won’t go too much into it here, but where there should have been overwhelming support, there wasn’t any. I began touring because I needed the creative outlet and to support myself and my family. People were more interested in breaking me or using me to battery-power whatever they had going on than to support my creativity. I create at the speed and flow of my inspiration, which doesn’t always work in a traditional system. I have always had to custom build what I’ve needed in order to get things done. The lack of respect and willingness to understand what that is, or what I need to be productive and healthy, doesn’t really sit well with me. When no one takes the time to understand, but only takes the time to count the money the fruit of this process produces, things can easily turn bad. Mistreatment, abuse, and neglect happen. I wrote an album about systemic racism and how it represses and stunts growth and harms (all of my albums have probably addressed systemic racism to some degree), before this was something this generation openly talked about. I was called crazy. Now…over a decade later, we hear this as part of the mainstream chorus. Ok, so chalk some of it up to leadership and how that works — I was clearly ahead, but you also have to acknowledge the blatant denial that went down with that. The public abuse and ostracizing while suppressing and copying what I had done, (I protested) with still no real acknowledgement that all of that even happened, is a lot.

“I wrote an album about systemic racism… before this was something this generation openly talked about. I was called crazy.”

I continue to tour and share with audiences all over the world, but I also full-time work on the trauma, stifling, and stunting that came with all of that and how my family and I were affected. In many ways, we’re living now, making up for years where we couldn’t be as free as we should have been able to. I had to break through a ton of unjust resistance, greed, fear and just plain human ugliness. Little else can rival freedom for me. If being a superstar means living a repressed life where people will only work with you or invest in your work if they can manipulate and control you, then I’m not sure how important music gets made without some tragic set of events following. I don’t subscribe to that.

Lastly, I appreciate the people who were moved by this body of work, which really represented a lifetime — up to that point — of love, experience, wisdom, family and community investment in me, the summation of my experience from relationships, my dreams, inspirations, aspirations and God’s ever-present grace and Love in my life through the lens of my 20-something but wise-sage existence, lol. I dreamed big, I didn’t think of limits, I really only thought of the creative possibilities and addressing the needs as I saw them at that time. I also had the support of a community of talented artists, thinkers, and doers, friends and family around me. Their primary efforts (THEN) seemed to be to help clear a path and to help protect. However, when you effectively create something powerful enough to move the bulls#t out of the way, all kinds of forces and energies may not like that. They may seek to corrupt and discourage, to disrupt and distract, to divide, and sabotage…but we bore witness to the fact that this happened — a young, black woman through hip-hop culture, a legacy of soul, Spirit and an appreciation for education and educating others communicated love and timeless and necessary messages to the world.

The music business can be an industry of entanglements, where a small number of people are expected to be responsible for a very large number of people. It’s hard to find fairness in a situation like that. Now, I look for as much equity and fairness as possible. I appreciate being loved for my contributions to music, but it’s important to be loved for who you are as a person just as much, and that can be a delicate but extremely important balance to achieve. Experiencing that is important to me.

[danwhobrowses]

America, We Need to Talk

For some reason in these past years the concept of ‘Reason’ and ‘Sense’ has departed your country, I’ve hissed, I’ve simmered, I’ve hit my head against the wall hoping that in the end IN THE END the collective mass of the American People will open their eyes, stop making excuses and realise that for 4 years, America has not become ‘Great Again’ I’ve resisted the urge to unload many a time, but news that Donald Trump is to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is just too much, because this is literal horseshit. For some part it feels like they’re only trying it just so Republicans can force a rhetoric as if Trump did a better job than Obama - who won in 2009 for easing religious tensions, preventing Nuclear Weapons distribution and profiting, working towards fixing climate change and assisting with the UN - as people die of COVID, cities burn and violence against peaceful protests continue to ravage your country.

I have to say that again, Ravage, because I feel as though some people are blind to the matter at hand. Donald Trump will say something and his cult of followers will believe it, when someone disagrees and presents evidence it’s deemed irrelevant or forged, if a Democrat says something on the contrary they need a full powerpoint presentation to prove it, somehow this mentality has poisoned the American society when the louder people will say something in confidence only for the rest of the world to read and think it’s one of the dumbest shit they’ve ever read. This isn’t just coming from a Brit, this is coming from family in Chicago, a co-worker who moved out of America and worked in the army, Italians, Greeks and someone who was in Hong Kong during the riots. The people who believe in Democracy, Majority Vote, Free Healthcare, Fair Wage, Equal Rights AND international peace that doesn’t look towards World War Fucking Three look at your country in shame because the state of your leadership and how it’s been allowed to continue with ridiculously boneheaded and stubborn reluctance to see the truth. So let’s start with the boiling point shall we, a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination? Have you learned anything from the last year? Or has the far-right got the prize so by the balls that this nomination is used as a cheap add-on to coincidentally peacock the Trump administration in its build to an election. The nomination to Trump has been cited to be in favour of the following things; Israel-UAE relations (aka ‘Saving the Middle East), Serbia-Kosovo deal (aka ‘Saving the ‘Middle East’’), Inter-Korea relations and likely the support of Jerusalem and Hong Kong, and in face value that may sway the common person who knows nothing about these deals. But a simple amount of research cuts most of these at the legs. Let’s talk Serbia and Kosovo, since it’ll directly involve Israel, relations were tense but they have not been at war, they are peacefully not talking to each other. The media will have you think that Peace has been brokered by Trump only in this but in reality Serbia still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, the tensions are still there you can just travel there now. This is an agreement that’s been build up since the economic and trade agreement in 2013. If that year isn’t surprising you that is 3 years before Trump was elected, when Barrack Obama was in office - Republican Public Enemy Hillary Clinton was at the forefront of that when she was Secretary of State. So no, Trump hasn’t saved the Middle East by this deal, mainly because Kosovo and Serbia are in Europe, they have been part of the EU for quite some time and the deal is already jeopardized since Serbia won’t build an embassy in Jerusalem if Israel recognize Kosovo as independent - which was part of the original deal. Also for all the Republicans’ use of ‘fear by Communism’ to slander their opponents they sure love to rub shoulders with countries also rubbing shoulders with Russia and China. So this segues into Israel-UAE, the Arab Nations have mainly been reluctant to recognize Israel as independent. On the 13th August a deal was struck called the Abraham agreement establishing Diplomatic Relations. Except, this was in the making since 2012 and only delayed to help progress Israeli-Palestine conflicts (which Trump’s actions with Israel led to Palestine cutting ties with the administration and his ‘Peace Plan’ falling apart 3 years after announcing it). UAE and Israel had been in conversation before Trump was signed in, but only made headway when the FDD - already funded by the UAE - took over. For 3 years USA did little for the relations, UAE and Israel doing it themselves, it’s only now do the US mediate a peace agreement, which meant that Trump didn’t really do much in terms of convincing both sides, he just made sure things didn’t get out of hand - which was never close to happening since there is little tensions. It was Kushner who requested the meeting and Mossad also had a huge part in it. Also I want to add that the US are only buddied with these two out of fear of Iran - you know, that country that Trump almost goaded into war in January after bombings and the death Assassination of General Soleimani who helped the US in the wake of 9/11 track and hunt down the Taliban, as well as fighting ISIS, how peaceful was that? The Middle East is still in Civil and Proxy Wars, no saving has been done there, the US just were there for Israel and UAE to confess that they’re friends. Which leads me to Korea. The Olympics helped more than Trump did, a shared effort where both countries had to travel and accommodate each other. Tensions may’ve eased in 2016 but they were far from resolved and in 2020 not much is better. Korea still antagonize one another and the North still antagonizes the US, any ‘peace’ the Trump Administration will claim to towards Korea faded quickly. And finally, Hong Kong, the US may be supportive and rightly so but this is again fear of Communism, it should’ve happened sooner but the US was hoping for that big and meaty trade deal with China. And this isn’t months I’m talking about it’s years, the proposal first took place after the Umbrella Movement...in 2014, it was annually brought up in Congress but postponed until the Senate decided to. And after Trump signed it he said he might veto it in favour of the China trade deal

“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi: he's a friend of mine." - Donald Trump, November 2019

So really, this Nobel Peace Prize is the product and efforts of other people that set events in motion that Trump was there just to sign his name on. Meanwhile, in the country he is President of, the COVID Death toll has officially risen to 190 Thousand. 20% of COVID deaths are in the United States. Tear Gas/Pepper Spray - which is a recognized chemical weapon not allowed to be used in warfare - is used by Trump Supporters along with paintballs to attack peaceful protesters and Trump calls that peaceful because ‘Paint is not bullets’ - as someone who has been hit with Paintballs from safe range, they will hurt like a bitch and if you don’t wear protective gear they can do enough harm to crack and sometimes even break bone, the asthmatic co-worker I aforementioned that was in Hong Kong also notes that Tear Gas is awful, it may not kill you but it is far from peaceful. In the same breath Trump refuses to condemn a 16 year old carrying an AR and shooting someone in the head. He has also refused to condemn Epstein’s financier Ghislaine Maxwell and ‘hopes that she’s well’...the sex trafficker, but when you mention late Civil Rights leader John Lewis and his words are ‘can’t say one way or the other...he didn’t come to my inauguration’. This is your leader. The embodiment of the standards the country upholds itself to, it baffles me and many many others that the American People Chose a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, careless, self-important, naive, power-mad, severally-bankrupted, reality tv personality man-child, who is also intending to use US Taxpayers money to cover lawsuit fees against him alongside all his other golf trips. The man literally said that no other president has done more for Black People than he has, this is while he profusely condemned Kaepernick taking a knee to protest Police Brutality against Blacks and POC only for years later the world support it as BLM protests still happen because action has not been taken. We’ll also see what happens on the 14th regarding the Felony Hearing of the officers in Buffalo who pushed over Gugino and gave him a brain injury which he is still rehabilitating from after Trump tried to sell him as an Antifa member. Just in case you’re unaware, antifa stands for anti-fascist but Trump will paint that again in ‘Fear of Communism’. If you actually look up this stuff, the web of Trump’s lies unravel, and yet people just forget about. The man is a pro at gaslighting I’ll give him that, I mean leaking e-mails that condemned Clinton right at election time was some cutthroat stuff, but a man who needs to rely on preying on xenophobia, paranoia, fear, racism and invests mainly on smear tactics and dismantling, is not someone who can lead a country to prosperity, the amount of leeway this man gets from his supporters just hurts my head. So let me ask you America, truly, what is it that you want? Because it can’t be this, can it? Protests, Riots, people refusing to wear a simple face mask to limit the spread of a deadly virus because they think it’s a fake thing that the entire world decided to get in on with WHO just to spite Trump? Teenagers carrying guns? Refugees refused asylum and kept in cages? Do you want to keep spending your savings just to go to the doctors? or do you think that ‘Patriotism’ is blindly defending your country’s flaws and clinging to archaic and outdated thinking because centuries ago your country prospered in it? I’ll tell it to you straight: America is not the greatest country in the world, it hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know what your history books tell you; that Native Americans were fine with slaughter, that the US won WW2 with the military might they always had, that Vietnam was a moral victory, but the present day should tell you that your country is a mess, and the man who has been at the helm for 4 years will not fix it in another 4. There’s only so much of Obama’s policies he can plagiarize as his own; he has left the UN, left the Paris Agreement for cleaner air and energy and all his original campaign members have been arrested, an alarming amount of people associated with him are facing criminal charges - is that not a red flag? Don’t let your thoughts that as a patriot you have to support your country no matter what, true patriotism is not just the love of your country but the hope and strive to better it because you can love it but accept that it has flaws. I mean even I’ll admit that the UK has a lot of its own shit to deal with, doesn’t mean I hate where I live I just know it can be better. If this were anyone else, hell if this were a Democrat the Republican party would be booking them a flight to the other side of the world with the stuff Trump has done and let to continue on with afterwards, through him you went from the United States to an Absolute State and the rest of the world wonder if this will either lead to World War 3 or a Second American Civil War You don’t have to like Joe Biden, but he clearly looks like the lesser of the two evils here, and at least in 4 years time America under him won’t be on fire. If you still don’t like him someone new could be elected after, but right now you are on a downward spiral and need someone who can put you back into a stable place, that man is not Donald Trump. The man who wants to intercept mail-in voting and outcry its ‘risk’ of tampering when he himself voted by mail is not a truthful leader, the man who tried to cancel the World Health Organization when they simply asked to not call COVID a racist name that incited xenophobia after decrying cancel culture is not a moral leader, and the man who said that COVID would peter out and suggested injecting disinfectant into the lungs to combat it only to now suddenly buy out all the experimental treatment so that they can try and engineer a cure in time for the election campaign, is not a wise leader. All the stuff you see in these coming months is just an attempt to win your vote, for the most part it’ll be Trump stamping his name on something other people worked on for years and claiming that he did all the work. So make sure you actually check the truth of these things, research and fact-check yourself with valid, neutral sources. Take off the blinders, take a breath and actually see the full picture. And please, as well as not letting this man have the Nobel Peace Prize Don’t give this guy have a Second Term

[gingerwonderwild]

Setting the record straight

I am a liberal, but that doesn't mean what a lot of people think it does.

Let's break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: Not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:

1. I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected.

2. I believe we should all have access to healthcare. Somehow that's interpreted as "I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all." This is not the case. I'm fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it's impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes "let people die because they can't afford healthcare" a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen. It also makes economic sense to me that having decent healthcare is cheaper than ER care.

3. I believe education should be affordable and accessible to everyone. It doesn't necessarily have to be free, but there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.

4. I don't believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don't want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess the majority of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy actually paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.

5. I don't throw around "I'm willing to pay higher taxes" lightly. If I'm suggesting something that involves paying more, well, it's because I'm fine with paying my fair share as long as it's actually going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.

6. I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it actually means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion-dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn't have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.

7. I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer.

8. I don't believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe they should have the *same* rights as you.

9. I don't believe undocumented immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they're supposed to be abusing, and if they're "stealing" your job it's because your employer is hiring illegally). I'm not opposed to deporting people who are here illegally (and don't have a valid claim under VAWA or CAT or for a hardship waiver, etc), but I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc). And it takes a system not outsourcing to profiteers!!!

10. I don't believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, safe flights, etc. It's not that I want the government's hands in everything -- I just don't trust people trying to make money will ensure their products/practices/etc. are actually SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. Certainly not right now. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they're harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.

11. I believe our current administration is fascist! Not because I dislike them or because I can’t get over an election, but because I've spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are actually mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.

12. I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege -- white, straight, male, economic, etc. -- need to start listening, even if you don't like what you're hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that's causing people to be marginalized.

13. I am not interested in coming after your blessed guns, nor is anyone serving in government. What I am interested in is sensible policies, including background checks, that just MIGHT save one person’s, perhaps a toddler’s, life by the hand of someone who should not have a gun.

14. I believe in so-called political correctness. I prefer to think it’s social politeness. If I call you Chuck and you say you prefer to be called Charles I’ll call you Charles. It’s the polite thing to do. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you're using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person?

15. I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something with a better profit potential in the future.

16. I believe that women should not be treated as a separate class of human. They should be paid the same as men who do the same work, should have the same rights as men and should be free from abuse. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?

I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I'm a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn't mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don't believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.

Copy & paste Or reblog if you want. I did! No pressure.Just wanted to set the record straight.Thanks for reading.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

The limits of contemporary anti-oppression theory and practice

Identity is not Solidarity

Privilege theory and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by confusing identity categories with solidarity and reinforcing stereotypes about the political homogeneity and helplessness of “communities of color.” The category of “communities of color” is itself a recently invented identity category which obscures the central role that antiblack racism plays in maintaining an American racial order and conceals emerging forms of nonwhite interracial conflict. What living in a “post-racial era” really means is that race is increasingly represented in government, media, and education as “culture” while the nation as a whole has returned to levels of racial inequality, residential and educational segregation, and violence unseen since the last “post-racial” moment in American history – the mid-60s legal repeal of the apartheid system of Jim Crow.

