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jq37 · 5 years ago

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Have you done breakdowns of the last few episodes yet? If not 👀

**spoilers for a new york wedding**

Prologue: I had a partially free day today (as in the day I started writing this which is now two days ago) so I decided to swing by Central Park and check out the Bethesda Fountain where I saw both a proposal and a man on a segway with a live snake around his neck so, yeah, New York is just Like That.

"Here's a possibly magic crown. Why don't we ask the butt stuff guy about that?"

The face Brennan makes when Emily says, "I used to do colonics at the salon," is great. Like, "We are two minutes into this ep, your sentence isn't even complete, and I already can't handle it."

So they get out of the sewers and Bethesda Fountain has been attacked (which is a shame just aesthetically because, having now seen it in person, it's a really pretty fountain). Em is devastated and explains that the fountain is like a Important magical symbol of good change and a source of divine purification magic.

Another side note about the fountain: There are these little cherub figures around it in additional to the Angel. I wonder if those are sentient too. Also-also, the promenade across from the fountain has these cool murals of the seasons. My point is, there's a lot of fodder for possible lore just in that small area of the park.

Misty finds ashes by the fountain (concerning) and wipes it on Kugrash's fur (rude).

I love that Emily thought Pete was pouring one out (one being one bag of cocaine).

"Sophie, your magic is that you're a wonderful person and you jump really good."

"The Bread Wedding"

Kudos to Brennan for all the wide range of crazy voices he had to do in this ep. Don Confetti. The Golem. Perry the Pigeon. That can't be easy on the throat.

Sophie is fully ready to fistfight Don Confetti over their last names which is wild for a lot of reasons we're not gonna get into.

So Brennan has everyone roll a Wis save and everyone did OK except I think Ricky. Brennan never explains why he had them roll that. Concerning. I'm wondering now if it was something that would have needed a nat 20 to save from it or something where the people who saved didn't realized they saved from it and the people who didn't are just ticking time bombs or sleeper agents or something else awful.

Pete is such a dangerous friend to be around when you're emotionally compromised. His solution to everything is drugs.

"It's an off-white!" --Misty upon being called out for wearing white to a wedding.

Brennan has Perry go on a wild 39 second monologue about relationships that Pete interrupts by stuffing drugs down his gullet--see again my previous bullet about Pete.

Sophie notices that a lot of the pixies recognize her which pm confirms her brother is In This which, to use the word of the day again, *Concerning*.

Emily having Sophie get really emotional but also struggling to keep the laughter out of her face is always super funny to watch.

So Pete finds a table of vampires. Brennan spends a couple of minutes describing them before he gets to it outright but it's pretty immediately clear they're vamps. Well, vamps plus a suspicious older guy and a girl (Melissa) who seems to be playing Renfield to the vamps. Getting high so they can drink her blood and get high. Pete brilliantly confirms this by getting the suspicious guy (Rob, as far as we know) to go off on Politics and then deep mind-reading the girl. That's one of the most clever RP things I've seen a player do. Pete also sees that Rob is hanging out with the vamps but he doesn't seem to be one.

Pete fails his wild magic check but nothing happened that we know of. A lot of stuff on the wild magic table is situational though (like the reincarnate spell from Bloodkeep with the potion Sohkbarr drank).

Rob implies he knows what happened with Pete's dad. Pete goes into a tailspin, as if he isn't constantly in one.

Everyone dancing so they can talk in public instead of just, like, having a sidebar. Just that entire sequence is peak comedy.

Ricky, the good boy, is dancing with his pigeon date while everyone else is mystery solving (or, in Soph's case, crying in a closet or something).

Rob is supposedly in finance. Last time there was a character involved in finance/banking in D20 it was the whole KVX fiasco in FH.

"Did I use up my favor? I could have had anything in the world."

Sophie upon seeing anything young woman in any kind of situation immediately springs into action, ready to drag them out by any means necessary. I love her.

Robert works at a hedge fund and Kug recognizes him. Brennan explains how he knows him in a very vague way which the rest of the table clocks instantly. Murph asks if Rob knows Gabriela. He does. Who the hell is Gabriela, Misty and I wonder.

Emily goes galaxy brain and theorizes that the bad guys are laundering souls which is equal parts bonkers and brilliant. The camera unhelpfully *doesn't* cut back to Brennan so I can attempt to read his DM poker face. I am reminded of Emily wondering if [redacted] was in the sword in a recent ep of Naddpod and Murph just deciding that they were on the spot because it was cooler than what he had planned. I know you can't win at DnD but I think Emily is winning at DnD.

I mentioned this in passing I think last recap, but Pete's magic is really interesting to me because Pete doesn't know what his character sheet looks like and he's not someone like Kingston or Ricky who's been doing their thing for a while and knows that they can do and what the things he can do are called. So Ally has to get a little creative about activating abilities (like True Strike in this ep) without being too meta, if that makes sense.

Kug knows Rob from a while ago (from the 80's he later says) but he doesn't seem to have aged. The group is thinking vampire, but he wasn't drinking blood in the memory Pete saw. Suspicious. Put a pin in that with everything else on my conspiracy board.

Misty: Eyyyy Macarena!

Kug kisses the pigeon. Sure.

Misty/Siobhan also does a clever thing and suggests taking a selfie with the vamp table in the background to see who shows up. Only Melissa and Rob do, so they're not vamps for sure.

So they go back to Kingston's place and he, Pete, and Sophie cook for everyone which has basically nothing really to do with the plot but I think it was a nice character beat for them.

Kingston and Misty fought a mummy on Long Island back in the day. As you do. Sidenote, when I was in Central Park today (two days ago), I passed by a big-ass obelisk that apparently exists and that I am *certain* Brennan has lore for, even if it doesn't come up.

Misty, a very wealthy Broadway star: If you pay for the Metropolitan Museum, you're a Goddamn fool.

Sophie had not put together that Misty is a fairy before now and I was like ??? for a second but, actually, with the info she has, that's not necessarily the conclusion she would draw. She could just be a really short lady with magic. It's been that kind of week.

Kingston presses Kug on how he knows Rob and Kug reluctantly confesses that HE USED TO BE A GUY. Zac blindly guesses that he was a stockbroker which is ALSO CORRECT.

"movie horse breeder" is such a specific job to pull out of thin air.

Siobhan, making a choice: Let me tell you about my good friend, John Wilkes Booth.

Brennan's total break of composure when Zac/Ricky says, "I wasn't always a firefighter." Zac lowkey has the best comic timing of everyone on the squad. He's just really understated about it.

Anyway, there are levels to this. How long has Kug been a rat??? I feel like it must have been a while because of all the weird ass stuff that he does. Also, he excuses a lot of his behaviors due to being a rat considering he's actually a rat-MAN, emphasis on the man. The stock broker thing surprised me more considering that Kug is introduced doing some pretty altruistic, non-stockbroker-y things. Did Kug piss off a homeless witch and get Beauty and the Beast-ed? He never actually answered the question about how he knows Rob since everyone got sidetracked by the fact that he used to be a whole-ass HUMAN MAN. Did Rob curse him for less moral lesson reasons? What's going on here????

Esther and Ale have been researching. The grey baby is apparently named Nod, just like the place, and it (it specifically, not him or her) like the ruler of there.

There's this whole group bit Brennan, Ally, and Siobahn do about how you can take the L train really far and then catch a shuttle bus that can only be seen by the pure of heart to get to Nod and it's really funny but how funny would it be if they actually tried to do it in a dire moment and also Ricky could do it for sure send tweet.

Kingston is trying so-so hard to keep everyone on task all episode. Bless him.

Kug asks Esther about her mom, which surprises her. He says they used to be friends (Did *SHE* curse him????). Esther says she hasn't seen her in a long time, since she was 5 or 6. Of course, it's easy to want to connect this to the Gabriela he was asking about earlier but we'll see about that. I think I saw some people speculating that he's Esther's dad which I'm even more skeptical about considering what we learn later but wouldn't that be wild?

Ricky decides to shoot his shot with Esther. His brain is full of love, determination, civic responsibility, and absolutely nothing else, bless his golden retriever heart.

Brennan as Esther drops the best stealth joke (though, it has a very high likelihood of crossing from joke to plot point) in D20 so far with the Imperial Axiom/Sinatra's Law explanation. It was a full, "Wait. What? Oh!" Big gold star for Brennan for that one. I had to take a second and recover from that when I heard it the first time. Beyond the joke, it also seems like a likely hook for the eventual Big Bad of the campaign. First NY, then the world, you know?

The fact that the highways go against the grain of magic leylines of NY in this world is such a good detail and it makes a lot of sense intuitively.

Zac breaks Brennan again with the, "Traffic's really bad," comment.

Please let Ricky's big dumb puppy self win over Esther. "It's really hard for me." Riiiickyyyy.