Understanding racism as primarily a matter of individual racial privilege, and the symbolic affirmation of marginalized cultural identities as the solution to this basic lack of privilege, is the dominant and largely unquestioned form of anti-oppression politics in the US today. According to this politics, whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy.

Demographic categories are not coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures” which can be represented by individuals. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. Identity is not solidarity. Gender, sexual, and economic domination within racial identity categories have typically been described through an additive concept, intersectionality, which continues to assume that political agreement is automatically generated through the proliferation of existing demographic categories. Representing significant political differences as differences in privilege or culture places politics beyond critique, debate, and discussion.

For too long individual racial privilege has been taken to be the problem, and state, corporate, or nonprofit managed racial and ethnic “cultural diversity” within existing hierarchies of power imagined to be the solution. It is a well-worn activist formula to point out that “representatives” of different identity categories must be placed “front and center” in struggles against racism, sexism, and homophobia. But this is meaningless without also specifying the content of their politics. The US Army is simultaneously one of the most racially integrated and oppressive institutions in American society. “Diversity” alone is a meaningless political ideal which reifies culture, defines agency as inclusion within oppressive systems, and equates identity categories with political beliefs.

Time and again politicians of color have betrayed the very groups they claim to represent while being held up as proof that America is indeed a “colorblind” or “post-racial” society. Wealthy queers support initiatives which lock up and murder poor queers, trans* people, and sex workers. Women in positions of power continue to defend and sometimes initiate the vicious assault on abortion and reproductive rights, and then offload reproductive labor onto the shoulders of care workers who are predominantly women of color.

But more pertinent for our argument is the phenomenon of anti-oppression activists – who do advance a structural analysis of oppression and yet consistently align themselves with a praxis that reduces the history of violent and radically unsafe antislavery, anticolonial, antipatriarchal, antihomophobic, and anticiscentric freedom struggles to struggles over individual privilege and state recognition of cultural difference. Even when these activists invoke a history of militant resistance and sacrifice, they consistently fall back upon strategies of petitioning the powerful to renounce their privilege or “allow” marginalized populations to lead resistance struggles.

For too long there has been no alternative to this politics of privilege and cultural recognition, and so rejecting this liberal political framework has become synonymous with a refusal to seriously address racism, sexism, and homophobia in general. Even and especially when people of color, women, and queers imagine and execute alternatives to this liberal politics of cultural inclusion, they are persistently attacked as white, male, and privileged by the cohort that maintains and perpetuates the dominant praxis.

After marching more than 1000 miles, protesters with disabilities confront Bolivian riot police in La Paz, February 2012

Protecting Vulnerable Communities of Color and “Our” Women and Children: The Endangered Species Theory of Minority Populations and Patriarchal White Conservationism

The dominant praxis of contemporary anti-oppression politics operates primarily at the level of managing appearances, relinquishing power to political representatives, and reinforcing stereotypes of individually “deserving” and “undeserving” victims of racism, sexism, and homophobia. A vast nonprofit industrial complex, and a class of professional “community spokespeople,” has arisen over the last several decades to define the parameters of acceptable political action and debate. This politics of safety must continually project an image of powerlessness and keep communities of color, women, and queers “protected” and confined to speeches and mass rallies rather than active disruption. For this politics of cultural affirmation, suffering is legitimate and recognizable only when it conforms to white middle-class codes of behavior, with each gender in its proper place, and only if it speaks a language of productivity, patriotism, and self-policing victimhood.

And yet the vast majority of us are not “safe” simply going through our daily lives in Oakland, or elsewhere. When activists claim that poor black and brown communities must not defend themselves against racist attacks or confront the state, including using illegal or “violent” means, they typically advocate instead the performance of an image of legitimate victimhood for white middle class consumption. The activities of marginalized groups are barely recognized unless they perform the role of peaceful and quaint ethnics who by nature cannot confront power on their own. Contemporary anti-oppression politics constantly reproduces stereotypes about the passivity and powerlessness of these populations, when in fact it is precisely people from these groups – poor women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans* street workers fighting back against murder and violence, black, brown, and Asian American militant struggles against white supremacist attacks – who have waged the most powerful and successfully militant uprisings in American history. We refuse a politics which infantilizes us and people who look like us, and which continually paints nonwhite and/or nonmale demographics as helpless, vulnerable, and incapable of fighting for our own liberation.

People of color, women, and queers are constantly spoken of as if we were children in contemporary privilege discourse. Even children can have a more savvy and sophisticated analysis than privilege theorists often assume! “Communities of color” have become in contemporary liberal anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of management by sympathetic whites or “community representatives” assigned to defuse political conflict at all costs.

When activists argue that power “belongs in the hands of the most oppressed,” it is clear that their primary audience for these appeals can only be liberal white activists, and that they understand power as something which is granted or bestowed by the powerful. Appeals to white benevolence to let people of color “lead political struggles” assumes that white activists can somehow relinquish their privilege and legitimacy to oppressed communities and that these communities cannot act and take power for themselves.

People of color, women, and queers are constantly spoken of as if we were children in contemporary privilege discourse. Even children can have a more savvy and sophisticated analysis than privilege theorists often assume! “Communities of color” have become in contemporary liberal anti-oppression discourse akin to endangered species in need of management by sympathetic whites or “community representatives” assigned to contain political conflict at all costs.

And of course it is extremely advantageous to the powers that be for the oppressed to be infantilized and deterred from potentially “unsafe” self-defense, resistance, or attack. The absence of active mass resistance to racist policies and institutions in Oakland and in the US over the last forty years has meant that life conditions have worsened for nearly everyone. The prisons, police, state, economy, and borders perpetually reproduce racial inequality by categorizing, profiling, and enforcing demographic identities and assigning them to positions in a hierarchy of domination where marginalized groups can only gain power through the exploitation and oppression of others. The budget cuts and healthcare rollbacks are leaving poor queer and trans people without access to necessary medical resources like Aids medication or hormones, and other austerity measures have dovetailed with increasingly misogynist anti-reproductive-rights legislature which will surely result in an increasing and invisible number of deaths among women. As “diversity” has increased in city and state governments, and in some sectors of the corporate world, deepening economic stratification has rendered this form of representational “equality” almost entirely symbolic.

We have been told that because the “Occupy” movement protests something called “economic inequality” it is not a movement about or for people of color, despite the fact that subprime targeting of Blacks and Latinos within the housing market has led to losses between $164 billion and $213 billion, one of the greatest transfers of wealth out of these populations in recent history. And despite the fact that job losses are affecting women of color more than any other group.

We are told that because the “economy” has always targeted poor people of color, that increasing resistance from a multiracial cohort of young people and students, and from downwardly mobile members of the white working and middle class, has nothing to do with people of color – but that somehow reclaiming and recreating an idealized cultural heritage does. We are told that we are “tokens” or “informants” if we remain critical of a return to essentialist traditional cultural identities which are beyond political discussion, and of the conservative political project of rebuilding “the many systems of civilization—economics, government, politics, spirituality, environmental sustainability, nutrition, medicine and understandings of self, identity, gender and sexuality—that existed before colonization.”

We reject race and gender blind economic struggles and analysis, but we do not reject struggles against what is, under capitalism, naturalized as the “economy.” While the majority of Occupy general assemblies have adopted a neo-populist rhetoric of economic improvement or reform, we see the abolition of the system of capital as not peripheral but fundamental to any material project of ending oppression.

Recent statistics give a snapshot of worsening racial inequality in the US today: the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households, the greatest wealth disparities in 25 years. Over 1 in 4 Native Americans and Native Alaskans live in poverty, with a nearly 40% poverty rate for reservations. From 2005 to 2009, Latin@s’ household median wealth fell by 66%, black household wealth by 53%, but only 16% among white households. The average black household in 2009 possessed $5,677 in wealth; Latin@ households $6,325; and the average white household had $113,149.

Oakland police preventing the reoccupation of a property in the process of foreclosure. 90% of Oakland’s foreclosures are concentrated in 3 largely black and brown zip codes, 94621, 94603, 94605.

To address these deteriorating material conditions and imagine solutions in terms of privilege is to tacitly support the continual state and economic reproduction of racial and gender hierarchies, and renew racist and patriarchal violence in the 21st century.

On Nonprofit Certified “White Allies” and Privilege Theory

Communities of color are not a single, homogenous bloc with identical political opinions. There is no single unified antiracist, feminist, and queer political program which white liberals can somehow become “allies” of, despite the fact that some individuals or groups of color may claim that they are in possession of such a program. This particular brand of white allyship both flattens political differences between whites and homogenizes the populations they claim to speak on behalf of. We believe that this politics remains fundamentally conservative, silencing, and coercive, especially for people of color who reject the analysis and field of action offered by privilege theory.

In one particularly stark example of this problem from a December 4 2011 Occupy Oakland general assembly, “white allies” from a local social justice nonprofit called “The Catalyst Project” arrived with an array of other groups and individuals to Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, order to speak in favor of a proposal to rename Occupy Oakland to “Decolonize/Liberate Oakland.” Addressing the audience as though it were homogeneously white, each white “ally” who addressed the general assembly explained that renouncing their own white privilege meant supporting the renaming proposal. And yet in the public responses to the proposal it became clear that a substantial number of people of color in the audience, including the founding members of one of Occupy Oakland’s most active and effective autonomous groups, which is also majority people of color, the “Tactical Action Committee,” deeply opposed the measure.

What was at stake was a political disagreement, one that was not clearly divided along racial lines. However, the failure of the renaming proposal was subsequently widely misrepresented as a conflict between “white Occupy” and the “Decolonize/Liberate Oakland” group. In our experience such misrepresentations are not accidental or isolated incidents but a repeated feature of a dominant strain of Bay Area anti-oppression politics which �� instead of mobilizing people of color, women, and queers for independent action – must consistently purge political differences within identity categories and attack the demographic ratios of existing interracial political coalitions in order to survive.

White supremacy and racist institutions will not be eliminated through sympathetic white activists spending several thousand dollars for nonprofit diversity trainings which can assist them in recognizing their own racial privilege and certifying their decision to renounce this privilege. The absurdity of privilege politics recenters antiracist practice on whites and white behavior, and assumes that racism (and often by implicit or explicit association, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia) manifest primarily as individual privileges which can be “checked,” given up, or absolved through individual resolutions. Privilege politics is ultimately completely dependent upon precisely that which it condemns: white benevolence.

[candy--heart]

If we nominate a candidate plagued by a litany of disqualifying issues, Trump will win. We can’t make that mistake again.

---- ---- ----

JOE BIDEN

has been personally involved in nearly every bad policy decision of the last 50 years. Currently coasting on name recognition and association with Obama, he can only go down from here as people realize he is more comparable to Trump than he is to anyone else. With all the negatives of Hillary’s failed campaign but none of the positives, he would almost surely see us lose the general election again. If you love your grandchildren at all please do not vote for Biden.

TOP 5 HIGHLIGHTS:

Led the fight against desegregating schools even years after it had been proven a success and defended by Republicans [Expanded 7/6]

Voted for the disastrous Iraq War, then escalated it, then lied about it, still says he’d “do it again,” and just hired a foreign policy advisor who helped Bush orchestrate the war before joining a lobbying firm for the military-industrial complex [Expanded 8/13, 8/29, 9/6]

Wrote the racist Crime Bill that intentionally led to record-breaking mass incarceration, positioning himself to the right of even Reagan and Bush

Opposed Roe v Wade and voted to allow states to overturn it like they are now, worked to undermine the ACA’s coverage of birth control, does “not view abortion as a choice and a right” and still opposed federal funding for it multiple times including during this election

Long history of creepily/patronizingly groping/sniffing/kissing/grabbing/condescending women and young girls just so many times, even including intimidation and continuing even now after his non-apology [Expanded 10/14, 10/29, 11/9]

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL:

Racist comments like this and this, and fondness towards if not impassioned support for so many of the worst racists and segregationists like this whom he chose to work with, as well as Republicans like George Bush, Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, and Jeb Bush. Generally has no understanding of racism in America [Expanded 7/27, 8/8, 9/13]

As part of his crusade against desegregating schools he was the only member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to block two black appointees to the Department of Justice

Has lied about marching in the Civil Rights movement multiple times, and seems to lie about attending an HBCU [Expanded 8/31, 10/29]

Horrible treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas hearing

Supports cutting Social Security and Medicare and raising the retirement age on multiple occasions, backing Paul Ryan’s efforts to do so, while voting to gut welfare

Led the disastrous War on Drugs, and somehow still opposes cannabis legalization (while simultaneously trying to destroy the growing industry by handing it over to the Big Pharma), yet two of his children escaped consequences for drug use [Expanded 8/31]

Pushed to expand death penalty, even to those on drug charges

Opposes Medicare for All while he and his campaign lie about it what it would entail, and wants to bring back penalizing those who can’t afford to pay for private insurance. He continues to praise Big Pharma to his ultra-wealthy donors and is the only candidate to refuse to meet with disabled healthcare activist Ady Barkan [Expanded 7/6, 7/27, 9/21, 10/14]

Originally claimed he “doesn’t have time” to propose his own healthcare plan, then proposed one that would kill 125,000 Americans and leave over 10 million uninsured (which he’s lied about) in a rollout sponsored by Big Pharma (even his own wife admits he’s not good on healthcare, and he’s let slip the true reality of his proposal) [Expanded 7/6, 7/27, 8/19, 8/26, 10/14]

Personally fought to make cancer medication unaffordable for patients in developing nations [Added 10/14]

Opposed equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community even very recently, only eventually coming around just 7 short years ago, and is still awkward at best on the issue [Expanded 9/22, 10/14]

Supported the NRA in passing massive anti-gun control legislation, and has blamed videos games for mass shootings multiple times [Expanded 8/5]

Opposes meaningful action on the climate crisis like the Green New Deal, instead pursuing the “middle ground” while his campaign attacks publications for accurately reporting this

He’s rated D- by Greenpeace in part because he supports fracking, oil and gas exportation, and the building of new fossil fuel infrastructure, and his campaign shot down the proposed climate debate and skipped MSNBC’s climate forum [Added 8/23, Expanded 9/6, 9/16]

Plagiarized fossil fuel groups’ language in his woefully inadequate climate crisis plan after his climate advisor made $1 million from one natural gas company alone. He then made uncomfortable physical contact with and rudely dismissed a young woman who asked him about this [Expanded 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to not accept fossil fuel money by attending a fundraiser hosted by his former advisor and current oil corporation co-founder/owner Andrew Goldman, and lied about it twice [Added 9/6, Clarified/Expanded 9/7, 10/14]

Voted to expand deportations and indefinite detention for immigrants multiple times and opposed amnesty for immigrants and supports requiring them to learn English

As VP his administration deported more people than any other in American history, deporting people at a higher rate than Trump’s administration even according to ICE themselves, and expanding the anti-immigrant system Trump now uses by 3,600%. He still refuses to answer for this and has gone as far as calling the police on immigration activists for passing out flyers [Expanded 7/9, 10/14]

As VP his administration built the inhumane concentration camps in which children separated from their families are still illegally caged, beginning the practice which Trump has now continued and resulting in the ongoing lawsuit claiming that ICE is violating the Flores Agreement by not providing basics like toothpaste and soap [Added 7/9]

Voted to build border walls and supported sending military to the border long before Trump

Voted to ban immigrants with HIV, locking Haitian refugees up in Guantanamo Bay

Spearheaded the Alliance for Prosperity which increased deportations, border militarization, privatization, and oil pipelines for American exploitation while worsening the refugee crisis

Architected Plan Colombia, internationalizing the War On Drugs resulting in mass death, displacement, and destruction of food crops, while opening the country to US business interests

Sides with Trump in backing right-wing coup in Venezuela

Voted to authorize invasion of the Netherlands if an American is tried for war crimes by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, refusal to participate in UN peacekeeping unless the US obtains immunity, and withdrawal of aid to countries that ratify ICC treaty

Supports Israel’s right-wing regime and apartheid in Palestine purely to protect US interests. A self-described Zionist, he blames Palestinians for multiple US-backed Israeli massacres, including an attack that killed 9 peace activists. Calls BDS “anti-semitic” and has a 100% rating from AIPAC [Expanded 7/4]

Recklessly threatens nuclear war with North Korea

Sided with banks to overturn Glass-Steagall and deregulate, leading to financial crisis, and has dishonestly tried to take credit for the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau despite actually helping strip state consumer protection [Expanded 10/18]

Defends billionaires hoarding wealth and promises to ensure it keeps happening at the expense of everyone else while voting to slash the top income tax rate and cripple the estate tax, resulting in $83 billion lost annually

Led the disastrous Bankruptcy Bill resulting in increased debt and specifically fought to make student loan debt more difficult to live with before dismissing the plight of Millennials who are now the most indebted generation ever [Expanded 8/26]

Lied about his own student debt multiple times, his own scholarship, and his own academic achievements, and has not proposed any plans to make public college tuition free or to abolish student debt [Added 8/26]

Voted against abolishing the electoral college that undemocratically elected Bush and Trump

Took $200,000 to help a Republican beat a Democrat to Congress despite being anti-abortion

Voted against enhancing labor protection enforcements

Voted for NAFTA, supports TPP, is generally to the right of Trump on trade, and argued against the prediction that China would become an economic competitor [Expanded 9/13]

Works with union-busters, voted to cut union pensions, continues to snub unions, and is generally bad for workers [Expanded 10/14]

Consistently sides with special interests and corporations against antitrust regulation and voted for the first antitrust exemption since 1922

Opposes net neutrality

Driving force behind the Patriot Act, supports warrantless wiretaps / mass surveillance while his son partially owns the Chinese government’s Islamophobic mass surveillance system [Edited 9/13]

Personally tried to prevent Ecuador from providing asylum for Edward Snowden

Says the CIA torture report is not a “black stain on this country” but a “badge of honor”

Worsened the opioid epidemic and made it harder to treat

Wants to make up reasons to jail anyone associated with a rave and literally bulldoze it down while his RAVE legislation lets kids die from preventable drug overdoses

Was the only senator to vote against expanding a child care tax credit [Added 7/29]

Has questionable electability based on receiving less than 0.22% in 3 previous Democratic primary elections. He has a history of insulting voters and is currently skipping major party events, hiding from the press, and holding only between a quarter and half as many public events as his rivals

Has questionable electability based on his infamous propensity for awkward “gaffes,” including many, many, many, many, many, many, many in this election cycle alone, to the point where he is literally unable to campaign [Added 8/9, Expanded 8/11, 8/13, 8/15, 8/23, 8/24, 9/2, 9/17, 10/14]

Plagiarized law school papers and campaign speeches (in which he lied about having coal miner roots), which ended his 1988 presidential run

His anti-progressive campaign surrogate Ed Rendell is a sexist, pro-fracking, pro-AIPAC Fox News supporter who approved bombing a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, killing 5 children and 6 adults [Added 6/26]

Used Charlottesville as a prop in his campaign video despite never even visiting once

Lied about getting shot down in Iraq and experiences in Afghanistan [Added 8/31]

Has no plan to reform the court system or counter its Republican takeover, has proposed re-nominating the failed Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, a nearly 70 year-old “moderate” who has opposed voting rights and human rights for Guantanamo detainees, and is fine with Kavanaugh remaining on the Supreme Court for life [Added 7/6, Expanded 9/16]

Is still openly courting Republican billionaires for donations, including John Catsimatidis, who’s compared taxing the wealthy to Nazi persecution of Jews

Endorsed by Alan Dershowitz, the millionaire Trump supporter accused of taking part in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring, after Biden’s son ensured a similar billionaire pedophile avoided prison after raping his own toddler

Voted to deregulate the credit card industry while a credit card company was his top donor from 1989–2000 and then hired his son

His administration awarded a $1.5 billion contract to his brother’s construction firm despite his brother having no prior residential construction experience

Has a long history of generally Trump-esque nepotism that he refuses to address [Added 10/14]

Broke his own pledge to take over 2x more money than Trump from lobbyists and special interests, including at least 13 billionaires, has the same general donor base as Trump, and very openly partakes in general corruption [Expanded 8/5, 8/11, 8/23, 10/14]

Flip-flopped on his initial opposition to using Super PACs and established one with military industrial complex and private healthcare lobbyists, even after admitting, “You shouldn’t accept any money from a Super PAC, because people can’t possibly trust you” just one year prior [Added 10/25]

His Senate chief of staff is now running Fox News’ lobbying operation [Added 10/14]

Hasn’t released any tax returns since 2015, which people seem to care about now [On 7/9 he released them to no media attention, revealing an $11 million increase in income in his first year out of office alone]

Seems to have found a loophole to avoid paying his interns [Added 7/12]

Unconvincingly co-opted Bernie’s education plan and slogan, and a Biden PAC plagiarized Kamala Harris’ slogan for its name

Despite his supposed frontrunner status he is a distant 5th in individual donors, raising questions of electability [Added 10/14]

“A lot of us sit around thinking up ways to vote conservative just so we don’t come out with a liberal rating. I’m really quite conservative…”

Meghan and the McCain family and Strom Thurmond have endorsed him, and Trump has donated to him

The worst part? He’s still not sorry for any of this (but wants a black man to apologize to him)

[marvsreflections]

On Guatemala's place in global history

There are few things you might take as intrinsically unchangeable on this world, one of those is human stupidity and the other one can be “change” or a least the concept related to such word.

I’m from a little country named Guatemala a piece of land south to Mexico, about 2 hours flight from Texas, this little country has been for most of its history nothing but a pseudo-democracy resembling more a modern feudal state than a republic, however the last century big changes (there’s the word again!) have transformed Guatemala into what some people called “a young democracy”.

Well as with manny ideas it is imperative to understand the social and historical context that gave birth to such labels, so in order to understand Guatemala and more importantly, why we matter more than ever before, we have dive into Guatemala’s history and it's now very close and bound relationship with the United States of America.

A bit of global history...

It all begins back in 1944, second war world has just finished, Hitler has been defeated and Europe is looking ahead to a feature of prosperity and unity, up until now the USA has been in the same side with Russia, however the end of the war leaves the world with two massive super powers.

The USA on the west with capitalism as the economic model, judeo-christian beliefs as moral templates and their own version of Greek political machinery called republic as its structure of power. The USSR on the east with communism, a one-party nation and socialism wrapping it all up, ideas that people somehow believe were totally opposite to western values.

This landscape of power lead to a “cold war” named like that because it wasn’t a war of direct military conflicts between the USSR and the USA but instead it was a war based on ideology, with both side creating propaganda to make their people believe those who did not live like them were the enemy and needed to be eradicated before they eradicate you!

This idea was aggravated by the fact that now both nations have the destruction power of the nuclear bomb, a new weapon of mass destruction capable of erasing human life from this earth, as you might expect the stakes were high, they were threats made, missile placed in close location to the enemy like Cuba or Ukraine, none of the parties was willing to lose and used every allie they could get to gain power and push the enemy further away from their motherland.

On this side of the globe, the USA declared war against communism and started programs of all kind to make sure there were no communist influence inside the motherland or anywhere close to it, so, guess where Guatemala landed on that plan? Yep, we weren’t really there, I mean, Guatemala was a bit more than a farm for the USA you might even say we were not consider humans back then, it is inevitable to say that we were just another “banana nation” for the white upper class of the big super countries.

About Guatemala on the 1940’s

Guatemala on the the 20th century was a nation owned by a big company that took the place of the Spanish crown, our communications system, train roads and the majority of the land, belong to the United Fruit Company (UFCO), they bought land at a really low price so they didn’t have to pay much taxes, they did not pay workers for the labor instead the “rent” a pieces of land as part of a “deal” where they could use the land to survive by also “paying” a part to the company, however the land was still under UFCO’s possession.

The precarious work situations under companies like the UFCO are depicted on the famous novel 1000 years of solitude by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, in a very dramatic and extreme representation, in the book after a strike by the workers demanding better conditions, the government reacts by inviting over 3000 of them to a meeting with the leadership to resolve their difference, however it was a tramp! The workers found themselves surrounded by machine guns and get methodically killed, the bodies were then thrown on a train and dropped off in the sea, after the event the government keeps exterminating any surviving union leader and denying the reports of the massacre.

Well, conditions were not that much better in Guatemala and I’m sorry to say that as in many good books, usually fiction is nothing by a reflection of reality, after years of being used for free labor, Guatemalans decided they needed a change they cannot longer live in a land that is not theirs, so in 1944 after numerous public demonstration and the killing of the teacher María Chinchilla in a protest, over 100,000 people gather to protest and stop the country for a week until the then president Jorge Ubico resigned en July 1, 1944, this initiated what some people called the first real “democratic period” in Guatemala, this new set of changes and reforms landed to a fresh-type president in 1951, it was a democratically elected president from the highlands of the country Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán .

About the CIA and UFCO

The thing with power is that is a human invention, so is fair to say that power is limited to what humans believe to be more important, as a mention before back in 40’s and 50’s we were not seen as humans by the USA or any of the companies coming from that side of the border, therefore we were not intitle of having an opinion nor to have a decent life or to be part of a country, we were only workers, just a step above from a horse or any other beast.

When a president of Guatemala decides that we can’t be a country if we don’t have land or infrastructure of our own, it is only inevitable he will have to make some changes that will not vibe with UFCO or some of its allies, and that is exactly what happened. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán started using government power to buy the land from the UFCO and give it to the poor people that were actually leaving on it and using it, buying land from the UFCO at the same low prices the claimed the bought it, he decided that train roads should be of public use and created a plan that aim to put Guatemala on the track to development.

The UFCO did not like what was happening in the country, their lands were being taken, they now have to come out with payment for their workers and a series of restriction help create the environment for workers unions and better working conditions that were impacting profits, this went on for about 3 years and the UFCO was doing everything they could to create propaganda and manipulate Guatemalans and Americas in order to take Arbenz from power.

One thing we need to understand is the people that were in Guatemala at that time and how their connection made a coup possible, one of the lawyers working for the UFCO was John Foster Dulles a republican from Washington D.C. that would eventually become the United States Secretary of State, Dulles’s brother Allen was the director of the CIA, in order to stop the “attacks” against the company, the Dulls brother worked together to convicend the President of the United States that Guatemala was a possible location for a soviet embassy in the western hemisphere. To achieve their goal they created a PR campaign to create fear among politician and the American people.

A CIA operation was created under the code name PBSUCCESS , the goal was to take way  Guatemala’s president from power and to make sure general Carlos Castillo Armas was in the presidency so the UFCO would be able to continue business as usual, the operation was a success, however as with many thing in history “success” not necessarily means “the beginning of a peaceful and great period”, so now we need to dive a bit deeper on “What happen when you interfere with a democratic elected government and place a puppet president instead?” type of question..

About the civil-war

Castillo Armas and most of the head of states that came after him were nothing but puppets to the UFCO and the United States, they did not put Guatemalans interest and needs on the agendas, instead they were working for the top sphere of the country therefore leading to a very unhappy population that were being oppressed by their own army and their own government, this is something we need to discuss, because again it shows how bound the United States’s and Guatemala’s faith are.

Because of the fact the the USA put the general in charge people did not like him, so we did not really pay for the army nor we wanted our taxes to go to a dictator, so the USA feeling bad or wanting to keep control of the country founded Guatemala’s army and let the generals do whatever they please, this lead to an army that was not found by taxes, nor it had to respond to the people of Guatemala, the army was the tool dictators have to keep people down, either disappearing anyone who did not agree with the government or rightout killing them.

As you might expect once you start killing and disappearing people, they will start fighting back, so the paramilitary forces were born and a 36 year war started, a conflict that took some 70,000 lives and countless more were disappeared, the army sustained with US money were going to villages and killing every men, raping women, some stories from my own family even mention babies being smashed against rocks, there was some pretty bad human right violations going on and you can’t deny how Guatemala and US government officials were involved in all of this.

About the USA and its gang problems in all of this...

Well, once you take a country to its knees is just a matter of time before people that are unable or don’t want to fight get themselves out, just as we are seeing happening today with Syrians refugees, there were a lot of Guatemala and Central America refugees that ended up in the US, they created communities in places like LA and New York, however racism and violence towards latino communities made them organize to protect themselves, back in the 1980’s as their countries of origin were consumed by civil war (some of the initiated by the USA itself) they created some of the first latino gangs in the US, MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha.

So, you might ask, what did the US did after creating a problem in Guatemala that ended up as gangs members in their backyard? Well they did what the US had been doing since its first contact with Guatemala, they ship out whatever bad shit they could to us, however we have to give them some credit, they did not think of that right away, it actually started back in the 1990’s so it is fair to say that the US had to deal with gangs for about a decade before deciding that it would be easier to ship them back to where they came from.

Even though I would not have any problem with a country kicking illegal immigrants that committed a felony to their original country, it is imperative to say that the US did not stop to think how can this change (the word again!) Guatemala and how it will affect the USA? Because if they would’ve stopped to think on that for a moment, there is a chance the would’ve realized they were making the same mistake all over again, they were creating a problem in Guatemala hopping it won't reach back to them, however we all know that is not how life works.

By 1996 “peace” was signed in Guatemala, there was even a speech by then president of the USA - Bill Clinton, promessing the Guatemalan people that human right will not be violated again and that the horrible civil-war we went through should never be repeated and the USA will not commit to the same wrong practices they did in the past, It was all good a least on a diplomatic level, however the US was on its high of deportation of gang members to our country.

There is this question I feel is worth asking at this moment… What would happen if you send a bouch of highly educated criminals (highly educated in contrast to the rest of Guatemala). that used to leave in big cities, they were resourceful, smart and on top of that we had never had to deal with a gang member or “marero” before?, in other words, the USA send criminals to a country with not infrastructure of any kind to contain them, nor it had a police force capable of facing this gang members.

Guatemala came out of the 36 years of civil war just to end up with a war with gangs that still last until today, something about 30 years dealing with a problem created by Guatemala and Central American refugees in the streets of LA, refugees that were there because a national army founded with US money were killing their families back home, this “war on gangs” lead Guatemala to a level of violence that reminded us of the war all over again, it stop the few progress we wanted to have, instead our youth was being recruited or killed by MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha, yet again people were forced to leave the country and find land were they would not be killed or robbed or extorted.

So, yep….We are talking about another exodus to the USA!

About “Mojados” or illegal immigrants to the USA after the 1990’s

There something we have to admit about the 1990’s - today problem with gangs, it is not all fault of the USA as is never “just on person’s” fault, when you put a country in a situation like we are, people don’t usually get access to education, information, food and health care, you know, the things that once cover might lead somebody to care about what their politicians are doing or where to money goes, but as Marx used to say, seas the means of production and you will have control of the system!.. Or something like that, because, that is what the top businessman and wealthy families of the country did, they took control over the country and made money out of the always unstable status of our nation.