So Kingston goes to see Willy, the Williamsburg golem about Lazarus from the Bible (New Testament). Aren't golems de facto Jewish? I think. I am correct. However, as much as Willy doesn't know about the New Testament, he *does* know about the Statue of Liberty which is convenient because--shoutout to the people who figured it out in advance--Lazarus is not Lazarus from the Bible. It's Emma Lazarus who wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty. This of course means that I need to do a close read of that poem at some point but not today baby because I need more information before I start going full Pepe Silvia. Sidenote: What a great place for Kingston to be when figuring out that info. Close enough that Willy can just point out the statue. It's cinematic. Fantastic.

(Also, I made a post about the fact that Siobahn just knew Emma's name off the top of her head, but when it cut to the other side of the table, Emily's eyes got all big too).

Emily gets a nat20 which RUINS her plans because she runs into Isabella aka the woman her husband left her for. They have an adult Means Girls stand-off where Sophie finds out they're getting married (or at least having a ceremony bc Dale didn't send her divorce papers yet). Big ups to Emily for staying in character and ditching all the sleuthing she was going to do because there is no way Sophie would be stable enough for that to be her top priority at the moment (even though I really wanted her to do all that stuff!)

Also, I'm looking forward to watching Sophie rip her to shreds when she inevitably turns out to be a succubus/demon/fiend/whatever. Honestly, she can just barfight her and I'd be satisfied.

So Misty goes home and finds a present waiting for her. It's a big ass mirror. Correction. It's a big ass mirror that Titania immediately uses to angry Skype her. Yikes.

It seems like her shoes of Titania are literally that, stolen from Titania (love that Titania was barefoot in her character art btw). I know they let her cast a certain spell in an earlier episode but I'm wondering why she stole them. Maybe they helped her cross over from Faerie (which happened ~400 years ago we ind out)?

Titania is pissed that Misty is stealing "glamour" that should be hers (via playing her in the new show). Glamour in the fairy sense is like a disguise. Glamour in the DnD sense is a fey-based bard option (which is the class I'm guessing Titania will be if they have to fight her). Curious to get a deeper explanation on that later.

Misty is able to cover back up the mirror but she breaks a hip in the process because of Titania's mojo and has to call Kingston. I already said this but I love their relationship.

(Sidenote, I meant to mention this earlier, but I think whiffs of the undead came up a couple of times in this ep which makes me wonder if the mummy situation Kingston mentioned is going to come back).

"Please, use any one of the guestrooms."

I FORGOT ABOUT KUG'S STUFF AT THE END

Ugh, this ep is an emotional roller coaster

"Wherever you are Rat Jesus, know that I love you. From Wally." What a good boy.

Everyone reacting to Murph's reaction to Wally before they Find Out is like, an experience. It's like that airpods meme.

OK, I'm not going to go through a whole play by play because nothing I could say would be better than watching the scene but I guess Murph/Bren decided in for a penny, in for a pound because we find out via a conversation between Wally and his businessman brother David that he is Kug's SON. HIS SON. S O N.

Wally is convinced that their dad wouldn't have just left them. David thinks Wally is being naive. I want to die.

Everyone around the table except maybe Ally is so visibly upset at this new information and Ally goes, "FUCK!" at the end so you know we all express emotions in different ways.

God, it's so sad! And I'm not gonna say, "I knew it!" because I didn't. I super didn't. But when Wally was introduced (man that scene hits differently now) I remember thinking, this is such an oddly specific NPC. Like, you know when you're playing a game and the stuff you can click is slightly better rendered and you can kind of tell what you should focus on and what's background art? That's how he felt.

Anyway, again, I'm sad. (GMYeah!.gif)

Watching *OVER* you Murph. OVER you. That's how you make it not creepy!

Meanwhile, Pete lets a bunch of bug monsters out of his dream into real New York City which, tbh, I'm not surprised. This seems like the kind of thing that would happen. Pete is exactly the worst kind of person to be the dream avatar in terms of being responsible.

I love that Siobhan is like, “I have a broken hip” as if all but one of them don’t have literal magic powers. That’s a very fixable problem compared to other stuff they’ve dealt with that day alone.

Anyway next time, a wasp centaur (thanks, I hate it) and a nat 20! See you then.

#dimension 20 #the unsleeping city #asks #a-salty-alto #there are for sure mistakes in this but I am on a whirlwind schedule rn #and I wanted to get this out before the next ep #so I wasn't too behind

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kidnafflea · 5 years ago

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Words rewire your nervous system

I didn't even know this was a thing until I began public speaking, podcasting, tweeting etc. Psycho-Linguisitcs. When psychology meets language. Speaking your life into existence is a thing. It rewires the internal which influences the external 'Your saying that words can rewire my reality?' Yes. 'Any idea why?' Yes. Pay attention. This may be the most important thing you read in all of 2019... 👀👇 There's a few BIG moments that parents expect from a baby. Can you name 2 of them? 'Hm...' It's their first steps & their first word. Walking is primal. You're going to keep experimenting until you walk. But the word... Is that primal? In order for you to answer that question, you gotta know some basics of language. It wasn't an invention that was designed out of the blue moon. There wasn't some mad scientist in a lab alone who said: 'Aha! Here it is. I have designed language!' Rather, it was a tool set created by society. Scientists are able to trace back dinosaur bones. But they always have a hard time tracing back the origins of language. Hard to dissect skeleton remnants to see the words they used. But the main premise is that language was developed by society. Every word that you use was the byproduct of one or many other peoples perceptions. The first word that baby utters was probably a word that they heard from you. And the first time you heard that word was probably when you heard it from your guardian. Language is simply an ANALOGY of reality. Picture a car. You see that? 'Yea.' What do you see? 'A burgundy Honda Civic.' How though? I just said 'picture a car.' Just random symbols. Why is it generating an image in your brain? 'Uhh...' Because words were designed by the people before you to convey perception. Fool. Don't you see? Words are more than symbols alone. They dictate your perception. Your view of the world. When I began public speaking, I was telling stories about my life. Events where I had a conflict and the lesson learned. And I was forced to articulate those experiences via words. Via language. I didn't know it at the time, but I was changing my reality. Your nervous system is made up of your brain & spinal cord. Nerves as well. Words light up centers of your brain which produce images. Just like the 'car' example from earlier. Each speech was serving as commands from the brain. Remember this. ☆ the brain is dumb. It’ll do whatever its told repetitively. ☆The mind is the smart one. Brain is tangible & mind is intangible. Psychology is the study of the mind. Linguistics is the study of language. "Psycho-Linguisitcs is the relationship between psychological processes & linguistic behavior." Intelligent people can read between the lines. When the see Psycho-Linguisitcs, they see the ability for the mind to USE words to change their biology. Change their nervous system. Change the pictures in their brain. Speaking your life into existence has always been a thing. The great ones have been saying it for centuries. Coincidence? I think not. They were using language to rewire their nervous system. Whether they were aware of it or not. Life experiences are neutral champ. YOU get to decide the narrative that you want to assign to it. And if you don't actively assign a narrative to your experiences, your dumb brain will do it for you. Your brain is designed to keep you safe Your brain is operating with the old school rules of your primal ancestors. The life of people whose life was always in danger due to sabertooth tigers, rival tribesman & other dangers Your brain at a default state is negatively biased. The 'negativity bias' is the brains propensity to filter negative events over positive events for survival reasons. So if you don't CONSCIOUSLY pick your narratives, then your brain will assign it for you. And it will not be favorable to your long term vision. Your brain doesn't give a fuck about your long term vision. Your brain doesn't give a fuck about your growth. Let me reiterate. Your brain only gives a fuck about your safety. Carrying primal belief systems in today's world will have you being a victim. No lie. Self defeating talk & making excuses. You don't know why. But your negative leaning brain sure does. Which is why you need to reprogram yourself. And the most efficient way you're going to do that is thru language. There is plenty of words that you can select from to creative dream narrative for your programmable brain. Change your internal world by being mindful of the words you're using. Better yet, set aside 10-30 minutes a day to program your brain To speak your desired reality into existence. Start of with journaling. Pen & paper. Writing by hand engages the motor sector of the brain, memory, logic, creativity etc. Writing by hand engages virtually all parts of your brain. Keep practicing that. And eventually you can expand to another vehicle if you desire like: Twitter Podcast YouTube Public speaking etc

Make sense of your past experiences by: Acknowledging your wins. And viewing the lessons behind your losses And write about your desired future. Your vision comes out as a baby. Needs attention to grow. Work on the past & future for the optimal present. Words play a big role in your reality. It influences the images in your brain. Those images generate feelings in your body. A use of the strategic words puts you in a state of hypnosis to rewire your internal world. Be strategic with your moves. Beware of shit posting or whining like a negative sack of shit. You're only living one life. Life it by being bold. Don't live it by playing catchup due to short term thinking. If you write it down, you will soon become it. Just watch. Now it's just a matter of you finding out. Best wishes for 2020.

#twt #mindset #loa

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finokoye · 5 years ago

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Mozfest 2019 writeup: Using IoT to Measure Outdoor Air Quality in Africa

As part of Mozfest 2019, I attended a session in the Openness space called ‘Using IoT to Measure Outdoor Air Quality in Africa’. The session was going to be led by Warukira Theuri who wasn’t able to make it* (for reasons I learned later which I’ll add a note about below).

There were about a dozen of us gathered so in the spirit of Mozfest... we kind of put our own session together on the topic.

This post is to document what was discussed. I take no credit for the topic, and advise anyone interested to follow/contact Warukira who is clearly an amazingly talented and smart young woman.

The session was facilitated using techniques I’ve picked up through my design jam facilitation days. The basic steps are:

Check in - a quick round of introductions for people to say their name, who they are and what they hope to get out of the session

Ideation - individually, everyone has 10 minutes to write down their thoughts on the topic. These could be challenges, questions or general comments

Clustering - what themes arise from people’s notes?

Discussion - normally in a design jam we would want to format the themes into ‘how might we?’ statements to help frame the future prototyping and research.

Discussion part 2 - taking the role of the critic, what are the questions, new provocations, criticisms we can think of?

Ideation - based on the themes that have been identified, what could help address these issues?

Check out - we swap contacts/social media handles and say ‘til next time!’

What themes came up?

As a group we noticed our thoughts and questions could be divided into a couple of core themes:

What standards do we build IoT products to?

Should we look to EU standards?

Questions were raised around ipv6 and general security of devices

Are there lessons from environmental tech for protecting and monitoring endangered wildlife for privacy paradigms? e.g. rhino tracking

How can we ensure quality of data created by IoT devices?

Does it match with quality of other public data assets?

What is the right hardware?

How do we learn to make the hardware?

Are there IoT devices that can boost wireless strength (to help deal with issue of lack of connectivity in rural areas)

Are there any accessible courses to learn how to program for IoT?

A diagram of our ideas mapping can be found here: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U_OVPPGElw0b3F4T0cLANYlDUDEyuFu68nQDxPtqrNA/edit?usp=sharing

Some provocations...

“OK, the air sucks - now what?”

This connected to question about how one turns data into action. Reporting that pollution levels have changed is one thing but is that enough to convince local councils? Is there a social/political organising aspect to support community tech?

Who else is doing this around the world - can we work in solidarity?

What are models of successful activism [informed by data obtained from open source IoT]

IoT will collect data for AI. Where does the responsibility lie?

Any good resources?

We ended the session by sharing potential resources that could help us all address these questions. The resources range from regulatory, to service design practice, to people working on similar projects facing similar obstacles (one thing that came up was that actually the dynamics of local politics and access are very similar whether in East Africa or Western Europe!).

Here is the list we put together:

Papers and research

Global information society watch 2018: Community networks

Community networks: the internet by the people, for the people

Designing Connected Products

Community centred tech

Luftdaten (Berlin)

Internet Society

Afrinic

Web Foundation

Women’s Rights online research

Design

This is Service Design Doing

Decolonising Design

Global Design Jam community

Campaigning

Friends of the Earth, Scotland - FYI, there are global networks so find your nearest one!

Regulatory

European Environmental Agency

Data

52 North wiki - specifically work on specific project called “sensor web”

SOME FURTHER COMMENTS

At a later conversation, I learned that the reason Warukira wasn’t able to make it was due to the “usual” UK government hostile environment idiocy which messed up her visa application.

I intend to write about this in a bit more depth but as someone who has attended Mozfest before and tends to hang out a lot with the folks attending from Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, this isn’t unusual. However, what struck me was the attitude of ‘us’, us in a collective sense meaning the hosts, the volunteers etc etc.

To me, the spirit of Mozfest should also be about solidarity as much as it is about people having fun, ‘just getting involved’ and having a can-do DIY attitude. Maybe it would have put the organisers into too much trouble with the authorities, but honestly, I wish more of us attendees and fellow facilitators could also have known about all the amazing people who weren’t able to make it because of the UK governments despicable policies, so that at least we - as the Mozilla family - can show our support and solidarity.

Now as I said, this happens every year and honestly at this rate will keep on happening - it will probably even get worse, so long as the conference remains in Europe, which it will. In the meantime, what those of us with relative privilege can do is to call it out, let our governments and local councillors know that we know what’s going on and that this is NOT OK. As a community, we should be explicitly talking about the fact that our fellow civic technologists are being unfairly treated due to neo-colonial nonsense. At the very least, this repeated issue with visa applications is an important lesson for the younger generation of technologists and academics in countries like the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, the US, Canada; in countries that are only at the top of the pile because of centuries of colonialism and occupation, to demonstrate why we cannot imagine technology is somehow in an ivory tower that will never be affected by politics.

I’ll stop there because I’m working on a proper article about it, especially now my initial fury has eased so I can talk a bit more thoughtfully about this.

In short, it would have been amazing to meet Warukira in person but I want to say a huge thank you to her for putting in a kick-ass session which provided an opportunity for us to discuss some really fascinating ideas and to learn from each other.

#mozfest #mozfest19 #workshops #visa #hostile environment #civic tech #tech activism

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optomstudies · 7 years ago

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bullet journal ideas masterpost

Over 250+ spread ideas!🎊

hoping your dreams are fulfilled, your grades are awesome and your skin is glowing in 2018!

my tips for bullet journalling

Year in Review

highlights / reflection

achievements this year

lessons learnt / growth as a person

things you want to improve on

advice you’ve received / given

best music/movies/tv shows/etc of the past year

friends made during this past year

commonplace journal pages

things you’ve discovered during the past year

useful tips during the past year

odd facts and trivia during the past year

topics to explore during the past year

questions to ask during the past year

New Year, New You

calendar / future log / yearly or monthly logs

things to look forward to this year

upcoming books/music/movies/tv shows being released this year

maslow’s hierarchy of needs self-reflection spread

goals / new year’s resolutions + steps to put it into action

skills you want to learn this year e.g. coding

habits you want to break / habits you want to pick up

diary: day-to-day happenings

budgets: monthly/yearly budgets

inspiration spread for new projects

level 10 life: rate areas (academic, personal, mental, physical, spiritual, social, financial) of your life out of 10, and write down goals to improve that rating!

monthly overviews (e.g. progress on goals)

assignment due dates calendar

18 things to do by the end of 2018

Special Pages for Special Friends

business cards from networking events

gift ideas for your friends/family/significant other

birthday / anniversary calendar

emergency contacts / phone numbers of important people

friendship journal:

memories / moments they were there for you

how you met

moments you want to share in the future

their mbti/hogwarts house

their best qualities

Trackers/Logs/______ of the Day

gratitude journal - # things you’re grateful for every day

habit trackers

motivational quotes

news headlines / this day in history

daily affirmations

currently reading / watching / listening to / feeling / eating / wanting etc.

time usage (read: wastage) tracker

k-drama or tv show episode tracker (always forget what ep I’m up to :S)

expenses tracker / tax deductibles

dream diary (tracker, plot(?), lucid or not, dream meanings)

new album or song releases

photo diary / sketch diary

weather

follower milestones

social media post tracker

household duties/chores tracker

grades tracker

year in pixels

TIL (today I learned)

civics

appointments: dentist, optometrist, doctor, therapist, etc.

bills: car / internet / rent etc

tax: income statements and work expenses receipts

membership/licence renewals

health

weight tracker

resting heart rate tracker (gives general idea of cardio fitness)

water intake tracker sleep log / time to bed / time awake / total hours slept

exercise log: number of reps / steps / minutes

mood trackers

period tracker

Various Creative Spread Ideas

day-to-day / life planning spreads

skincare routines

perfect/ideal morning routine

self-care reminders

exercise routines

wishlist

bucket list

firsts: kiss, date, house, vacation, car, concert, etc.

DIYs to attempt

savings jar (doodle it!)

yearly / monthly recurring tasks

usernames/passwords (hints only for security!)

5 or 10 year plans

dream job

dream house

planning for moving houses

dream wedding / planning

date ideas

make a worse case scenarios primer

summary tutorials for your reference e.g. step-by-step tax returns

academic

studyblr ideas

topics I need to revise

finals study timetable/plan

aspirations: what you want to be and why / how to get there

class timetable

assignment ideas

project schedules / team meeting dates

professors’ emails/office hours

assessment results

anti-procrastination page

motivations to study

skills you want to learn or are useful e.g. coding

formulas page

courses you want to take and their pre-reqs

college comparisons

back to school shopping list

textbook list with prices

language learning

vocabulary lists

grammar structures

media (books/tv shows/movies) to consume in that language

self-reflection / personality traits

best and worst characteristics

what to be mindful of / what you need to work on

mbti types you’re most compatible with

fears and how you want to overcome them

letters to your future self (include hopes and dreams)

letters to your past self (include achievements and things to be proud of!)

inspirational people

stress management tips

charities to donate to and why you support them

volunteering activities

fun, cute, and aesthetic spread ideas

things worth staying alive for / getting out of bed for

a spread with all the things you were worried about which turned out fine

message page from your friends to you

“i can’t live without ______”

creative crafts spread: tips / equipment / tutorials

aesthetic colour moodboards

happy / comforting / relaxing / funny things spread

seasons (summer/autumn/winter/spring) spread

rainy day spread

holidays spreads: christmas / easter / halloween / thanksgiving

idioms and proverbs from all different cultures

flowers spread: fav flowers, meanings, bouquet/arrangements, press ‘em!

crystals spread: fav gemstones (doodle ‘em), meanings

succulents spread: fav succulents, terrarium layout ideas

coffee/tea spread: paint with coffee / fav blends / best cafes

what’s in my bag (doodle it!)

outfit ideas / polyvore style collections

magazine clippings

shower thoughts / hypothetical ideas spread

draw my life spread / personal timeline

favourite characters e.g. gudetama, kumamon, etc. (doodle ‘em!)

interesting words list (ephemeral, mellifluous, serendipity, scintillating etc)

ideal date ideas

wedding anniversary ideas (like 1st is paper, 25th silver, 30th pearl, 40th ruby, 50th gold, 60th diamond)

baby animals spread (duckies, puppies, bunnies!!)