So by the 1990’s after 30 years of military regimes, guatemala democracy was finally flourishing, like a baby that gets into age, it started to be aware of itself and every more and more people started to understand how this democracy thing is supposed to work ( a least more people in the capital city) and what can we do to make sure it is use in benefit of the people, however our leaders still coming from the upper class, mostly spanish descendant with old money and with little interest or connection with the population of their own country., they were used to do whatever they want with  our country, they took advantage of our national institutions to control the country and steer it on the direction they saw better for them and their business, our all times lover impunity was still with us and as time passes she would reveal itself more and more clearly.

So after the war we found ourselves in a country with MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha, with no police, with a government handle by the rich class that only cares about their business and how they can get out of Guatemala, a government dedicated to use the country to make themself richer, even if that means stealing money from heath, education and security programs that were supposed to be in place to take our country to a better future after the war ended.

We did not have (and would argue we still not have) a national identity, Mayan people made up to 65% of the population however they were being discriminated, no jobs, no services and a country that up until today is very divided. On the other had the USA in a effort to stop gangs and immigration say something like  “We’re sorry for taking your president out of power and starting a civil war” but now we will reinforced our borders, American visas would be expensive and rare for you and we start ICE to send all illegal Guatemalans in the USA back as we have been doing with gang members.

So as you might know by now this also had and effect that wasn’t what they expected. Instead of Guatemalans saying, “well I guess we can’t get to the USA anymore and here comes Juan from San Diego after he was deported”, people from all over the country started to hire human traffickers, people that knew how to move between borders and that could charge up to 5000 USD for trip, this “coyotes” as they called them are part of a organized net of crime that also includes drug traffickers, illegal gun sales, force prostitution and others, however when you come from a country where the government does care about you and the gangs want to kill you, dealing with a coyote might be the best of your options.

[lyghtblab]

So, first of all, this is a GREAT example of how racism feeds into the Electoral College. Undocumented immigrants don’t vote, and the idea that cities somehow breed more voter fraud BECAUSE they are more diverse, or that POOR people, people who, say, live in APARTMENTS instead of being LAND OWNERS is such old-timey classism to be laughable.  

And that’s SO MUCH of the rhetoric around the EC. People talk about how they don’t want “Urban” or “City” people making choices, and 99% of the time, that’s just code for “black” and “brown” and “Jewish” and “Gay” because you bigots think that 1. Only minorities live in cities and minorities ONLY live in cities and 2. You don’t want anyone who isn’t a WASP-y Farmer voting apparently.

Like, you’re argument is literally “cities have more poor brown people, and I don’t think their votes should count.” So FUCK YOU.

Also, cities WOULDN’T dominate in the popular vote.

Really? What about the BIG CITIES?

#1 New York City. 8,601,186

#2LosAngelesCalifornia 4,057,841

#3Chicago,Illinois 2,679,044

#4Houston,Texas 2,359,480

#5Phoenix,Arizona 1,711,356

#6 Philadelphia,Pennsylvania 1,576,596

Those 6 cities, combined, have less than 22 million people. The US has 327 million.

And this is my point- the US is not made of a small handful of huge cities. The vast majority of the country lives in SMALL cities and towns, under a million people each, and their suburbs.

So, no, with the Popular Vote, you could not pander just to the biggest cities and be done with it. If you add up EVERY SINGLE CITY with more than 100,000 people in it (Which is 311 cities), that’s still only 94 million. 28% of the US population.

Even if ALL the ~poor brown people~ that you want to stop from voting lived EXCLUSIVELY in cities (which they don’t, you fucking racist), the popular vote DOESN’T actually empower cities.

The EC ALSO doesn’t actually help rural (”white land owning”) populations (you fucking racist, you don’t even know the racial or economic breakdown of the rural areas you claim to care about). In fact, the EC makes things worse for rural areas. 46 states have an urban majority, and  “winner-take-all” laws that have been enacted by state legislatures in 48 states. So if there is a stark divide between rural and urban populations, in 46 states, the urban votes will win and 100% of the electoral points will go to the urban side (Where YOU think all the poor brown people live, again, you fucking racist).

However, in a popular vote system, no one’s vote would get thrown away like that, and everyone’s vote would be counted equally in the final tally.The popular vote would actually give MORE voice to rural populations that are all but completely erased in our current system.

And it is important to remember that in reality cities do not vote in perfect blocks. Neither do states. Even the most liberal city has conservative voters and even the deepest rural hellholes in Texas has progressives (I was one of them until I moved for college!) Those people matter. Those people should count.

Why not have a system where CITIZENS elect the president? Why does it matter which state someone lives in, if all votes should count equally? (I mean, I know YOU think that POOR BROWN PEOPLE shouldn’t be voting, you fucking racist, but ya know, for the rest of us who actually value the idea of a democracy)

This is a REALLY good website about the popular vote and it debunks a lot of common myths about the Electoral college. (^^ copied from @ fandomsandfeminism ‘s reblog. i wanted a version without the random terf reblog in it)

Maps matter. Map 1 over-represents territory. Map 2 is weighted by where people live ... 

[marvintexts]

On Guatemala's place in global history

There are few things you might take as intrinsically unchangeable on this world, one of those is human stupidity and the other one can be “change” or a least the concept related to such word.

I’m from a little country named Guatemala a piece of land south to Mexico, about 2 hours flight from Texas, this little country has been for most of its history nothing but a pseudo-democracy resembling more a modern feudal state than a republic, however the last century big changes (there’s the word again!) have transformed Guatemala into what some people called “a young democracy”.

Well as with manny ideas it is imperative to understand the social and historical context that gave birth to such labels, so in order to understand Guatemala and more importantly, why we matter more than ever before, we have dive into Guatemala’s history and it's now very close and bound relationship with the United States of America.

A bit of global history...

It all begins back in 1944, second war world has just finished, Hitler has been defeated and Europe is looking ahead to a feature of prosperity and unity, up until now the USA has been in the same side with Russia, however the end of the war leaves the world with two massive super powers.

The USA on the west with capitalism as the economic model, judeo-christian beliefs as moral templates and their own version of Greek political machinery called republic as its structure of power. The USSR on the east with communism, a one-party nation and socialism wrapping it all up, ideas that people somehow believe were totally opposite to western values.

This landscape of power lead to a “cold war” named like that because it wasn’t a war of direct military conflicts between the USSR and the USA but instead it was a war based on ideology, with both side creating propaganda to make their people believe those who did not live like them were the enemy and needed to be eradicated before they eradicate you!

This idea was aggravated by the fact that now both nations have the destruction power of the nuclear bomb, a new weapon of mass destruction capable of erasing human life from this earth, as you might expect the stakes were high, they were threats made, missile placed in close location to the enemy like Cuba or Ukraine, none of the parties was willing to lose and used every allie they could get to gain power and push the enemy further away from their motherland.

On this side of the globe, the USA declared war against communism and started programs of all kind to make sure there were no communist influence inside the motherland or anywhere close to it, so, guess where Guatemala landed on that plan? Yep, we weren’t really there, I mean, Guatemala was a bit more than a farm for the USA you might even say we were not consider humans back then, it is inevitable to say that we were just another “banana nation” for the white upper class of the big super countries.

About Guatemala on the 1940’s

Guatemala on the the 20th century was a nation owned by a big company that took the place of the Spanish crown, our communications system, train roads and the majority of the land, belong to the United Fruit Company (UFCO), they bought land at a really low price so they didn’t have to pay much taxes, they did not pay workers for the labor instead the “rent” a pieces of land as part of a “deal” where they could use the land to survive by also “paying” a part to the company, however the land was still under UFCO’s possession.

The precarious work situations under companies like the UFCO are depicted on the famous novel 1000 years of solitude by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, in a very dramatic and extreme representation, in the book after a strike by the workers demanding better conditions, the government reacts by inviting over 3000 of them to a meeting with the leadership to resolve their difference, however it was a tramp! The workers found themselves surrounded by machine guns and get methodically killed, the bodies were then thrown on a train and dropped off in the sea, after the event the government keeps exterminating any surviving union leader and denying the reports of the massacre.

Well, conditions were not that much better in Guatemala and I’m sorry to say that as in many good books, usually fiction is nothing by a reflection of reality, after years of being used for free labor, Guatemalans decided they needed a change they cannot longer live in a land that is not theirs, so in 1944 after numerous public demonstration and the killing of the teacher María Chinchilla in a protest, over 100,000 people gather to protest and stop the country for a week until the then president Jorge Ubico resigned en July 1, 1944, this initiated what some people called the first real “democratic period” in Guatemala, this new set of changes and reforms landed to a fresh-type president in 1951, it was a democratically elected president from the highlands of the country Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán .

About the CIA and UFCO

The thing with power is that is a human invention, so is fair to say that power is limited to what humans believe to be more important, as a mention before back in 40’s and 50’s we were not seen as humans by the USA or any of the companies coming from that side of the border, therefore we were not intitle of having an opinion nor to have a decent life or to be part of a country, we were only workers, just a step above from a horse or any other beast.

When a president of Guatemala decides that we can’t be a country if we don’t have land or infrastructure of our own, it is only inevitable he will have to make some changes that will not vibe with UFCO or some of its allies, and that is exactly what happened. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán started using government power to buy the land from the UFCO and give it to the poor people that were actually leaving on it and using it, buying land from the UFCO at the same low prices the claimed the bought it, he decided that train roads should be of public use and created a plan that aim to put Guatemala on the track to development.

The UFCO did not like what was happening in the country, their lands were being taken, they now have to come out with payment for their workers and a series of restriction help create the environment for workers unions and better working conditions that were impacting profits, this went on for about 3 years and the UFCO was doing everything they could to create propaganda and manipulate Guatemalans and Americas in order to take Arbenz from power.

One thing we need to understand is the people that were in Guatemala at that time and how their connection made a coup possible, one of the lawyers working for the UFCO was John Foster Dulles a republican from Washington D.C. that would eventually become the United States Secretary of State, Dulles’s brother Allen was the director of the CIA, in order to stop the “attacks” against the company, the Dulls brother worked together to convicend the President of the United States that Guatemala was a possible location for a soviet embassy in the western hemisphere. To achieve their goal they created a PR campaign to create fear among politician and the American people.

A CIA operation was created under the code name PBSUCCESS , the goal was to take way  Guatemala’s president from power and to make sure general Carlos Castillo Armas was in the presidency so the UFCO would be able to continue business as usual, the operation was a success, however as with many thing in history “success” not necessarily means “the beginning of a peaceful and great period”, so now we need to dive a bit deeper on “What happen when you interfere with a democratic elected government and place a puppet president instead?” type of question..

About the civil-war

Castillo Armas and most of the head of states that came after him were nothing but puppets to the UFCO and the United States, they did not put Guatemalans interest and needs on the agendas, instead they were working for the top sphere of the country therefore leading to a very unhappy population that were being oppressed by their own army and their own government, this is something we need to discuss, because again it shows how bound the United States’s and Guatemala’s faith are.

Because of the fact the the USA put the general in charge people did not like him, so we did not really pay for the army nor we wanted our taxes to go to a dictator, so the USA feeling bad or wanting to keep control of the country founded Guatemala’s army and let the generals do whatever they please, this lead to an army that was not found by taxes, nor it had to respond to the people of Guatemala, the army was the tool dictators have to keep people down, either disappearing anyone who did not agree with the government or rightout killing them.

As you might expect once you start killing and disappearing people, they will start fighting back, so the paramilitary forces were born and a 36 year war started, a conflict that took some 70,000 lives and countless more were disappeared, the army sustained with US money were going to villages and killing every men, raping women, some stories from my own family even mention babies being smashed against rocks, there was some pretty bad human right violations going on and you can’t deny how Guatemala and US government officials were involved in all of this.

About the USA and its gang problems in all of this...

Well, once you take a country to its knees is just a matter of time before people that are unable or don’t want to fight get themselves out, just as we are seeing happening today with Syrians refugees, there were a lot of Guatemala and Central America refugees that ended up in the US, they created communities in places like LA and New York, however racism and violence towards latino communities made them organize to protect themselves, back in the 1980’s as their countries of origin were consumed by civil war (some of the initiated by the USA itself) they created some of the first latino gangs in the US, MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha.

So, you might ask, what did the US did after creating a problem in Guatemala that ended up as gangs members in their backyard? Well they did what the US had been doing since its first contact with Guatemala, they ship out whatever bad shit they could to us, however we have to give them some credit, they did not think of that right away, it actually started back in the 1990’s so it is fair to say that the US had to deal with gangs for about a decade before deciding that it would be easier to ship them back to where they came from.

Even though I would not have any problem with a country kicking illegal immigrants that committed a felony to their original country, it is imperative to say that the US did not stop to think how can this change (the word again!) Guatemala and how it will affect the USA? Because if they would’ve stopped to think on that for a moment, there is a chance the would’ve realized they were making the same mistake all over again, they were creating a problem in Guatemala hopping it won't reach back to them, however we all know that is not how life works.

By 1996 “peace” was signed in Guatemala, there was even a speech by then president of the USA - Bill Clinton, promessing the Guatemalan people that human right will not be violated again and that the horrible civil-war we went through should never be repeated and the USA will not commit to the same wrong practices they did in the past, It was all good a least on a diplomatic level, however the US was on its high of deportation of gang members to our country.

There is this question I feel is worth asking at this moment… What would happen if you send a bouch of highly educated criminals (highly educated in contrast to the rest of Guatemala). that used to leave in big cities, they were resourceful, smart and on top of that we had never had to deal with a gang member or “marero” before?, in other words, the USA send criminals to a country with not infrastructure of any kind to contain them, nor it had a police force capable of facing this gang members.

Guatemala came out of the 36 years of civil war just to end up with a war with gangs that still last until today, something about 30 years dealing with a problem created by Guatemala and Central American refugees in the streets of LA, refugees that were there because a national army founded with US money were killing their families back home, this “war on gangs” lead Guatemala to a level of violence that reminded us of the war all over again, it stop the few progress we wanted to have, instead our youth was being recruited or killed by MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha, yet again people were forced to leave the country and find land were they would not be killed or robbed or extorted.

So, yep….We are talking about another exodus to the USA!

About “Mojados” or illegal immigrants to the USA after the 1990’s

There something we have to admit about the 1990’s - today problem with gangs, it is not all fault of the USA as is never “just on person’s” fault, when you put a country in a situation like we are, people don’t usually get access to education, information, food and health care, you know, the things that once cover might lead somebody to care about what their politicians are doing or where to money goes, but as Marx used to say, seas the means of production and you will have control of the system!.. Or something like that, because, that is what the top businessman and wealthy families of the country did, they took control over the country and made money out of the always unstable status of our nation.

So by the 1990’s after 30 years of military regimes, guatemala democracy was finally flourishing, like a baby that gets into age, it started to be aware of itself and every more and more people started to understand how this democracy thing is supposed to work ( a least more people in the capital city) and what can we do to make sure it is use in benefit of the people, however our leaders still coming from the upper class, mostly spanish descendant with old money and with little interest or connection with the population of their own country., they were used to do whatever they want with  our country, they took advantage of our national institutions to control the country and steer it on the direction they saw better for them and their business, our all times lover impunity was still with us and as time passes she would reveal itself more and more clearly.

So after the war we found ourselves in a country with MS-13 and Mara Salvatrucha, with no police, with a government handle by the rich class that only cares about their business and how they can get out of Guatemala, a government dedicated to use the country to make themself richer, even if that means stealing money from heath, education and security programs that were supposed to be in place to take our country to a better future after the war ended.

We did not have (and would argue we still not have) a national identity, Mayan people made up to 65% of the population however they were being discriminated, no jobs, no services and a country that up until today is very divided. On the other had the USA in a effort to stop gangs and immigration say something like  “We’re sorry for taking your president out of power and starting a civil war” but now we will reinforced our borders, American visas would be expensive and rare for you and we start ICE to send all illegal Guatemalans in the USA back as we have been doing with gang members.