#just bullet journal things

bujo spread layouts and devices to try out (e.g. chronodex, parallel time ladder)

key/legend (keep it simple!)

colour palettes/swatches

washi tape / pens / markers swatches

banners / fonts

doodles

ticket stubs / receipts

stickers / stamps

cutouts of info brochures

pressed flowers

calligraphy / brush lettering / handwriting practice

favourite stationery

activities

_______ that you want to do* / have done* (kind of bucket list) *watch, read, listen to, try, taste, cook, play etc.

books

movies

tv shows

music

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arts/crafts e.g. paper quilling

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how to play / equipment / etc.

video games

foods

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books / movies / tv shows

summary / review

favourite characters

meaningful moments / moments that made you laugh / cry

(for the media critic) artful moments:

best descriptive passages

best cinematography

best action scenes

best use of soundtracks

(basically moments that make it deserving of awards)

music

album reviews

favourite songs

playlists for every mood and all seasons

meaningful lyrics

songs you shazamed

favourite genres and exemplar songs

kpop

reasons why i love my bias / bias wrecker / group

letter to your bias

comeback concepts / favourite outfits

visual/picture tutorials for makeup styles

calendar of your favs’ schedules during comeback season

in-jokes/memes

awards / achievements / records broken / milestones

translated lyrics

kpop songs vocab lists

upcoming releases

on this day

art

pics of your favourite artworks/artists + write about it

art styles you want to emulate

explain techniques for different media e.g. watercolour wet-on-wet

doodle ideas

astrology

natal chart readings/aspects/placements

solar return reading for the incoming year / transits

synastry / compatibility chart readings

constellation/star charts

symbol reference page for planets, zodiac signs, aspects

food

recipes

meal plans

shopping lists

interesting foods: (doodle ‘em!) taste / texture / smell (e.g. truffles, caviar)

cafes/restaurants you want to go to + their specialty dish (photo)

cocktails you want to mix/taste (doodle ‘em!)

media

interesting articles + moral/ethical issues it prompted you to think about

controversial topics on the news and for/against arguments/your thoughts

on this day in history

fav websites / blogs

jokes / puns / pickup lines

favourite poems / quotes / short stories

kinaesthetic

burn book - write things that make you angry/sad and rip the page out

wreck it journal - e.g. colour, scribble, stickers all over this page

travel

places to visit

travel itinerary

cultural parables

useful phrases in the language and their meaning

travel memories spread: things you did / places you went / selfies

postcard collection

packing list

friendly and not-so-friendly people that you met in foreign lands

writing

short story ideas

plot brainstorming spreads

journal prompts

drabbles

character designs

foreign words which can’t be directly translated into english

Follow optomstudies for daily original posts and study masterposts! Links: all originals + langblr posts + 15-part college 101 series + web directory!

#studyblr #studyspo #study tips #studyspiration #bullet journal #bujo #bujo spread #weekly spread #bullet journal ideas #journal #planner #study space #college #university #high school #journalsanctuary #mymp #small studyblr network #optomstudies

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weareallfallengods · 6 years ago

Text

Survival

Writing prompt:

If you’re over 25 and haven’t done something remarkable, you are hunted down and killed. Some people invent things. Some make cures for diseases. Others become established members of their community. You’re pushing 30, and somehow not dead yet, even though you cant think of a single thing you’ve done thats remarkable in any way. Why aren’t you dead?

I write for adults about adult themes with adult language. I try to tag possible triggers (but I know I'm not going to get all of them), so if violence or implied death or cussing bothers you, you'll probably want to find a different author.

********************************************

Somehow, that date came up again. Not quite sure how, but somehow, the number circled on my shitty wall calendar with the coffee splatter on it managed to be today. Again. It's been doing that for 5 years now.

At first I wanted to be a surgeon- save people's lives, make a difference, all that shit. Yeah, I was caught up in the hype for a while too. Just like everyone. Thought I'd make some ground-breaking discovery and change the world. Just like everyone. And then, at 22, I flunked out of med school. That was it. Dream over, kaput, fin.

When I opened my termination letter, it was like reading a death sentence. 10 years of prep and study down the drain. 3 years left. 3 years, and no idea what to do. No clue what I could do to save my own life after all those years learning how to save others.I drank for a solid month. I dont even remember that month now. My only memento from it is an entire skip of liquor bottles. It's a miracle I didn't die from alcohol poisoning. Not that I didn't try.

See, I was afraid. Scared, actually. Terrified would be more accurate, if I'm honest. I knew I only had 3 years left until they came for me. Unless I managed to do something extraordinary within the next 3 years, they'd come for me, and the only thing that would remain is a 2 paragraph obituary in the local paper, followed by a vacancy announcement. When you're suddenly forced to confront your own imminent demise, and see every dream, hope and aspiration you'd had evaporate, right in front of your eyes, its perfectly natural to drown that in a swimming pool of vodka.

But then, after a month of drowning, and a week of curing a hangover that would make Satan shudder, I got angry. Like Bruce Banner angry. As I was leaving an all night diner, the notice board caught my eye. Having nothing better to do with my life, I stood there for a while just reading every single card in detail, every single lost cat, every used car, every 5k charity run. And then I saw it. And I thought, "You know what? Fuck it, why not. I've spent all this time trying to do one thing that I've never actually done just whatever I feel like, had hobbies, anything really. Why the fuck not."

And that's how I ended up 2 days later in some shity warehouse district, rolling around on a mat with some dude I didnt even know, sweating and swearing profusely and having the time of my life. "Sasha's Self Defense" it said on the small, weathered and rusted sign on the brick wall out front, next to a door that looked like it had been transported straight from the proverbial gulag.

I'd naively thought this was going to be one of those Karate Kid knock offs for some reason when I first arrived. Sasha soon disabused me of that notion. In fact, when he saw I'd brought a new gi in a duffle bag, he laughed so hard he had to slap his ass down on a rickety folding chair just to keep breathing. Once he calmed his mirth at my expense, he let me know in a no-nonsense, 'I'm an old-timer and seen some shit in my day' heavily accented tone that this would be a class that focused on survival at all costs. "No bullshit wax on-wax off," were his exact words I believe.

And boy was he right. When I told him I'd set aside my year's tuition for lesson payments, well, wouldn't you know it, I became his most prized pupil; I quickly learned this was not a good thing. It meant 14 hours a day of the most humiliatingly punishing activity ever dreamed up by Moscow's Finest. I couldnt even move the morning after my first day. But somehow I limped my battered frame down to the bus stop and was only an hour late. Ha, only. Sasha seemed to take it as a personal insult. The only thing he hated less than sloppiness was tardiness it seemed. Apparently the 10th Circle of Hell was reserved for those who dared be late. And he made you earn your way out of that circle.

His only saving grace was fairness. If I had to suffer, at least I wasnt alone. Well, at first anyway. The few other students that suffered his wrath along side me doing slavic folk dances with wrist and ankle weights very quickly learned that this wasn't the type of class they had thought it was and soon I was alone with Sasha.

On the days I did well, I got treated to pierogies. Oh man, I lived for those pierogies. They were made by angels and served by someone I can only describe as if Jesus came back as a woman. Who was Russian. And spoke even less english than Sasha, if that was possible. His sister was as completely opposite to that sadistic maniac as it was possible to be and still be a human being. Where he was loud, she was soft. Where he was tough, she was gentle. Where he was strict, she was generous, even indulgent. Blonde to his brunette. Slim to his barrel chest. Cousin by marriage, I think they said. Well, relatives of some kind anyway. And she was the only one who could make him laugh. And when he laughed, the whole block knew! He was just that loud, that boisterous, with everything he did.

But I loved his little Anya. Just like everyone. But like in a wholesome, mom-ish kind of way. I loved her because I got to sit for an hour when she was around. Because she"d always tuck a to-go container of pierogies into my bag. Because she'd chide Sasha for pushing me too hard. In short, she was an angel.

But I have to hand it Sasha- in 4 months, he took a scrawny bookworm into someone who could pose for Men's Health. In 6 months, I could beat Ivan, his partner, in 5/10 sparring matches. In 7 months, I ran a marathon. In 9, he had me enter a triathalon. And I made it into the top 50 out of 500 entrants. Not too bad if I say so myself. In 12 months, I was beating Ivan almost every time.

And that's when the other Ivan showed up. After a year, Sasha decided it was time I learned weaponry. After all, no real fight was fair, he said. And Ivan (another cousin? Sasha had one heck of an extended family) instructed me on everything from broken beer bottles, to knives and pool cues. And my medical training paid off, because more often than not, I was the one stitching myself up if training got a little rough that day.

Eventually, I moved into the gym. Not sure how it happened, but I think I just got too tired to leave one day and never really left. Sasha didnt seem to mind since it meant I wasnt ever late again. Plus the coffee he imported was the best thing ever. Like it was so good that's probably the Extraordinary Thing he did to live as long as he had.

The days just melted together, into one long symphony of beautiful exhaustion and physical torment, as I poured myself into the first activity I could remember doing purely because I wanted to, something that numbed the dread of the finality of my life expectancy.

But then one day, one specific day, the one I'd been dreading in the back of my mind for a year came around.

They found me.

I guess they were a little slow in finding me, not surprising since I'd basically just disappeared from my old life, no forwarding address type thing. It wasnt intentional, it just sort of happened, what with me diving head first into something purely for me, without the thought of doing it for someone else. But they found me. Just like they find everybody.

See, it doesnt matter if you try to run, if you move, or change your name. They always find you eventually. I just hadn't thought about it in a long while. That year was the first time since I was probably 14 that I'm hadn't thought about the Gardeners. I guess that's why it surprised me so much.

Yeah, Gardeners. I dont know who came up with the name, in guess some misguided attempt at a positive PR spin bullshit to pass off squads of government assassins who's only job was to track down the NCs of the world and eliminate them. Sorry, NCs- Non-Contributors; the people who hit their expiration date without doing something noteworthy, something that was deemed to "advance or bolster the Human Condition" to borrow a phrase from the civics classes we had to take every fucking year of school. A cutesy sounding name that was supposed to make the government sound like a benevolent old couple pulling weeds from their garden of humanity. The worst lies always sound the sweetest, dont they?

And I was now 25.

It happened a few weeks after my birthday. Just another routine day for me, going for a light 5k run after my soak in a mineral bath. Light rain, most of the streetlights out, the few lights on in the warehouse district reflected beautifully off the streets. That's why I ran at night, all the colors changed that normally bleak neighborhood into something beautiful. It was just one little thing to balance out the harshness of reality, and I reveled in it.

I don't actually remember what happened exactly. I do recall seeing a suspiciously conspicuous homeless guy huddled under a loading dock awning, and then just a flash of movement from the corner of my eye. I think it happened really quickly; at least that's what Sasha said the next morning as he was making arrangements for me to visit another cousin of his "back in the old country". It could have been. God, after seeing the bodies around me in the aftermath, I hope, for their sake, that it was fast. 5 bodies. All still. I still remember my breath turning to blue fog, blurring the details of them. Helping me to be able to pretend I didn't see the blood mixing with the rain and oil, spreading out over the concrete like a macabre inversion of the cloudy sky above.

I'm glad they wore masks. It's bad enough having that scene burned into my brain forever, without specific people's faces being etched there as well. I'm glad I dont see their faces in my mind every time I close my eyes. I just wish I could still enjoy the rain. They managed to take that from me, even if I'm still breathing, so I guess they didnt completely fail. They just killed a part of my soul instead. But hey, there's plenty of people that don't like the rain, right? But I bet they don't smell blood when it does though.

And that was pretty much it. No sirens, no manhunt, nothing. Before I could process what was happening, I was on a bus, headed for "the old country", which, as near as I could tell, looked an awful lot like Pittsburg. Sasha's 'cousin' met me at the bus depot there, a man of very few words. Not as loud as his cousin, Zhena tended to communicate with looks, grunts and shrugs mostly. Same work ethic though.

And then the cycle repeated- 14 months this time before they caught up with me. Too bad that Zhena got caught up in it, he was a great guy. He and I didn't really become close or buddies or anything, but it still hurt to see what happened to him. To what was left of him anyway. The Gardeners definitely were trying to send a message with that. To quote an old wise man, "I didnt want to know, but now I do, and I'm telling you, you dont want to know." And that's coming from someone who was training to become a surgeon, so just trust me on this one.

This time, they were waiting for me. I think they'd planned on Zhena being enough of a distraction that they'd be able to take me out easily, but since since I woke up the next day on the floor of the sparring ring in a too large pool of blood that wasnt my own, I'd say they failed. The difference this time was I was on my own. No 'cousins' to call in favors from. No family I could call because I didnt want them getting a visit from the Gardeners either. I was alone this time.

Weirdly, I was actually OK with that. I'd been surrounded by family, teachers, advisors, tutors for so long that solitude was actually kind of nice. I could hear myself think my own thoughts for the first time in what seemed like forever.

I'm not ashamed to say that I took what little of value there was from Zhena's gym (I knew him well enough to know that Sasha was his only family) so that I could get a seedy hotel for a while. I did at least have the decency to let Sasha know, and that that would be the last he ever heard from me, to keep him out of trouble. Bad enough that 10 people were already dead, I didn't want Sasha or Anya's name added to that list because of me.

And so I vanished. Completely. Sure I travelled, kept studying and training like I had been, but never staying longer than a few months, never using the same name, copying other random people's habits and patterns so I didnt have one of my own for them to track down. Yeah it was cliche, but hey, I figured my dad watching all those spy flicks when I was young had to be good for something, right?

Sometimes I was a baker, sometimes a delivery driver, even a dock hand. Whatever it took to make a buck so I could eat.

I got really good at other things too. Like disposing of bodies. Not really a skill I ever thought I'd want or need, but Necessity is a harsh and demanding teacher. Sadly, my skill as a surgeon came in handy- bodies are easier to get rid of when they're in smaller pieces. And people are easier to turn into bodies when you know how they're put together intimately. Not what I had in mind for my life, but since it was the choice between this or dying, well, I guess I can put up with it.

I suppose that catches us all up to the present, more or less. OK yeah theres a lot that's gone down between Pittsburg and now, but it was all pretty much the same: lather, rinse, repeat. Literally sometimes. Those were the days it felt like there wasnt enough soap in the world to get all the blood off.

So here I am, I'm my single room in Kandahar, staring at the date that had somehow come up again. Every year, they send someone. Usually a team. And I survive. No matter how they come at me, or when or how many. I survive.

And I'm sitting here, staring at the calendar, steaming cup of espresso, just staring, as a light breeze fluttered the corner of the calendar page, sending the orchids dancing in the vase next to it. All I could think is, "How? How does this keep happening? I'm not even supposed to be here, not supposed to be alive."

As I raised my cup of espresso, something slid under my door. "OK that's weird," I said aloud as I stood.

The chair made an ungodly screech as I pushed it back and made my way over to where a small, cream colored envelope sat on the floor, a couple inches from the bottom of the door. It was heavy for it's size, but not because anything was in it, just the paper was that thick. Probably hand-made. It's odd the little things you notice in times of stress. Heavy, rough paper, no postmark, nothing written on the outside, just the flap tucked in, not even sealed. Reminded me of how my mother used to give out birthday cards. I always thought that was a little weird, but it was just one of her quirks that made her even more endearing to everyone.

I sat down a little heavier than I had planned and felt the chair crack a little. There was a single sheet of paper inside, folded in half; I was right- handmade paper. But that wasnt important, what was important was the heavy, blocky hand-written message it contained.

"We've been looking for you for a long time. It has come to my attention that you may have something unique to contribute after all. We may have been too hasty in judging your Ability to be a Contributor. I believe you do actually have a remarkable Ability to Survive. I'd like to speak to you this afternoon in the plaza outside the Blue Mosque. I will be alone, and you can approach me, so as to allay your justifiable suspicions. I will have a silver coffee set on the table in front of me.

I believe we can help each other, if you're willing to listen to my proposition.

-Soon,

Baddar"

Well, this is interesting.

#writing prompt #short story #what if #what would you do #one shot #writeblr #death #language

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gravitascivics · 3 years ago

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STARTING IT OFF

For readers of this blog, it might be interesting to know that this blog has been online for quite a few years. This posting approaches the 1100th entry; just fifteen more to go. Perhaps some might be interested in looking at the first of these postings – say the first one hundred of them. This blogger plans to make them available online where one can read them at leisure or print them and have them in book form. They will be presented in book form and as such, they will be preceded by an introduction. To perhaps entice the reader to look for this rendition of the first 100 postings, this posting will share that version’s introduction.

Before presenting the “Introduction,” here are a few words regarding this version of the postings. They are edited to match the editorial style that the blog currently utilizes. Hopefully, some the phraseology is smoother and more polished than it was originally. They do set this blog on its course by reviewing many of the assumptions this blogger has relied upon all these many years. The first topic he addresses in the first set of postings is the importance of civics education.