So as you might know by now this also had and effect that wasn’t what they expected. Instead of Guatemalans saying, “well I guess we can’t get to the USA anymore”, people from all over the country started to hire human traffickers, people that knew how to move between borders and that could charge up to 5000 USD for trip, this “coyotes” as they called them are part of a organized net of crime that also includes drug traffickers, illegal gun sales, force prostitution and others, however when you come from a country where the government does not care about you and the gangs want to kill you, dealing with a coyote might be the best of your options.

[dramarising-replacement]

What we REALLY learned from BotE lore

I know I’m about a month too late for this but…. (Dadmin feel free to put a keep reading here if you think it’s too long)

Jailbreak- -Tundra??? Skydancer??? Eating fish??????? There’s like 6 different plant food granola ration items that would keep just fine??? -Either the breed diets are more of a preference or the writers just forgot their own lore, I’m inclined towards the second but the first is a plausible in-universe plot bandaid

-Dragons have surnames and with little exception they’re all warrior cats adjectivenoun shit. Because of course they are.

-Feathers can be unusually thick, apparently -Isolated beastclans unaware of/apathetic to the uprising are a thing -Most of the icefield is too dangerous to fly in -The fortress of ends is far from the only prison location -New location: Dripcave dregs -Icefield’s government so far seems to consist entirely of the (very harsh) prison system, so i guess the southern icefield is ice age america -[Racial tensions intensify] -Dragon money is accepted by at least some beastclans -Racial tensions not helped by language barrier -Rations stashed at key points along the mountains -Tundras become amnesic when stressed -Who/What the wardens are does not seem to be common knowledge -Oh hey look a new canon breed for one of the flights that only has one breed which isn’t very popular, which has unique lore, and a design that perfectly matches with many people’s wishes for “Something like a tundra but fiercer”, that i guarantee will be eternally left right next to couriers as “Perfectly good breeds that will never be implemented and the admins will never even tell us why” -They don’t seem to know much about other breeds -Like genders, for example -They also might be psychic -May or may not be ageless on top of that -Tundras are descended from them, which means at some point in the distant past some left for the surface and stayed there, which means these things are perfectly capable of joining surface society again -It seems a lot of the deities have disappointing giant first children that they want to hide/kill to bury their shame Ten Eyes- -New location: The Oculus of the Eleven -Like if the UN was also a wizard council -So far implied there haven’t been any major interflight wars for at least a few generations -Leylines are Serious Business™ -SMARK -SMARK -Mirror pack instincts are very strong -Dragons supposedly don’t have computers, but the leyline monitor things sound an awful lot like computers -Crystalspine mountains grow in response to ambient magic -Oculus seems to have been anticipating eventual sabotage of some variety for a long time -Age discrimination -Not only are dragon/beastclan racial tensions insanely high, but racial tensions between flights and breeds seem to be immense as well -Mirrors revert to base aggressive animal instincts when stressed -Even if they act like they’re friends they all actually hate eachother and will totally throw eachother under the buss at the first sign of trouble -Dragons know about the two arcane apocalypses(the first of which wasn’t technically the arcanist’s fault because he wasn’t fucking born yet but that’s a rant for a different time) -Mirrors can be blinded by enough heat -Uuuh -Uuummm -What, you wanted useful bits on what it’s actually like in arcane in general? Fuck you, have this rushed and thinly-veiled segway into lightning’s bit that takes place entirely inside an isolated dragon UN base with no elaboration on the outside world Temper, Temper- -Fire has kind of an Industrial revolution/great depression theme going on -Funding cutbacks -Railways confirmed -Imported materials confirmed -Racism again -Economic class divide -Angry coatls puff their feathers -Fire treats their working class like shit, and apparently has been for a very long time -Vocal Accents confirmed -I have no idea why Haemil isn’t overwhelmed by heat signatures all the time if just a few angry people was enough to blind Beatrix -Worker’s guilds are a thing. We have no idea how they work, but they’re a thing, and they have some amount of power. -Only the blacksmiths can withstand the great furnace -Volcano heartshaft -Dragons have explored at least as far down as the upper mantle -“Forgemasters” who seem to be greedy slavedriver corporate aristocrat types -Forgemaster council of some sort exists, and apparently is the closest there is to a central government -There’s a main cavern where the great furnace’s blacksmiths work and it has a big-ass gate on it -Fire tundras crop their fur and still get burned anyway -Ashfall wastes are the main exporters of tools and weapons -So, who wants to break the news to Por and Ventik that they literally cannot physically speak to eachother? -I suppose you could make the excuse that one of the others is translating, but i think they just forgot their own lore again. -Ashfall provides the tempest spire with bolts, rivets, and sheet metal -Arftificial scarcity to drive up demand is a thing in sornieth’s economy -Also, international economy is a thing -Apprenticeship is a thing -Giant bellows in the great furnace, operated by big tattooed imps who may or may not be exaltees -Non-arcane archmages -Other flights are required to construct sanctums whenever concentrations of magic are found -The Oculus doesn’t have anywhere near as much power across sornieth as it thinks it does-their efforts are easily foiled pretty much whenever the local government feels like it -They don’t seem to be very well-respected or even liked anywhere either -Magically-charged magma (and presumably other things) exist, and have useful scientific properties -Government’s first reaction to discovery of new resources/tech is to use it as an excuse to lay off most of their already-struggling workforce -Government cover-ups are also totally a thing -Apparently, tundras rarely frown -Parties of blacksmiths are sent to chart any caves discovered -Steel crates -New location: Flintlock Fumaroles -Professions are often handed down through families for generations -Individual clans are capable enough of reliable communication for a worker’s strike of this magnitude to be assembled in only days. -Flamecaller isn’t really present, and has fallen almost entirely into legend -You don’t have to be a skydancer to sense high levels of magic -There’s another volcano now, apparently even bigger and badder than the great furnace -Everyone’s been fired(lol), There’s a worker’s revolution going on, and there’s a whole new fucking island, all of which i’m sure will never be spoken of again. -If you claim it they will come A New Direction- -Ashfall wastes and Scarred wasteland are visible from the plateau -Dis place high yall -Dragons have trouble flying in stagnant air -Dragons sometimes rob couriers -Couriers run in an awkward waddle -The twisting crescendo is sentient, capable of appearing as a dragon, and, apparently, female -The windsinger can send magic statues in the mail or something idk i’m not sure anyone entirely knows what’s going on there -Windmills confirmed -That’s it -This one’s kinda simple -What, you wanted more useful detail on what life in the plateau is like? Fuck you, have this folk tale-sounding glorified space whale aesop Kindred Crossing- -At some point in the past, light and shadow made a failed attempt at an alliance that involved building portals that seem to only be able to activate during a lunar eclipse with the correct keystone like some lonely mountain shit(At least if admin comments on the forums are to be trusted) -Apparently the technology to make said portals was lost and the incident was forgotten about -Somehow this created the hewn city by bleeding the two together. Why shadow doesn’t have an unusually light-y area near the portal, i don’t know. -New location: thorndark altar, for all your cliche cultist needs -Lots of shadow pool and moon-related religious stuff -Creepy cult clans confirmed -Shadow goo smells like shit -Shadow goo puts out feeding tendrils -Awful mothers confirmed -Action figures confirmed -Whiny edgy teenagers confirmed -Some sect of shadow religion that multiple clans apparently follow involves elders in robes passing around candles with purple flames, creepy cultist chanting, and throwing prized possessions into the goo -Presumably this “sacrificing prized possessions” thing is not an isolated practice -“Voidling” seems to be an insult or derogatory title of some sort, in other news awful mother is awful. Something tells me her son being such a screwed-up asshole isn’t entirely his own fault. -“It’s not like he’ll remember it anyway”- That’s racist -The descriptive phrase “Dark hovels” is telling. Make of it what you will. -Lots of crazy ancient shit like this is absolutely hidden under pools and growth throughout the tangled wood -There are specialists trying to map the hewn city -I can’t help but feel like the specific wording of the description “A primitive hook-shaped runestone” says a little bit and the light flight’s attitude -Shadow flight has assassins specifically for the purpose of ruining light scholar’s work Ancient Fascinations- -Preservation guild is a thing, and presumably other guilds of similar function are too -Archeology confirmed -Most places still rely on torches and candles for light -Secretaries are a thing, which also means all the things that necessitate secretaries exist -Some weird monsters or some shit like that have popped into existence under dragonhome, and apparently are turning people into fossils or something -The things in question looks sort of like beastclans. Maybe undead second age creatures? -Government coverups: Archeology guild edition -Organizations take funding from wealthy sponsors -Imperials can be just as self-important as pearlcatchers -A very ominous, mysterious, wealthy, anonymous organization that if fiction has taught me anything can’t be up to any good -Even in fantasy dragon land you can acquire just about any historical artifact for your private collection by throwing enough money at it -What, you wanted more on what dragonhome is like for the average dragon? Fuck you, here’s a boring ametuer SCP story taking place entirely in an isolated archeology site. Workplace Hazards- -Lightning farm has monitoring equipment -Uhhh -Ummmmmm -Flying in storm bad -Shock switch is a real thing…? Maybe…? -Computers don’t exist yet, everyone still uses papers -… Even though that lightning farm monitoring equipment from just a few lines ago sounded an awful lot like a computer -Errrrrrr -Electrical engineer guild…..? -The shifting expanse does in fact have money -Cactus tea? Cactus fucking tea? -Aaaaaahhhh…? -Whelp lightning has effectively just withdrawn from the dragon un, secretly declared war on them, and pissed on their embassy just for good measure. you know, just in case the whole “Antithesis of all magic and nature, making them effectively the closest there is to a shade faction” thing wasn’t enough. -Unless the lore in the next one does a complete 180 and it turns out this is fine somehow or it’s because of a secret conspiracy unrelated to the flight or something, lightning is now likely THE designated antagonist faction and enemies with the entire world -Oh nooo sciency scientists with no morals are gonna destroy the world again with their scientific hubris!1!1! No bad things would ever happen if those darned scientists would just stop messing with nature and poking around where they don’t belong!1!! -Yeah, salary cycle.. That’s certainly……. A word……. That probably means something…… Which is never explained…. -Scientific scientists destroy non-sciency things because of science reasons, Next up our special guest Vulcan with “Emotion is illogical and must be destroyed” -Have fun being the designated wholly evil faction, nerds. Technology eats your soul. -What, you wanted lore that provided any insight whatsoever into what the expanse is like on any level, or at least something that didn’t spend every line it could going out of it’s way to emphasize how one-dimensionally amoral everyone and everything here is? -That’s stupid -You’re stupid -Fuck you and that train you rode in on -Here, have a bland thinly-veiled tacked on continuation of arcane’s story that pointedly goes out of it’s way to avoid introducing any significant new elements whatsoever because that could potentially humanize lightning on some level and interfere with our pushing the totally irredeemable mad scientists that need to be wiped out for the good of the world narrative, set almost exclusively in an equally bland extension of the dragon UN building that gets knocked over to make an evil hubris reactor because scientific scientists sciencing sciencly oppose all non-science. -Watch as all lore from now on is about how everything is lightning’s fault and they’re the enemies of all life or something -durr hurr science is scary thomas edison is a witch The Seed and the Sickness- -Plague and nature getting lumped together for no goddamned reason, as usual -If the excuse is because they’re twins then light and shadow should get lumped together too, light’s story is certainly short enough and they’re already semi-connected -Plague and nature have had an armistice for thousands of years -Why yes, let’s trade nukes every decade. How could this possibly go wrong. -Plague dragons have lots of scars and war paint and wear bones confirmed -Earth flight mediates because of course it does -Dragons know about the first battles of the plaguebringer and gladekeeper -Scarred wasteland is humid -Nature dragons tell horror stories about it -Quarantine zones for testing diseases -Plague actually specifically develops and tests diseases -Nature dragons can’t live in the scarred wasteland without special measures -Bonerguards -The behemoth is sick, possibly, maybe, it’s not entirely clear, probably just hallucinations -Secret ninjas poisoning ambassadors -“Be strong, survive” -Bone spears. *immature giggle* -Nature magic can do some pretty gory, fucked up stuff. Impaled corpses hanging from trees, anyone? -It’s nice to know the admins are allowed to write about shit like that but even having an argument written in a playermade bio puts it in the danger zone -Weaponized carnivorous plants -Plague breath is toxic gas and yellow goo -Other plague magic includes giant rotting membrane cocoons -Nature and plague are probably gonna go to war again, and might drag earth into it too -Now there’s a sick lady with a plant-nuke fused to her out there somewhere -In plague, if you’re hurt, too bad. Medical treatment is for the weak. Either you survive your open wounds or you don’t. Plague dragons covered in bloody bandages are not lore-freindly, because bandages mean they weren’t strong enough to tough it out themselves. -Also implied that plague looks down upon the dead in some way

-Plague also DEFINITELY hates doctors and medicine -Ohh nooo EEEVIL plague conspiracy involving the plague ambassador -You thought there would be equal sections for both ambassadors? The plague ambassador’s section is all of 3 sentences long and only exists to tell us how evil she is. -What, you wanted lore that expanded on what it’s like in nature in any significant way? Fuck you, have a bland sabotage plot that takes place entirely in the scarred wasteland with no mention of anything at all in the viridian labyrinth. -What, you wanted lore that expands on what it’s like in plague in any significant way? Fuck you, have a bland sabotage plot that takes place entirely in an isolated nature embassy with no mention of how anything outside it works. Hear Today, Gone Tomorrow- -Pearlcatchers have slings and bags to carry their pearls -New location: shoredeep presage -Divination caves that direct the tidelord’s prophecy bubbles up from the deep for rite-of-passage rituals -Prophets have multiple levels of rank based on age -Water dragons carve handholds to use in areas with strong tides -Divination requires specific rituals seemingly similar to alchemy, along with a blindfold and special chant -Braziers made of dried coral and shells -Dragons swim with their wings -Not all water dragons have divination powers, and the ones that don’t seem to be considered lesser -The first prophecy is meant to be carried to your grave -Dragons breathe water. With their lungs. -Fishing shacks exist -The weather in wind has a direct effect on the weather in other flights, in this case leveling the whole damn water flight because the crescendo decided it wanted to spin the other way -The crescendo also does not have a monopoly on the “gigantic magically-charged supercell” game, it’s just the most consistent one -Giant whirlpool. Maybe the spiral keep collapsed? -Prophecies tell you whatever the fuck they feel like telling you, not what you want them to -All the currents in the ocean have also changed thanks to the reversed wind -Fish daddy’s not talking anymore Raising a Family- -Did you really just use a Necromancer pun? Is the next line going to be about doing it on a budget? -Very short -So short it may as well be fused with shadow’s like they did with plague and nature -Emperors generally have extremely simple, childlike minds, with varying levels of decay, and are often deliriously happy -Always hungry -Think of eachother as siblings, it’s unclear if they really are or not. Technically siblings of multiple elements are possible if their parents traveled a lot. -Have fragmented and hazy memories of their past lives -Something about “Mother and other siblings”, possibly lightweaver -Hewn city has a border patrol -Emperors with less then 4 heads DO have enough juice to go apocalypse mode, despite what the encyclopedia says -The only one i genuinely enjoyed and felt was well-written -Except now there’s a fucking hydra-zombie rampaging through light flight. i’m sure that won’t be a problematic place to leave a cliffhanger dangling for months at all. Voices- -Leafmom’s worried, Germmom’s pissed -Droolmom thinks this is the funniest shit she’s seen in 10,000 years -Something’s wrong with sornieth’s molten core, i think -Icepop bragging about his limited edition Cthulhu collection -GLITTERMOM NO YOU RACIST FAVORITE-CHILD-PICKING BITCH I SWEAR IF YOU DO ANYTHING TO THOSE MURDERNOODLES -Noddledad don’t give a fuck -Daddy Cave Johnson definitely sanctioned this evil scientific hubris reactor. Goddammit Cave. -*Space dad creepily floating outside everyone Else’s window with binoculars* -Earthdad got a playmate, but they don’t seem friendly -*Goes around putting up missing posters for tidepapa*

[patriotsnet]

Who's Right Democrats Or Republicans

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

Who's Right Democrats Or Republicans

Views Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

Just under half of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while a slightly larger share have an unfavorable view.