So, here is the Introduction:

INTRODUCTION

Unfortunately, civics education does not enjoy the gravitas that other academic subjects seem to enjoy. This book contains the first hundred postings of a blog dedicated to civics education. The blog, Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, attempts to first point out not only why civics should be considered with more respect, but why it should be considered a lynchpin for all of education, especially public education.

Its author, a retired educator, hopes the reader can begin reading this book with at least an open mind to reconsider his/her own sense of what role civics should play in the overall education of the nation’s youth. The blog addresses an array of issues its writer sees that affect civics’ actual role and/or its potential role in the lives of the students who take either civics in middle school or American government in high school.

Beyond its lessened importance in the eyes of most, there is the basic view of the subject – not only by the citizenry but by those in charge of its presentation in American schools. The argument presented here is that that view of the subject’s content – of how civics presents American governance and politics – falls short of representing and explaining what the founders of the nation – those responsible for the Constitution and its ratification – set out to establish. That aim was a federated union of not only the states, but of the citizenry as well.

While the various postings of this blog elucidate what that general aim was, one can summarily describe it as establishing a union in which the citizenry entered a grand partnership. That is, “We the People …” established the resulting polity and that “we the people” were meant to maintain ownership of it. That would be what James Madison would later describe as a government instituted by choice as opposed to by accident (with a resulting ownership by a nobility or some self-anointed elite class) or by force (with a resulting ownership by a “strong man or woman”).

The blog’s author argues that that agreement was motivated by an amalgamation of influences that the history of the American people had experienced by the late 1700s. In sum, those influences affected their political beliefs, values, and biases. In this, one needs to remember that when one decides to act in a situation where choices are available, two forces are at play: what one believes should happen and what one sees as the reality of the situation.[1]

And the founders were not immune; they strove for what they believed should happen, their espoused theory, but within the parameters of the factual conditions presented to them and while they were not infallible, they collectively held a highly functional theory-in-use. Given the importance of what they were about, one can readily assume the founders were keenly aware or conscious of both realms.

That is, the founders were disposed to exert the energy or effort to figure out what was best to do, and given their subsequent political careers, what was best for the nation apart from their individual interests. And, as when those types of situations concern either government or politics or both, real far-reaching consequences could and did ensue.

Those points in time need to be treated with the utmost respect. Surely, whoever or whatever taught the founders their civic lessons and taught the citizenry, those involved with the ratification of the Constitution, could not have been more important to them and to their posterity.

Is it hyperbole to ascribe this sort of importance to what one learns – way back when – in a civics classroom? Collectively, it is, and the nation is experiencing how a poorly conceived civics program affects the governing health of a people. Polarized politics and its effect on the current governance of the US attests to that belief. It behooves Americans to understand what has happened in recent years and to become an active citizenry to determine what the right course of action this polity should take from this point onward.

This simple notion of an involved citizenry being sufficiently informed of what constitutes politics and how that level affects the collective – no, better stated, communal – health of a people should be respected. Unfortunately, that seems to be ignored or belittled by the current efforts in the nation’s civics programs.

This current situation is not seen by the common fellow as unfortunate, unusual, or out of place. Why? Because it is much in line with how Americans view governance and politics – that being each can be uninhibited or encouraged to either become proactive, totally indifferent, or anything in between these dispositional orientations.

Much of this blog’s message concerns the current political culture that the nation sustains. It, that shared perspective, has and continues to support a natural rights view. This is explained in the first 100 postings, but to define what natural rights means, it is a view of governance and politics that features, as a trump value, natural liberty.

It is a view that holds the right of each to determine his or her behavior as long as each does not inhibit or interfere with others having the same right. Since such a claim encompasses a large array of behavior, it is more useful to think of this right as a large set of various rights from speech, movement, advocacy, employment, religion, entertainment, etc.

While one might, without reflection, adhere to this view of rights, one should know that not all people who support republican governance agree with this view. Another rivaling view is a view known as federalism. And one can make the claim that the founders held to this other view.

Stated another way, the founders employed another view of liberty in establishing the polity they created. They did not adhere to natural liberty but to a form of federal liberty. And they arrived at that view, as alluded to above, from an array of influences.

Those influences included the Puritanical religious ideals (congregationalism, engagement, localism, and a covenantal foundation), Enlightenment thinkers (not just Locke and Hobbes, but Hutcheson and Reid, among others), a developmental history that allowed a great deal of independence from the British Parliament, the formation of local governance, and the values developed through English constitutional history. The bottom line is that they believed a republic needed to encourage certain values among the populace.

Hopefully, this introduction stirs the curiosity of whoever reads it and that he or she continues to read the postings that follow. The intent is to follow this volume with subsequent volumes of the postings that appeared after the first 100 postings. To date (mid-2021), that’s approaching 1100 postings.

[1] This distinction refers to what change theorists might call espoused theory – what should happen – and theory-in-use – what conditions prevail in the situation. See Kenneth D. Benne, “The Current State of Planned Changing in Persons, Groups, Communities, and Societies” in Planning of Change, eds. Warren G. Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 68-82.

#Gravitas (a blog)#US Constitution #federalism #civics education #social studies

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Do Republicans Believe About The Role Of Government

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-believe-about-the-role-of-government/

What Do Republicans Believe About The Role Of Government

Civil Rights United States Citizens In Puerto Rico

What Do Republicans Believe?

The 2016 Republican Party Platform declares: “We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state. We further recognize the historic significance of the 2012 local referendum in which a 54 percent majority voted to end Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. territory, and 61 percent chose statehood over options for sovereign nationhood. We support the federally sponsored political status referendum authorized and funded by an Act of Congress in 2014 to ascertain the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico. Once the 2012 local vote for statehood is ratified, Congress should approve an enabling act with terms for Puerto Rico’s future admission as the 51st state of the Union”.

America Should Deport Illegal Immigrants

Republicans believe that illegal immigrants, no matter the reason they are in this country, should be forcibly removed from the U.S. Although illegal immigrants are often motivated to come to the U.S. by companies who hire them, Republicans generally believe that the focus of the law should be on the illegal immigrants and not on the corporations that hire them.

The Party Thats Actually Best For The Economy

Many analyses look at which party is best for the economy. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Democratic presidents since World War II have performed much better than Republicans. On average, Democratic presidents grew the economy 4.4% each year versus 2.5% for Republicans.

A study by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson found that the economy performs better when the president is a Democrat. They report that by many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large. Between Truman and Obama, growth was 1.8% higher under Democrats than Republicans.

A Hudson Institute study found that the six years with the best growth were evenly split between Republican and Democrat presidents.

Most of these evaluations measure growth during the presidents term in office. But no president has control over the growth added during his first year. The budget for that fiscal year was already set by the previous president, so you should compare the gross domestic product at the end of the presidents last budget to the end of his predecessors last budget.

For Obama, that would be the fiscal year from October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2018. Thats FY 2010 through FY 2017. During that time, GDP increased from $15.6 trillion to $17.7 trillion, or by 14%. Thats 1.7% a year.

The chart below ranks the presidents since 1929 on the average annual increase in GDP.

President

1.4%

A president would have better growth if he had no recession.

Read Also: Leader Of The Radical Republicans

A Conservative Vision Of Government

Peter Wehner&Michael Gerson

Winter 2014

The past few years have put the size and role of government at center stage of our national politics. But the raging debates about how much Washington is doing and spending have involved almost exclusively yes-or-no questions about the left’s vision of government. The right has been very clear about what government should not be doing, or should be doing much less of, but it has not had nearly enough to say about just what government should;do.

It is not hard to see why. The Obama years have set a high-water mark for the size and reach of the federal government, including a post-World War II record for federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product at 25.2% . The United States has amassed more than $6 trillion in debt since January 2009. Prior to Obama, no president had submitted a budget with a trillion-dollar deficit; he has submitted four of them. And even as the administration’s projections for the coming years promise smaller deficits, they also promise a larger and more expensive government than Americans have ever seen.

Republicans have argued that unrestrained spending, and particularly unreformed entitlements, will burden the nation with unmanageable levels of debt in the coming decades and starve the budget of funds for other essential purposes. They further contend that a large, meddlesome, intrusive state not only undermines the private economy but also crowds out civil society and enervates civic character.

Regulating The Economy Democratic Style

The Democratic Party is generally considered more willing to intervene in the economy, subscribing to the belief that government power is needed to regulate businesses that ignore social interests in the pursuit of earning a return for shareholders. This intervention can come in the form of regulation or taxation to support social programs. Opponents often describe the Democratic approach to governing as “tax and spend.”

Also Check: We Are All Republicansâwe Are All Federalists

Government Should Help People

It is the role of government to help people. And it should help to solve problems. While Democrats, like Republicans, are capitalists, everyone believe in the free market. Their disagreements are over degree. How much government regulation is okay? The Left clearly believes that government should play a larger role in our lives. Among those roles are regulating business and protecting consumers. Government should also help people with poverty. Basically, the Left favors more government. The Right favors less government.