The GOP is viewed more negatively 38% say they have a positive view of the Republican Party, while 60% rate it unfavorably. These views are modestly changed since last summer, with the share of Americans rating the GOP unfavorably slightly higher than it was in August and the share of Americans with a negative view of the Democratic Party down slightly .

About three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view the GOP favorably, while 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the Democratic Party positively.

Nearly all Republicans who say they strongly identify with the Republican Party express a favorable opinion of the GOP. Among Republicans who say they not so strongly identify with the party, 77% say have a favorable view, while 56% of independents who lean toward the Republican Party say the same.

Democrats who very strongly identify with the Democratic Party nearly universally view their party favorably, as do 87% of Democrats who describe themselves as not-so-strong Democrats. About six-in-ten Democratic leaners have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Within both partisan groups, views of the opposing party are overwhelmingly unfavorable across-the-board, with more than eight-in-ten strong partisans, not so strong partisans and leaners alike saying this.

Why Are An Elephant And A Donkey The Party Symbols

The Democratic party is often associated with the colour blue and the donkey mascot.

That dates back to Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential campaign, when opponents called him a “jackass” for his stubbornness.

Instead of taking the nickname as an insult, Jackson embraced it and used the donkey image on his election posters.

It was then quickly adopted by newspapers and political cartoonists.

The Republican’s elephant symbol came along years later.

Many believe it came about, in part, due to a widely used expression during the Civil War led by Republican president Abraham Lincoln.

Soldiers entering battle were said to be “seeing the elephant” a phrase that means learning a hard lesson, often with a profound cost.

The symbol was then popularised by political cartoonist Thomas Nast; an early rendition featured in the 1879 edition of Harper’s Weekly.

Both symbols are still largely used for political campaigns.

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

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

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

Crime And Capital Punishment

Republicans generally believe in harsher penalties when someone has committed a crime, including for selling illegal drugs. They also generally favor capital punishment and back a system with many layers to ensure the proper punishment has been meted out. Democrats are more progressive in their views, believing that crimes do not involve violence, such as selling drugs, should have lighter penalties and rehabilitation. They are also against capital punishment in any form.

Conservative Endorsements Of Democratic Candidates

During the 2004 election, several high-profile conservative writers endorsed the Presidential campaign of John Kerry, arguing that the Bush administration was pursuing policies which were anything but conservative. Among the most notable of these endorsements came from Andrew Sullivan and Paul Craig Roberts, while a series of editorials in Pat Buchanan‘s The American Conservative magazine made a conservative case for several candidates, with Scott McConnell formally endorsing Kerry, and Justin Raimondo giving the nod to Ralph Nader.

In South Carolina in , the Democratic candidate for United States Senator was Bob Conley, a traditional Catholic, and a former activist for the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul. Conley failed in his bid to defeat Lindsey Graham, receiving 42.4 percent of the vote.

In his campaign for reelection, Walter Minnick, U.S. Representative for Idaho’s 1st congressional district, was endorsed by Tea Party Express, an extremely rare occurrence for a Democrat. Minnick was the only Democrat to receive a 100% rating from the Club for Growth, an organization that typically supports conservative Republicans. Minnick lost to Raúl Labrador, a conservative Republican, in the general election.

Think Republicans Are Disconnected From Reality It’s Even Worse Among Liberals

Arlie Hochschild

A new survey found Democrats live with less political diversity despite being more tolerant of it with startling results

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today? Democrats guessed 50%. Its actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe most police are bad people. Republicans estimated half; its really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the studys findings: the wilder a persons guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

Read more

This effect, the report says, is so strong that without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree. And the more politically engaged a person is, the greater the distortion.

Should the US participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do? A majority of voters in both parties said yes.

Yes Dictators Sometimes Cloak Themselves In Socialism But Tyranny Here And Elsewhere Is Always Right

Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump

The meaning today of the Big Lie almost always refers to the false claim by Donald Trump and his right-wing cronies that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen by the left and Joe Biden, with the help of foreign agents.

Not only is this claim false, it is absurdly false.

This is hardly the first Big Lie from the right. Not even close. The right has been promulgating Big Lies for decades.

In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.

How in the world could 1% of the population ever win elections over the 99%? Simple. The 1% bamboozles the 99%. To win elections, the right must conceal its true intentions from the voters and instead engage in manipulative tactics, like lying and fearmongering.

The lies are not just little lies.They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.

Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.

Once again, this is the exact opposite of the truth. Dictatorships and fascism are right-wing, not left-wing.

Shockingly, this nonsense actually works.

Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

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Neither, that is shy you discuss and debate and come to an agreement. It is time that the people make them sit back in their seats in the house and Senate, give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerWhen the come to an agreement, then they can go home for a good night sleep and we will pick another issue and lock them in their chambers the next day and have them work that one out.Bet it would not take long for these idiots on both sides of the aisle to get the picture

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They are both wrong, but I think the Democrat senate is more wrong because they are trying to force an agreement using police stationed at national parks and monuments to make life hell for everyone. Also earlier last week the senate rejected a bill from house Republicans that would have delayed the shutdown for awhile./Edit:give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerNo no no, PBJs are too tasty. Give them bread and butter.

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Liars are the worst kind of thieves-Only trust Hell No Kitty

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What Does Left Mean

In politics, left refers to people and groups that have views. That generally means they support reforms, especially those seeking greater social and economic equality.

The farleft is often used for what is considered more extreme, views, such as and . Collectively, people and groups, as well as the positions they hold, are referred to as theLeft or the left wing.

Trump Supporters The Exception

Despite political rhetoric that places them at opposite ends of the spectrum, Republican and Democratic voters appear to be similarly compassionate.

Democrats view compassion as a political value while Republicans will integrate compassion into their politics when their leaders make it part of an explicit message.

There is a caveat to this: I asked these survey questions about personal feelings of compassion in a 2016 online survey that also asked about choice of president.

The survey was conducted a few days after Republican presidential primary candidates Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio had dropped out of the race, making Donald Trump the only viable Republican candidate for the nomination.

In their responses to the survey, a large percentage of Republican voters said they would rather vote for someone other than Trump, even though he was the unofficial nominee at that point.

The Republican voters who didnt support Trump were similar to Democrats on the survey with respect to their answers about compassion. Their average scores on the compassion items were the same. This is in line with the other survey data showing that liberals and conservatives, and Republicans and Democrats, are largely similar in these personality measures of compassion.

But Trump supporters answers were not in line with these findings.

The research indicates that appeals to compassion if made by trusted leaders should work for voters of both parties.

Republicans And Democrats After The Civil War

Its true that many of the first Ku Klux Klan members were Democrats. Its also true that the early Democratic Party opposed civil rights. But theres more to it.

The Civil War-era GOP wasnt that into civil rights. They were more interested in punishing the South for seceding, and monopolizing the new black vote.

In any event, by the 1890s, Republicans had begun to distance themselves from civil rights.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.  

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

The Democratic Party General Policy And Political Values

The Democratic Party generally represents left-leaning, liberal and progressive ideological values, thus advocating for a strong government to regulate business and support for the citizens of the United States. Thus, one of the key values emphasized by Democrats is social responsibility. Overall, Democrats believe that a prominent and powerful government can ensure welfare and equality for all. Much like the Republican Party, political opinions within the Democratic Party stretch across a wide spectrum, as both parties are, to a large degree, decentralized. However, from a general point of view, Democrats tend to support heavy taxation of high-income households. In comparison to Denmark, where taxes are generally high, the Democratic taxation policy may not seem excessive, but on a U.S. taxation scale these tax percentages are in the heavy end.

  Left Wing And Right Wing Politics

Politics is said to be split in half and you either have left or right political views. Left-wing politics is typically associated with progressive ideas and equality. Democrats are viewed as left-wingers. Right-wing politics values tradition, equity, and survival of the fittest. Republicans are viewed as right-wingers. 

Left-Wing

Left-wing beliefs are liberal in that they believe society is best served with an expanded role of the government. Examples of an expanded role for the government include entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, Medicaid, universal healthcare, food stamps, free public education, unemployment benefits, strong environmental laws, and other regulations on industries.

Right Wing

Right-wingers believe that the best outcome for society is achieved when individual rights and civil liberties are paramount and the role and especially the power of the government is minimized. Right-wing ideology would favor market-based solutions to the issues that these government programs aim to tackle. For example, encouraging a freer marketplace for healthcare, driven by consumer choice to drive down costs. Or privately held retirement accounts like 401 plans instead of government-guaranteed Social Security.

Democrats V Republicans On Jim Crow

Segregation and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

During this time, African Americans were largely disenfranchised. There was no African-American voting bloc. Neither party pursued civil rights policies it wasnt worth their while.

Photo Credit

Democrats dominated Southern politics throughout the Jim Crow Era. Its fair to say that Democratic governors and legislatures are responsible for creating and upholding white supremacist policies.

Southern Democrats were truly awful.

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

Todays Republicans Really Hate Democrats And Democracy

1) Trumps supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas

This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called MAGA voters by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.

These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.

Is God A Democrat Or A Republican

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the United States are political parties.  God is so much bigger than any political party.  He is bigger than the United States of America or any other country.  He is bigger than the world we live in.

Psalm 8:3 says God created the stars with His fingers.  Considering that our local star, the sun, is 70 times the size of the Earth, that would make God very big.  Human issues are very small to Him but we will be judged by what we do.

We as believers need to keep our political party in check and be praying for the leadership of our nations.  In the United States, historically parties or groups of organized political interests came later.  The majority of the early settlers were true Christians fleeing persecution and the government trying to control them through a political church.  The Democrats have been considered the party of the people or working class and the Republicans the party of business professionals for decades.  In actuality, that is not true.

Abraham Lincoln was the US President who fought to hold the United States together when division arose about whether African slaves were people or just property of their owners.  It was the Republican party that won the right of the slaves to have true freedom not the Democrats.

Vice Presidents Of The United States

John C. Breckinridge, 14th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from Kentucky , Member, United States House of Representatives from Kentucky’s 8th District , Member, Kentucky House of Representatives from Fayette County . He was presidential nominee of the southern Democratic Party in 1860.

John C. Calhoun, 7th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from South Carolina , 16th United States Secretary of State , 10th Secretary of War , Member, United States House of Representatives from South Carolina’s 6th District . He was a supporter of slavery, state sovereignty and a proponent of the theory of nullification.

John Nance Garner, 32nd Vice President of the United States , Member, United States House of Representatives from 15th District of Texas , 39th Speaker of the House of Representatives , House Minority Leader , Leader, House Democratic Caucus , Member, Texas House of Representatives from Texas 91st District , County Judge, Uvalde County Texas . He supported the poll tax. Although he served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he turned against Roosevelt during his second term, taking a more conservative stance on several issues.

Thomas A. Hendricks, 21st Vice President of the United States , 16th Governor of Indiana , United States Senator from , and member of the United States House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district and Indiana’s 5th congressional district .

What Is Happening To The Republicans

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

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Content

But, for all the anxiety among Republican leaders, Goldwater prevailed, securing the nomination at the Partys convention, in San Francisco. In his speech to the delegates, he made no pretense of his ideological intent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Goldwaters crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedys assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwaters ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.

agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

History Of The Republican Party

The Republican Party came into existence just prior to the Civil War due to their long-time stance in favor of abolition of slavery. They were a small third-party who nominated John C. Freemont for President in 1856. In 1860 they became an established political party when their nominee Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States. Lincolns Presidency throughout the war, including his policies to end slavery for good helped solidify the Republican Party as a major force in American politics. The elephant was chosen as their symbol in 1874 based on a cartoon in Harpers Weekly that depicted the new party as an elephant.

Democratic Candidate Joe Biden

Reuters: Carlos Barria

The Democrats are the liberal political party and their candidate is Joe Biden, who has run for president twice before.

A former senator for Delaware who served six terms, Biden is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

He held that role for eight years, and it has helped make him a major contender for many Democrat supporters.

Earlier this year, Biden chose California Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

The 77-year-old has built his campaign on the Obama legacy, and tackling the country’s staggering health care issues.

He is known for his down-to-earth personality and his ability to connect with working-class voters. He would be the oldest first-term president in history if elected.

According to 2017 Pew Research Centre data, a vast majority of the African American population supports the Democratic party, with 88 per cent voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential elections.

The Philosophy Behind Republican Economic Policy

Republicans advocate supply-side economics that primarily benefits businesses and investors. This theory states that tax cuts on businesses allow them to hire more workers, in turn increasing demand and growth. In theory, the increased revenue from a stronger economy offsets the initial revenue loss over time.

Republicans advocate the right to pursue prosperity without government interference. They argue this is achieved by self-discipline, enterprise, saving, and investing.

Republicans business-friendly approach leads most people to believe that they are better for the economy. A closer look reveals that Democrats are, in many respects, actually better.

A Record Number Of Americans Say Democrats And Republicans Are Doing Such A Poor Job That A Third Party Is Needed Polling Shows

Dissatisfaction with two-party politics is at an all-time high, new Gallup polling shows, with 62 percent of Americans saying Democrats and Republicans are doing such a poor job of representing their constituents that a third party is needed.

But the zero-sum, winner-take-all dynamics of U.S. elections make it nearly impossible for third parties to gain electoral traction, despite survey data that shows fully half of Americans do not identify with any party and label themselves independents. This was underscored this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when former president Donald Trump ruled out creating a third political party to promote his brand of nationalist conservatism.

To hear those calling for change including many scholars and some lawmakers the inherent problem with our current system is that it shoehorns the into just two parties. Warnings that the nation has backslid toward autocracy driven in large part by the Republican Partys shift away from democratic norms bring added urgency, they say, and reversing that Trump-era trend will require something radical: breaking up the Democratic and Republican parties.

[antoine-roquentin]

First, take a look at the very equivocal position of the Democratic leadership. One little noted detail is important. An amendment inserted in the lame-duck legislation that enshrined the “Swaps Pushout” weakening of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in January 2015, made it easier for big donors to funnel much larger sums of money to the national party committees. This has, I think, made it even easier for blocs of big donors to control those committees, even as small contributions sometimes surge. Not only in 2018, but in the 2020 primaries, I think this mattered.

As a result, the Democratic National Committee has not been subordinated to the Biden campaign, at least not yet. The surge in the southern Democratic primaries that destroyed the Sanders boom involved many big Democratic donors along with many black congressmen and women, together with the political and financial networks of former president Barack Obama and the Clintons. It was a coming together of the entire Democratic establishment to stop Sanders. Congressional black leaders were thus heavily identified with the “Stop Sanders” movement, too.

But with the combined economic collapse and the pandemic revealing the bankruptcy of the traditional establishment, the whole top of the party has had to scramble. How they have responded is very interesting. Thanks to the dissemination of so many videos, the realization about the racism that black Americans face — and not just by so many police — is very widespread. The revulsion is deep and real.

In response, the Democratic establishment is taking a leaf from the past — not the late ’60s, when groups highly critical of the Democrats became prominent, but the early ’60s. Joel Rogers and I described the process in our book Right Turn. When the civil rights movement emerged, major foundations, prominent business leaders of major multinationals, and foundations allied to them heavily supported that groundswell. John F. Kennedy famously called Martin Luther King in jail, while prominent Wall Street lawyers flew down south or otherwise helped represent civil rights campaigners who were under legal attack. That’s what’s happening right now, with groups closely allied with the Democratic Party helping to raise money. There will be tensions now, as there were then, between the party and the movement, but that’s the basic direction things are taking.                

So how does this play into the election?                                   

I think the basic script each party is following is evident. Democrats are hoping for a repeat of 2008. In that election, policy was hopelessly bungled by the Republican leadership. After Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, nobody in opposition had to say very much. Democrats could just sit and watch John McCain flail helplessly.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly copying the Nixon playbook, though because he’s in power, 1972 is closer to the mark than 1968. His administration’s heavy-handed appeals to “law and order” are obvious, and so are the ways he tries to bait protesters. The “law and order” mantra is looking a bit thin, though, partly because the videos and protests so clearly touch a chord with many members of the public. But it is also apparent that the US military wants no part in quelling domestic protests, so that the best Trump is likely to be able to do is to try to irritate protesters and hope for strong public reactions. Attorney general William Barr is also pitching in, in spectacular fashion.

The other thing the White House is bent on doing is finding a way to levitate the economy. In 1972, Richard Nixon famously relied on Arthur Burns at the Fed to engineer a legendary political business cycle. Today’s Fed certainly reacts to pressures from Trump, but the drastically different world situation severely limits its room for maneuver. It can hardly do more than it has even if it wanted to.

This is why the president and the vice president are trying so desperately to downplay the pandemic. They want to drive people back to work and push up the GDP. Vice president Mike Pence is plainly encouraging state leaders to talk up their successes and downplay bad news, including spiking COVID-19 cases in the South and West. The White House thinks they have to get the economy moving again or Trump will be toast in November.           

How different is this from what the administration was doing earlier?  

It represents a doubling down on policies that Trump and his camp wanted to promote earlier and did for a while. As the pandemic hit, all over the developed world, prominent business figures and conservative economists warned about the dangers of a long lockdown. Some, including an occasional central banker, even talked sotto voce about how such policies would reduce state pension obligations. In the United States, the UK, and other European countries, advocates talked up the idea of “herd immunity.” Trump’s “kitchen cabinet” of business figures, including prominent private equity managers, were repeatedly cited as pushing the president to take a “go slow” attitude on lockdowns.

After the publication of the Imperial College estimates of the death rates such policies would entail, though, enthusiasm waned. The UK changed policy. The switch definitely affected the Trump administration’s attitudes. It helped, along with the ghastly reality of what was happening on the ground, especially on the East and West coasts of the United States, to force the administration to accept lockdowns and sheltering in place. Both in the United States and in the UK, though, pressures from business groups for rapid reopening remained very strong. Conservative groups have even urged reopening without establishing a viable testing regime, which is exactly what the administration has now done.

Clear camps are forming within business, and those look to be seeping into politics. Many small companies whose business models rest on low wages, along with financiers — meaning private equity first and foremost — whose strategies depend on buying and breaking up firms, continue to plump for rapid reopening.

By contrast, many firms in the rest of finance, and especially in high-tech and capital-intensive industries whose strategies do not rest on low wages, are less heedless of the dangers of quick opening. Many tech firms enthusiastically promote their products as solutions to the problems the pandemic creates — as is obvious with many internet and software companies. Robert Rubin called for joint panels of medical professionals and economists to decide when reopening was feasible and for contact tracing; even robotic assistance has been touted.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, is the critical question of worker safety. Trump gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Not only is the number of inspectors way down, but key appointees are plainly uninterested in regulating on the issue at all.

It seems to me that this is a potentially fateful intersection between the movement growing out of Minneapolis and the Democrats. Calls to reopen quickly are basically demands by affluent white-collar managers who can work at home. They want to send blue-collar workers back to work under conditions the senior executives would not accept for themselves. Many of the blue-collar workers are, it is important to add, black or Latino. Though you would never know from reading any major newspaper, wildcat and other strikes have soared since Minneapolis. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of them, as Mike Elk’s Payday Report website is documenting. It seems clear that the protests have inspired many black and Latino workers to demand safe working conditions.

I don’t have much to say for the classic financial bailouts the United States has pursued — they protect the wealth of those that have it, while the government does something, but not much, to protect the livelihood of average citizens. But it would make a great deal of sense to move onto the national balance sheet the costs of redesigning work to make it safe. That would be a really good use of public resources.                              

So how does this play out in the election?                                                   

Right now, COVID-19 cases are soaring in many Southern and Western states, whose Republican governors had followed the White House lead and pretended the pandemic was over or would somehow never reach them. As a result, you can feel a seismic tremor in Trump’s support: the fabled 40 percent or so base level for him that people thought could never be breached is being broken.

But I remember 1988 very well, when Michael Dukakis was almost 20 points ahead of George H. W. Bush in late summer. A lot can happen to change what looks like an all but insurmountable advantage. One needs to remember that Biden looks good mostly next to Trump; the Democratic candidate doesn’t generate much enthusiasm from voters on his own. How the Biden campaign can tap the energy that fueled Sanders, and, to some extent, Warren, is not clear yet. The terms of trade between the camps are still being worked out, and the effort could fail. If Democratic elites are dumb enough to believe the claims so many have made that 2016 had nothing to do with economics, they could repeat that disaster.

I have a hard time believing that people who are out of work and watching how the government is allowing insurers to slip out of covering the costs of COVID tests will be inspired to vote for Biden without something far stronger than a “public option” for health care instead of Medicare for All, for example.

Plenty else can go wrong, too. Let’s just bracket the possibility of some foreign crisis, especially in the South China Sea, since it’s also clear Trump right now is still hoping that a big trade deal with China might come through. Otherwise, there are the old reliables for the GOP: efforts to hold down voter turnout and giant flows of big money.

This year, though, there’s a wrinkle to the first one. Trump’s campaign against the Post Office may have started out as a fight with Amazon, but right now, it’s clearly turned into something else. Empirical evidence from the Wisconsin primary is clear that voting in person led to several waves of new COVID infections.

As a result, interest in mail balloting is way up. Of course, Republicans are mostly opposed to that, though empirical evidence up to now does not suggest that mail ballots have strong partisan advantages one way or the other. But, of course, a broke Post Office won’t be delivering much of anything. My guess is that you’ll see Trump dig in ever more obdurately on this issue as election day approaches.

Which brings us to the money question. Here, I don’t have much to add to what my colleagues Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote earlier in the year. In 2016, we found that Trump floated to victory on a big wave of late money from large private equity firms, among others. We also conjectured that the perfect correlation for the first time in American history between Republican success in Senate elections and the outcome of the presidential vote in states was not an accident. That turned out to be true. Trump did a bit better in states with Senate races. We’ve now shown how late money turned around those Senate races, when prospects just weeks before the election looked hopeless. That example is instructive. Democratic candidates who lost elections in those final days have told me how they watched the inflow of money turn around what had seemed a favorable situation. Problems with even counting ballots are, I think, likely to make 2020 very tense, no matter what polls say now or even the day before. Whether we live in a pre- or a post-apocalyptic era might be tested.

[statetalks]

Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

Views Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

Just under half of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while a slightly larger share have an unfavorable view.

The GOP is viewed more negatively 38% say they have a positive view of the Republican Party, while 60% rate it unfavorably. These views are modestly changed since last summer, with the share of Americans rating the GOP unfavorably slightly higher than it was in August and the share of Americans with a negative view of the Democratic Party down slightly .

About three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view the GOP favorably, while 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the Democratic Party positively.

Nearly all Republicans who say they strongly identify with the Republican Party express a favorable opinion of the GOP. Among Republicans who say they not so strongly identify with the party, 77% say have a favorable view, while 56% of independents who lean toward the Republican Party say the same.

Democrats who very strongly identify with the Democratic Party nearly universally view their party favorably, as do 87% of Democrats who describe themselves as not-so-strong Democrats. About six-in-ten Democratic leaners have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Within both partisan groups, views of the opposing party are overwhelmingly unfavorable across-the-board, with more than eight-in-ten strong partisans, not so strong partisans and leaners alike saying this.

Why Are An Elephant And A Donkey The Party Symbols

The Democratic party is often associated with the colour blue and the donkey mascot.

That dates back to Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson’s 1828 presidential campaign, when opponents called him a “jackass” for his stubbornness.

Instead of taking the nickname as an insult, Jackson embraced it and used the donkey image on his election posters.

It was then quickly adopted by newspapers and political cartoonists.

The Republican’s elephant symbol came along years later.

Many believe it came about, in part, due to a widely used expression during the Civil War led by Republican president Abraham Lincoln.

Soldiers entering battle were said to be “seeing the elephant” a phrase that means learning a hard lesson, often with a profound cost.

The symbol was then popularised by political cartoonist Thomas Nast; an early rendition featured in the 1879 edition of Harper’s Weekly.

Both symbols are still largely used for political campaigns.

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

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

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

Crime And Capital Punishment

Republicans generally believe in harsher penalties when someone has committed a crime, including for selling illegal drugs. They also generally favor capital punishment and back a system with many layers to ensure the proper punishment has been meted out. Democrats are more progressive in their views, believing that crimes do not involve violence, such as selling drugs, should have lighter penalties and rehabilitation. They are also against capital punishment in any form.

Conservative Endorsements Of Democratic Candidates

During the 2004 election, several high-profile conservative writers endorsed the Presidential campaign of John Kerry, arguing that the Bush administration was pursuing policies which were anything but conservative. Among the most notable of these endorsements came from Andrew Sullivan and Paul Craig Roberts, while a series of editorials in Pat Buchanan‘s The American Conservative magazine made a conservative case for several candidates, with Scott McConnell formally endorsing Kerry, and Justin Raimondo giving the nod to Ralph Nader.

In South Carolina in , the Democratic candidate for United States Senator was Bob Conley, a traditional Catholic, and a former activist for the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul. Conley failed in his bid to defeat Lindsey Graham, receiving 42.4 percent of the vote.

In his campaign for reelection, Walter Minnick, U.S. Representative for Idaho’s 1st congressional district, was endorsed by Tea Party Express, an extremely rare occurrence for a Democrat. Minnick was the only Democrat to receive a 100% rating from the Club for Growth, an organization that typically supports conservative Republicans. Minnick lost to Raúl Labrador, a conservative Republican, in the general election.

Think Republicans Are Disconnected From Reality It’s Even Worse Among Liberals

Arlie Hochschild

A new survey found Democrats live with less political diversity despite being more tolerant of it with startling results

In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: How many Republicans believe that racism is still a problem in America today? Democrats guessed 50%. Its actually 79%. The survey asked Republicans how many Democrats believe most police are bad people. Republicans estimated half; its really 15%.

The survey, published by the thinktank More in Common as part of its Hidden Tribes of America project, was based on a sample of more than 2,000 people. One of the studys findings: the wilder a persons guess as to what the other party is thinking, the more likely they are to also personally disparage members of the opposite party as mean, selfish or bad. Not only do the two parties diverge on a great many issues, they also disagree on what they disagree on.

Read more

This effect, the report says, is so strong that without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree. And the more politically engaged a person is, the greater the distortion.

Should the US participate in the Paris climate accord and reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do? A majority of voters in both parties said yes.

Yes Dictators Sometimes Cloak Themselves In Socialism But Tyranny Here And Elsewhere Is Always Right

Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump

The meaning today of the Big Lie almost always refers to the false claim by Donald Trump and his right-wing cronies that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen by the left and Joe Biden, with the help of foreign agents.

Not only is this claim false, it is absurdly false.

This is hardly the first Big Lie from the right. Not even close. The right has been promulgating Big Lies for decades.

In fact, lying is the only way the right wing can win elections. After all, its policies are profoundly unpopular with ordinary people because the right-wing favors the 1% rich over the 99% working and middle classes.

How in the world could 1% of the population ever win elections over the 99%? Simple. The 1% bamboozles the 99%. To win elections, the right must conceal its true intentions from the voters and instead engage in manipulative tactics, like lying and fearmongering.

The lies are not just little lies.They are whoppers. They are the complete opposite of the truth. They are 180 degrees from the truth. They are the polar opposite of the truth, like from the North Pole all the way to the South Pole. Hence the term Big Lie.

Yet, shockingly, many of these egregious lies actually work. They take hold. They create a false impression in the mind of the public.

Once again, this is the exact opposite of the truth. Dictatorships and fascism are right-wing, not left-wing.

Shockingly, this nonsense actually works.

Who’s Right Democrats Or Republicans

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Neither, that is shy you discuss and debate and come to an agreement. It is time that the people make them sit back in their seats in the house and Senate, give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerWhen the come to an agreement, then they can go home for a good night sleep and we will pick another issue and lock them in their chambers the next day and have them work that one out.Bet it would not take long for these idiots on both sides of the aisle to get the picture

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They are both wrong, but I think the Democrat senate is more wrong because they are trying to force an agreement using police stationed at national parks and monuments to make life hell for everyone. Also earlier last week the senate rejected a bill from house Republicans that would have delayed the shutdown for awhile./Edit:give the a bucket to go to the bathroom and PBJ’s for breakfast lunch and DinnerNo no no, PBJs are too tasty. Give them bread and butter.

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Liars are the worst kind of thieves-Only trust Hell No Kitty

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What Does Left Mean

In politics, left refers to people and groups that have views. That generally means they support reforms, especially those seeking greater social and economic equality.

The farleft is often used for what is considered more extreme, views, such as and . Collectively, people and groups, as well as the positions they hold, are referred to as theLeft or the left wing.

Trump Supporters The Exception

Despite political rhetoric that places them at opposite ends of the spectrum, Republican and Democratic voters appear to be similarly compassionate.

Democrats view compassion as a political value while Republicans will integrate compassion into their politics when their leaders make it part of an explicit message.

There is a caveat to this: I asked these survey questions about personal feelings of compassion in a 2016 online survey that also asked about choice of president.

The survey was conducted a few days after Republican presidential primary candidates Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio had dropped out of the race, making Donald Trump the only viable Republican candidate for the nomination.

In their responses to the survey, a large percentage of Republican voters said they would rather vote for someone other than Trump, even though he was the unofficial nominee at that point.

The Republican voters who didnt support Trump were similar to Democrats on the survey with respect to their answers about compassion. Their average scores on the compassion items were the same. This is in line with the other survey data showing that liberals and conservatives, and Republicans and Democrats, are largely similar in these personality measures of compassion.

But Trump supporters answers were not in line with these findings.

The research indicates that appeals to compassion if made by trusted leaders should work for voters of both parties.

Republicans And Democrats After The Civil War

Its true that many of the first Ku Klux Klan members were Democrats. Its also true that the early Democratic Party opposed civil rights. But theres more to it.

The Civil War-era GOP wasnt that into civil rights. They were more interested in punishing the South for seceding, and monopolizing the new black vote.

In any event, by the 1890s, Republicans had begun to distance themselves from civil rights.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.  

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

The Democratic Party General Policy And Political Values

The Democratic Party generally represents left-leaning, liberal and progressive ideological values, thus advocating for a strong government to regulate business and support for the citizens of the United States. Thus, one of the key values emphasized by Democrats is social responsibility. Overall, Democrats believe that a prominent and powerful government can ensure welfare and equality for all. Much like the Republican Party, political opinions within the Democratic Party stretch across a wide spectrum, as both parties are, to a large degree, decentralized. However, from a general point of view, Democrats tend to support heavy taxation of high-income households. In comparison to Denmark, where taxes are generally high, the Democratic taxation policy may not seem excessive, but on a U.S. taxation scale these tax percentages are in the heavy end.

  Left Wing And Right Wing Politics

Politics is said to be split in half and you either have left or right political views. Left-wing politics is typically associated with progressive ideas and equality. Democrats are viewed as left-wingers. Right-wing politics values tradition, equity, and survival of the fittest. Republicans are viewed as right-wingers. 