Republicanism In The Thirteen British Colonies In North America

In recent years a debate has developed over the role of republicanism in the American Revolution and in the British radicalism of the 18th century. For many decades the consensus was that liberalism, especially that of John Locke, was paramount and that republicanism had a distinctly secondary role.

The new interpretations were pioneered by J.G.A. Pocock, who argued in The Machiavellian Moment that, at least in the early 18th century, republican ideas were just as important as liberal ones. Pocock’s view is now widely accepted.Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood pioneered the argument that the American founding fathers were more influenced by republicanism than they were by liberalism. Cornell University professor Isaac Kramnick, on the other hand, argues that Americans have always been highly individualistic and therefore Lockean.Joyce Appleby has argued similarly for the Lockean influence on America.

In the decades before the American Revolution , the intellectual and political leaders of the colonies studied history intently, looking for models of good government. They especially followed the development of republican ideas in England. Pocock explained the intellectual sources in America:

The commitment of most Americans to these republican values made the American Revolution inevitable. Britain was increasingly seen as corrupt and hostile to republicanism, and as a threat to the established liberties the Americans enjoyed.

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Republican Ideological Divides On Government Role And Performance

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, those who describe themselves as conservative are more critical of government performance than those who describe their political views as moderate or liberal.

The largest ideological gap among Republicans is over the job the government is doing strengthening the economy. Overall, 46% of moderate and liberal Republicans and Republican leaners say the government is doing a good job strengthening the economy. By contrast, conservative Republicans and leaners are 20 points less likely to hold this view .

Conservative Republicans are less likely than moderates to say the government is doing a good job on a range of other issues, including keeping the country safe from terrorism , helping people get out of poverty and managing the nations immigration system . But on poverty and immigration, fewer than half of both groups say the government is doing a good job.

There are no issues for which moderate and liberal Republicans are more critical of government performance than conservatives. However, there are several issues for which there are hardly any ideological gaps among Republicans, including protecting the environment and ensuring safe food and medicine.

Ensuring access to quality education is another area where most moderate and liberal Republicans say the government should play a major role , but no more than about half of conservatives say the same.

Senator Jim Inhofe Republican Of Oklahoma

Political Parties: Crash Course Government and Politics #40

Incoming chairman of the Senate committee on the environment and public works

Inhofe is the poster boy for Republican climate change denialism, not only for his stridency on the issue but because he is the once and future leader of the key Senate committee on environmental policy. Inhofe will be able to lead the committee for two years before running up against term limits . This time around, Inhofes committee is expected to focus on transportation and infrastructure bills.

But it seems likely that Inhofe will devote some energy to blocking the regulation of carbon emissions. We think this because on 12 November he told the Washington Post: As we enter a new Congress, I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPAs unchecked regulations.

Inhofe has climate change the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people, has said God, not humans, controls the weather, and has denied climate change in many other ways.

Also Check: Republicans 2016

Reviewing And Using The Lesson

What is republican government?

Define “common welfare.” Give examples of how your school helps the common welfare.

Define “civic virtue.” Give examples of people with civic virtue in your school and community.

Where was civic virtue taught in early America?

Describe a situation in which your interests might conflict with the common welfare.

Explain these terms: republican government, representative, interests, common welfare, civic virtue.

ISBN 0-89818-169-0

Do The Republicans Even Believe In Democracy Anymore

They pay lip service to it, but they actively try to undermine its institutions.

By Michael Tomasky

Contributing Opinion Writer

A number of observers, myself included, have written pieces in recent years arguing that the Republican Party is no longer simply trying to compete with and defeat the Democratic Party on a level playing field. Today, rather than simply playing the game, the Republicans are simultaneously trying to rig the games rules so that they never lose.

The aggressive gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court just declared to be a matter beyond its purview; the voter suppression schemes; the dubious proposals that havent gone anywhere yet like trying to award presidential electoral votes by congressional district rather than by state, a scheme that Republicans in five states considered after the 2012 election and that is still discussed: These are not ideas aimed at invigorating democracy. They are hatched and executed for the express purpose of essentially fixing elections.

We have been brought up to believe that American political parties are the same that they are similar creatures with similar traits and similar ways of behaving. Political science spent decades teaching us this. The idea that one party has become so radically different from the other, despite mountains of evidence, is a tough sell.

Or is there?

So were not there right now. But we may well be on the way, and its abundantly clear who wants to take us there.

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Figure 26 Proportion Of Each Group Who Thought That Us Businesses Should Do More About Global Warming

US businesses should do more to deal with global warming. Since 1997, majorities of Democrats and Independents have believe that US business should do more about global warming. In 2020, 92% of Democrats and 69% of Independents believe that businesses should do more. Minorities of Republicans have favored increased action from businesses, with all-time highs of 5859% in 1997 and 1998. The partisan gap is 49 percentage points in 2020.

Average people should do more to deal with global warming. Since 1997, majorities of Democrats and Independents have believed that average people should do more about global warming. In 2020, 90% of Democrats and 70% of Independents think that average people should do more. Smaller proportions of Republicans have also favored increased individual action, with all-time highs of 60% in 1997 and 1998. The partisan gap is 43 percentage points in 2020.

John Maynard Keynes Is A Good Guy

John Maynard Keynes was a 20th century economist. Most Democratic economic theory derives from his ideas. Keynes put forth the idea that supports a government role in regulating the business cycle. For instance, Keynes believed in the idea of stimulus funds as a solution for recession. Traditionally, deficits don’t bother the Left. Spending money is fine if it produces growth. Growth pays for itself. Although the Right often accuses the Left of uncontrolled spending, both sides have created much debt. They argue over the kind of debt. The Left prefers welfare debt. The Right prefers military debt. That’s one example.

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Which Republican President Inspired The Teddy Bear

Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican U.S. president from 1901 to 1909, inspired the teddy bear when he refused to shoot a tied-up bear on a hunting trip. The story reached toy maker Morris Michtom, who decided to make stuffed bears as a dedication to Roosevelt. The name comes from Roosevelts nickname, Teddy.

Republican Party, byname Grand Old Party , in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Democratic Party. During the 19th century the Republican Party stood against the extension of slavery to the countrys new territories and, ultimately, for slaverys complete abolition. During the 20th and 21st centuries the party came to be associated with laissez-fairecapitalism, low taxes, and conservative social policies. The party acquired the acronym GOP, widely understood as Grand Old Party, in the 1870s. The partys official logo, the elephant, is derived from a cartoon by Thomas Nast and also dates from the 1870s.

Are Liberals To Blame For Our Crisis Of Faith In Government

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Content

Do you trust the federal government? When voters were asked that question in December, 1958, by pollsters from a center now called the American National Election Studies, at the University of Michigan, seventy-three per cent said yes, they had confidence in the government to do the right thing either almost all the time or most of the time. Six years later, they were asked basically the same question, and seventy-seven per cent said yes.

Pollsters ask the question regularly. In a Pew survey from April, 2021, only twenty-four per cent of respondents said yes. And that represented an uptick. During Obamas and Trumps Presidencies, the figure was sometimes as low as seventeen per cent. Sixty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they had faith in the government. Today, an overwhelming majority say they dont. Who is to blame?

Eight months later, Ronald Reagan, a man who opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare, which he called an attempt to impose socialism, and who wanted to make Social Security voluntarya man who essentially ran against the New Deal and the Great Society, a.k.a. the welfare statewas elected President. He defeated the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, by almost ten percentage points in the popular vote. In this present crisis, Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.

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What The World Thinks About Climate Change In 7 Charts

On April 22, leaders and representatives from more than 150 countries will gather at the United Nations to sign the global climate change agreement reached in Paris in December. Pew Research Centers spring 2015 survey found that people around the world are concerned about climate change and want their governments to take action. Here are seven key findings from the poll:

1Majorities in all 40 nations polled say climate change is a serious problem, and a global median of 54% believe it is a very serious problem. Still, the intensity of concern varies substantially across regions and nations. Latin Americans and sub-Saharan Africans are particularly worried about climate change. Americans and Chinese, whose countries have the highest overall carbon dioxide emissions, are less concerned.

2People in countries with high per-capita levels of carbon emissions are less intensely concerned about climate change. Among the nations we surveyed, the U.S. has the highest carbon emissions per capita, but it is among the least concerned about climate change and its potential impact. Others in this category are Australia, Canada and Russia. Publics in Africa, Latin America and Asia, many of which have very low emissions per capita, are frequently the most concerned about the negative effects of climate change.

Also Check: How Many Democrats And Republicans Are In The House

The Founders Studied History

Introduction: Crash Course U.S. Government and Politics

The Founders studied the history of governments. They were very interested in what they read about the government of the Roman Republic. It was located in what is now the country of Italy. The Roman Republic existed more than 2,000 years before our nation began.

The Founders liked what they read about the Roman Republic. They learned some important ideas from their study of the government of ancient Rome. They used some of these ideas when they created our government.