Left-Wing

Left-wing beliefs are liberal in that they believe society is best served with an expanded role of the government. Examples of an expanded role for the government include entitlement programs such as social security and Medicare, Medicaid, universal healthcare, food stamps, free public education, unemployment benefits, strong environmental laws, and other regulations on industries.

Right Wing

Right-wingers believe that the best outcome for society is achieved when individual rights and civil liberties are paramount and the role and especially the power of the government is minimized. Right-wing ideology would favor market-based solutions to the issues that these government programs aim to tackle. For example, encouraging a freer marketplace for healthcare, driven by consumer choice to drive down costs. Or privately held retirement accounts like 401 plans instead of government-guaranteed Social Security.

Democrats V Republicans On Jim Crow

Segregation and Jim Crow lasted for 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

During this time, African Americans were largely disenfranchised. There was no African-American voting bloc. Neither party pursued civil rights policies it wasnt worth their while.

Photo Credit

Democrats dominated Southern politics throughout the Jim Crow Era. Its fair to say that Democratic governors and legislatures are responsible for creating and upholding white supremacist policies.

Southern Democrats were truly awful.

Where Do Trump And Biden Stand On Key Issues

Reuters: Brian Snyder/AP: Julio Cortez

The key issues grappling the country can be broken down into five main categories: coronavirus, health care, foreign policy, immigration and criminal justice.

This year, a big focus of the election has been the coronavirus pandemic, which could be a deciding factor in how people vote, as the country’s contentious healthcare system struggles to cope.

The average healthcare costs for COVID-19 treatment is up to $US30,000 , an Americas Health Insurance Plans 2020 study has found.

Todays Republicans Really Hate Democrats And Democracy

1) Trumps supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas

This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called MAGA voters by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.

These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.

Is God A Democrat Or A Republican

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the United States are political parties.  God is so much bigger than any political party.  He is bigger than the United States of America or any other country.  He is bigger than the world we live in.

Psalm 8:3 says God created the stars with His fingers.  Considering that our local star, the sun, is 70 times the size of the Earth, that would make God very big.  Human issues are very small to Him but we will be judged by what we do.

We as believers need to keep our political party in check and be praying for the leadership of our nations.  In the United States, historically parties or groups of organized political interests came later.  The majority of the early settlers were true Christians fleeing persecution and the government trying to control them through a political church.  The Democrats have been considered the party of the people or working class and the Republicans the party of business professionals for decades.  In actuality, that is not true.

Abraham Lincoln was the US President who fought to hold the United States together when division arose about whether African slaves were people or just property of their owners.  It was the Republican party that won the right of the slaves to have true freedom not the Democrats.

Vice Presidents Of The United States

John C. Breckinridge, 14th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from Kentucky , Member, United States House of Representatives from Kentucky’s 8th District , Member, Kentucky House of Representatives from Fayette County . He was presidential nominee of the southern Democratic Party in 1860.

John C. Calhoun, 7th Vice President of the United States , United States Senator from South Carolina , 16th United States Secretary of State , 10th Secretary of War , Member, United States House of Representatives from South Carolina’s 6th District . He was a supporter of slavery, state sovereignty and a proponent of the theory of nullification.

John Nance Garner, 32nd Vice President of the United States , Member, United States House of Representatives from 15th District of Texas , 39th Speaker of the House of Representatives , House Minority Leader , Leader, House Democratic Caucus , Member, Texas House of Representatives from Texas 91st District , County Judge, Uvalde County Texas . He supported the poll tax. Although he served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he turned against Roosevelt during his second term, taking a more conservative stance on several issues.

Thomas A. Hendricks, 21st Vice President of the United States , 16th Governor of Indiana , United States Senator from , and member of the United States House of Representatives from Indiana’s 6th congressional district and Indiana’s 5th congressional district .

What Is Happening To The Republicans

In becoming the party of Trump, the G.O.P. confronts the kind of existential crisis that has destroyed American parties in the past.

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Content

But, for all the anxiety among Republican leaders, Goldwater prevailed, securing the nomination at the Partys convention, in San Francisco. In his speech to the delegates, he made no pretense of his ideological intent. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Goldwaters crusade failed in November of 1964, when the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who had become President a year earlier, after Kennedys assassination, won in a landslide: four hundred and eighty-six to fifty-two votes in the Electoral College. Nevertheless, Goldwaters ascent was a harbinger of the future shape of the Republican Party. He represented an emerging nexus between white conservatives in the West and in the South, where five states voted for him over Johnson.

agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

History Of The Republican Party

The Republican Party came into existence just prior to the Civil War due to their long-time stance in favor of abolition of slavery. They were a small third-party who nominated John C. Freemont for President in 1856. In 1860 they became an established political party when their nominee Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States. Lincolns Presidency throughout the war, including his policies to end slavery for good helped solidify the Republican Party as a major force in American politics. The elephant was chosen as their symbol in 1874 based on a cartoon in Harpers Weekly that depicted the new party as an elephant.

Democratic Candidate Joe Biden

Reuters: Carlos Barria

The Democrats are the liberal political party and their candidate is Joe Biden, who has run for president twice before.

A former senator for Delaware who served six terms, Biden is best known as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

He held that role for eight years, and it has helped make him a major contender for many Democrat supporters.

Earlier this year, Biden chose California Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

The 77-year-old has built his campaign on the Obama legacy, and tackling the country’s staggering health care issues.

He is known for his down-to-earth personality and his ability to connect with working-class voters. He would be the oldest first-term president in history if elected.

According to 2017 Pew Research Centre data, a vast majority of the African American population supports the Democratic party, with 88 per cent voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential elections.

The Philosophy Behind Republican Economic Policy

Republicans advocate supply-side economics that primarily benefits businesses and investors. This theory states that tax cuts on businesses allow them to hire more workers, in turn increasing demand and growth. In theory, the increased revenue from a stronger economy offsets the initial revenue loss over time.

Republicans advocate the right to pursue prosperity without government interference. They argue this is achieved by self-discipline, enterprise, saving, and investing.

Republicans business-friendly approach leads most people to believe that they are better for the economy. A closer look reveals that Democrats are, in many respects, actually better.

A Record Number Of Americans Say Democrats And Republicans Are Doing Such A Poor Job That A Third Party Is Needed Polling Shows

Dissatisfaction with two-party politics is at an all-time high, new Gallup polling shows, with 62 percent of Americans saying Democrats and Republicans are doing such a poor job of representing their constituents that a third party is needed.

But the zero-sum, winner-take-all dynamics of U.S. elections make it nearly impossible for third parties to gain electoral traction, despite survey data that shows fully half of Americans do not identify with any party and label themselves independents. This was underscored this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when former president Donald Trump ruled out creating a third political party to promote his brand of nationalist conservatism.

To hear those calling for change including many scholars and some lawmakers the inherent problem with our current system is that it shoehorns the into just two parties. Warnings that the nation has backslid toward autocracy driven in large part by the Republican Partys shift away from democratic norms bring added urgency, they say, and reversing that Trump-era trend will require something radical: breaking up the Democratic and Republican parties.

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/whos-right-democrats-or-republicans/

[lightoftruth]

It seems as though “wokeness” ideology is taking over our society with everyone from churches, to schools, to giant corporations seeing who can be the most “woke.” Generally, “woke” ideas emphasize feelings over facts, pretend that individuals determine reality for themselves (i.e. your “truth”), put a priority on affirming feelings, ideas, or behaviors rather than willing someone’s actual good, and often deny even the ability to know objective truth. Being “woke” means you have become enlightened to the alleged systemic oppression of various groups and you vow to fight for “social justice” which usually means working for equal economic and social outcomes in a given context.

In reality, the current popular understanding of “social justice” that undergirds the “woke” movement is the opposite of the good all humans should pursue and is anything but just (i.e. giving someone their due). Historic Christianity, and even things like logic and science, are seen as opressive, racist, bigoted, etc. Today’s “woke” culture is tearing our society apart and erecting barriers to people considering the true Gospel and the freedom it provides. While acknowledging the need to combat actual instances of racism and bigotry, the Church should summarily reject the major notions of “wokeness” ideology, critical race theory (CRT), “white guilt,” and “white fragility” for several reasons.

False Ideas and Fallacious Thinking

One reason to reject such thinking is that many of these ideas are built upon the false notion of standpoint epistemology that essentially rejects the ability of, or even need for, humans to know objective truth about reality. As one evangelical professor says, “CRT scholars ‘reject the prevailing orthodoxy that scholarship should be or could be “neutral” and “objective.”’ … Human beings are perspectival knowers. We learn about, see, and treat things from tradition-bound perspectives. Our scholarship, then, never arises from a neutral, objective view from nowhere.” This, however, is a completely self-defeating proposition as it itself claims to be an objective truth about “scholarship” that somehow transcends his own “tradition-bound perspectives.” Sadly, this type of thinking saturates both the CRT movement and the Bible and philosophy departments of many evangelical institutions. Carried to its ultimate end, such thinking makes biblical exegesis subjective if not meaningless.

In addition, “woke” ideology is largely built upon the idea that every individual is either racist or anti-racist. Any reasons one provides to prove he is not a racist is used as evidence for his alleged racism. This dichotomy is in fact a false dilemma and the logic underpinning it is fallacious. Even further, these ideas violate the command of Jesus to love God and love others (ex. Love your enemies; Love keeps no record of wrongs; Love wills the good of others; etc.). They remove any personal responsibility and choice from individuals and place guilt on a collective group of people simply because of their skin color. This is the epitome of collectivist and racist thinking. While individuals are certainly impacted and influenced by the societal structure which they have experienced, ultimately individuals are responsible for their own behavior.

Loving Our Neighbors Well

It’s time to love our neighbors well by boldly standing for truth and goodness. The Apostle Paul says, “Do not participate in the useless deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them … For this reason it says, ‘Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’ So then, be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of your time …” (Eph. 5:11-16, NASB). Classical natural law thinking found in scholars such as Thomas Aquinas gives us an objective basis, common to all human beings and consistent with God’s inerrant Word, from which we can fight the real evils of racism and bigotry while also shining light on the unfruitful ideas of the cult-like movement of “wokeness.”

Edward Feser recognizes the irony, “The currency of the term ‘social justice’ originated in Thomistic natural law theory. … It has to do with the just or right ordering of society as defined by strong families and cooperation between husband and wife in carrying out their respective roles for the sake of children and elders, solidarity and cooperation between economic classes and other social groups, and scrupulous attention to subsidiarity in the state’s relationship to the ‘little platoons’ of society.” Good philosophy (such as classical natural law theory) and good theology give us the needed tools to expose the “wokeness” ideology standing in the way of the Gospel.

To effectively engage with this “woke” culture, you will need a deeply integrated understanding of theology, philosophy, and apologetics—the bedrock of an accredited degree or certificate from Southern Evangelical Seminary and Bible College (SES). SES is committed to training believers to effectively proclaim the Gospel, engage bad ideas in the public square, and defend objective truth and goodness. As SES co-founder, Dr. Norman Geisler, said, “[Apologetics] is opening the door, clearing the rubble, and getting rid of the hurdles so that people can come to Christ.”

Take a moment right now to download our FREE ebook Three Reasons a Seminary Education May Be Right for You. Regardless of your particular vocation or ministry context, sound apologetics that is undergirded with good philosophy and theology is a must for doing the heavy lifting of removing the hurdles that prohibit many in our “woke” post-Christian society from considering the Gospel.

We cannot love our neighbors well and lead them to the feet of Jesus if we sacrifice truth and goodness on the false altar of “wokeness” ideology. It’s time to wake up.

[wolfandpravato]

Why slippery slope arguments should not stop us from removing Confederate monuments

Statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, VA.

This past weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia arose from a gathering of racists, neo-Nazis, and white nationalists, whose ostensible purpose was to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Over the last several years, efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces have gathered steam because more and more people are coming to realize that government should not honor people who principal claim to fame was fighting a war in defense of the evil institution of slavery.

Defenders of Confederate monuments sometimes try to argue that slavery actually had nothing to do with the Civil War and secession. This theory is undermined by the Confederates’ own explanation of their motives, including those in the Southern states’ official statements outlining their reasons for secession, which focus on slavery far more than any other issue, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who famously said that “slavery . . . was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” and that protecting it was the “cornerstone” of the new Confederate government.

Despite longstanding mythology to the contrary, Robert E. Lee was no exception. He was a staunch supporter of slavery who chose the Confederacy over the Union in large part for that very reason and denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as a “degradation worse than death.”

Perhaps because efforts to separate the Confederacy from slavery are so implausible, defenders of keeping Confederate monuments in place increasingly resort to slippery slope arguments. Here’s Donald Trump making the case earlier today:

“I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Trump asked….

He went on to make a slippery slope argument — equating Confederate general Robert E. Lee with presidents like Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were slave owners…

“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

In fairness, the slippery slope argument is sometimes advanced by more intellectually serious advocates than Trump. It is wrong, even so. The argument fails because there are obviously relevant distinctions that can be made between Washington and Jefferson on the one hand and Confederate leaders on the other.

One crucial distinction it misses is that few if any monuments to Washington, Jefferson and other slaveowning Founders were erected for the specific purpose of honoring their slaveholding. By contrast, the vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery. I noted another key distinction here:

Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.

Endorsing the slippery slope case against removing Confederate monuments also creates a problematic slippery slope of its own. If we should not remove monuments to perpetrators of evil for fear that it might lead to the removal of monuments to more worthy honorees, that implies that eastern European nations were wrong to remove monuments to communist mass murderers like Lenin and Stalin, and Germany and Italy were wrong to remove monuments to Nazi and Fascist leaders. After all, there is no telling where such removals might lead! By Trump’s logic, taking down German monuments to Hitler and Goebbels might lead to the removal of monuments to Immanuel Kant, who expressed racist sentiments in some of his writings. Getting rid of monuments to Lenin and Stalin might lead people to take down monuments to Picasso, who was also a communist. Where will it all stop?

In some instances, of course, the question of whether the good a historical figure did in one area outweighs the evil he did in another is a legitimately close one. For example, I believe that Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst of all the presidents, and have no objection to renaming the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. But I can understand progressives who argue that his racism and other flaws were outweighed by the good they believe he did on other issues. We differ in part because I take a far more negative view than they do of Wilson’s economic policies and of his role in the botched peace settlement after World War I. Both are major aspects of Wilson’s legacy that must be considered alongside his segregationism. By contrast, most Confederate leaders have no legacy comparable in magnitude to their role in fighting for slavery. The Wilson case is a closer call than those of Lee or Jefferson Davis.

Over time, it is inevitable that we will get some of the closer cases wrong. But that risk is inherent in the practice of honoring historical figures with monuments at all. Only a tiny minority of people can get such an honor. Deciding which few it will be inevitably involves value choices. And the decision-making process will never be perfect. The risk of making a mistake is not a good reason to continue to honor large-scale evildoers with few or no offsetting virtues. Giving undeserved honor to the evil is at least as grave an error as denying proper recognition to those who merit it.

Obviously, freedom of speech allows private individuals to honor whoever they choose. But that does not mean they are right to honor Confederate leaders. And it certainly does not mean the government should continue to join them in doing so.

Trump and others also make the claim that taking down Confederate monuments is somehow “chaging” or “erasing” history. But ceasing to honor evil-doers is not the same as erasing all memory of them. No one proposes that we simply forget about Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederacy – or Hitler and Stalin, for that matter. To the contrary, we should continue to remember and study all of them, and derive such lessons as we can from the history of the wrongs they committed. And we can do all of that without continuing to glorify those who fought a war to perpetuate slavery.

Originally Found On: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/08/15/why-slippery-slope-arguments-should-not-stop-us-from-removing-confederate-monuments/