You May Like: Democrats Switched Platforms

Illegal Immigration Is A Bigger Problem That Deportation Doesn’t Solve

People emigrate to America for a chance at a better life. We have always been a welcoming land. Democrats believe immigrants enter America with hope. We have a responsibility to be a beacon. The Left supports ways to allow illegal immigrants to stay in this country. This is particularly important if those people are paying taxes and working jobs. Most immigrants contribute to our country. They work hard jobs. They pay taxes. Democrats support penalizing companies who hire illegal immigrants as a first step to curbing illegal immigration.

Democrats believe that most immigration issues, including illegal immigration, are human rights issues. America has an obligation to help persecuted people. When they come to America, we should welcome them, not attack them.

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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After 9/11, No Americans Were Held to Account. Here's Why That's Dangerous

September 11 is the most studied day of our lifetimes. Almost everyone who was old enough remembers the details—where they were, how they felt, what it meant to them. It remains unforgettable.

The U.S. intelligence community had known some sort of terrorist attack was on the way but failed to focus or to act. After 9/11, there was finger-pointing at President George W. Bush and the White House, between the previous Bill Clinton and Bush administrations, at the CIA, NSA, FBI and even at the Pentagon. The government pledged to do better: to break down barriers to intelligence analysis and sharing, and to organize itself so that such a catastrophic event would never happen again.

But even in the immediate aftermath, there were more powerful emotions that overshadowed the desire for reform. The desire for revenge propelled the administration of George W. Bush to declare a global war. Panic within the government drove the secret agencies to take their own liberties—through warrantless surveillance, torture and secret prisons, arbitrary watchlisting, domestic spying and more. And though reforms did follow, including the largest reorganization of government in 50 years, government performance again faltered. September 11 was followed by other intelligence debacles, from the faulty reports regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last month: a long line of failures that yearn for accountability.

"Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envisage flying airplanes into buildings," — President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice

Polls show that a majority of Americans remain bewildered about the attack, the perpetrators and the reason. And most everyone laments Washington's political and partisan machinations and the decline of American institutions. However, few connect today's national friction to the aftermath of 9/11. Yes, the government has (so far) succeeded in preventing another such attack on U.S. soil, but an even greater disaster in endless war and the collapse of civic life sullies the achievement.

And despite legions of blue ribbon panels to review what happened, despite subsequent revelations of wrongdoing, despite administrations promising to do better, the basic reality of government was exposed: No one is held accountable—not a White House official or top government agency director, not an intelligence analyst or FBI agent, not even a lowly airport security screener.

The cost of government secrecy has also been exposed. It nurtures our world of alternative facts and undermines public faith in government motivations and authority. Secrecy has also fed a generational gap, with young people indifferent to or confused about national security, an entire new generation seeking their own agendas with regard to what is vital for the country and the world.

So yes: We will never forget. But a more interesting question at the 20th anniversary is what we should remember—or more, what should we learn?

— By William M. Arkin | 09/10/21 | Newsweek Magazine

20 years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, have we learned the right lessons?

September 11 is the most studied day of our lifetimes. Almost everyone who was old enough remembers the details—where they were, how they felt, what it meant to them. It remains unforgettable.

But even in the immediate aftermath there were more powerful emotions that overshadowed the desire for reform. The desire for revenge propelled the administration of George W. Bush to declare a global war. Panic within the government drove the secret agencies to take their own liberties—through warrantless surveillance, torture and secret prisons, arbitrary watch listing, domestic spying and more. And though reforms did follow, including the largest reorganization of government in 50 years, government performance again faltered. September 11 was followed by other intelligence debacles, from the faulty reports regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan last month: a long line of failures that yearn for accountability.

So yes: We will never forget. But a more interesting question at the 20th anniversary is what we should remember—or more, what should we learn?

Tragic Failure

On September 11, 2001, two hijacked commercial airliners crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. Soon thereafter, the Pentagon was struck by a third hijacked plane. A fourth hijacked plane, bound for the U.S. Capitol building, crashed into a field in Somerset County in southern Pennsylvania after passengers managed to overpower the hijackers. The 19 hijackers were all young Arab men, from four different countries, all sacrificing their lives on behalf of Al-Qaeda.

The attacks that day killed 3,030 U.S. citizens and other nationals. There were 2,735 persons who died in the twin towers in New York: 2,184 at work in the buildings, 129 aboard the two aircraft (119 passengers and crew, and 10 hijackers), 343 firefighters, 71 law enforcement officers, and eight private emergency medical technicians and paramedics. A total of 189 were killed at the Pentagon: 125 uniformed military, civilian and contractor personnel in the building and 64 passengers, crew, and terrorists. Forty-four died in Pennsylvania.

The day itself was horrific in other ways. Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on presidential communications, on nationwide air defenses, on airport security and on emergency preparedness, despite preparations that were supposed to work in the face of a full scale nuclear war, hardly any part of what had been created worked.

Leaders were preoccupied with the most basic activities—getting phone calls through, finding and protecting their loved ones, keeping up with the news, struggling with the rumor mill. For a large part of the day, President Bush was unable to reliably communicate or know precisely what was going on. Successors to the presidency and Cabinet members ignored continuity-of-government plans and procedures for emergency response. The White House and Pentagon were out of sync and made decisions without any basis in fact. There was stunning confusion regarding what the president ordered Air Force fighter jets to do and why. The Pentagon confusedly declared a high-level alert—including nuclear forces—with key decision makers, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dick Meyers mistaking measures to increase the protection of American forces with an alert that prepared for war.

Hijacked United Airlines flight 175 flies towards the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 in New York City. CNN/Getty

Many of the organizational and technological deficiencies of 9/11 have since been corrected, we've been told. But in an age where information overload is exponentially worse, and where cyberthreats raise questions about the reliability and credibility of communications and decision-making, there is no particular reason to believe that the very same issues won't repeat in some future crisis. And indeed everything that happened 20 years ago recurred in the past two years. With the emergence of COVID-19, continuity and emergency actions again became important when questions of the president and vice president separating were raised, and yet none of the established procedures were followed. And when rioters swarmed the Capitol on January 6th, the lack of preparedness was alarming. Questions of who was in charge again became paramount. The dots were not connected; the information did not flow; the decision-makers were paralyzed.

The failure to connect the dots, big and small, was certainly a theme of the 9/11 Commission, which published its final report three years after the attacks. It stated that "the 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise. Islamic extremists had given plenty of warnings that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers." But it's worse than that. As early as 1995, when a plot was foiled in the Philippines, the CIA knew of plans to use airplanes in an attack. And though an August 6th President's Daily Brief (PDB) became infamous as the warning that was ignored, an item in the December 4, 1998 PDB titled "Bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft and other attacks" said that the Al-Qaeda leader might "implement plans to hijack U.S. aircraft...and that members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport."

Trained rescue dog Gus and his trainer Ed Apple from the Tennessee Task Force One Search & Rescue team searching for survivors in the wreckage at the Pentagon following 9/11 terrorist attack. MAI/Getty

Warnings continued over the years and particularly peaked in July 2001, the CIA expecting something spectacular during the summer. There is no question that the Agency had a hard time getting the attention of President Bush and his deputies, but as Newsweek's "Road to 9/11" series attests, even in the last weeks before 9/11, there were abundant signs and warnings that the intelligence community and the FBI themselves failed to follow up on or heed. The Bush administration might not have been paying sufficient attention, but the security agencies flat out failed to do their own jobs.

"Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envisage flying airplanes into buildings," stated President George W. Bush. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice claimed: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." FBI Director Robert Mueller said: "There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country."

The 9/11 Commission, of course, gave these officials the space to explain, and laid out the details of the many failures that accumulated to forge the attacks. But in its desire to produce a useful and supportive bipartisan document that would suggest practical reform, the Commission also floated above the fray, not pointing fingers and not naming names, keeping the government's secrets and not forcefully condemning anything. In an environment where no one was held accountable or took responsibility, reform became a matter of the American people writing the government a blank check, creating gigantic new bureaucracies but eliminating nothing. And because no one was held accountable, the public was left to wonder if important information was being withheld.

Revenge

Once the attacks in New York and Washington occurred, it was clear that Al-Qaeda, then led by Osama bin Laden, was responsible. Though many, including many in the news media, questioned whether there was "proof " that a man in a cave could be behind such a diabolical plot, once the airline passenger manifests became available, the intelligence agencies were able to see the abundance of information that they already possessed but never analyzed properly—two men had entered the United States in January 2000 and moved to San Diego and then found their way onto the flight that hit the Pentagon; four hijacker pilots attended various flight schools throughout America and had been awarded pilot's licenses by the Federal Aviation Administration; tens of thousands of dollars had moved from the Middle East; three of the four pilots were connected to a Hamburg cell known to German intelligence, Afghanistan was abuzz with chatter and terrorists were on the move expecting retaliation for something.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice listens as President Bush speaks on trade promotion authority at the Department of State. Brooks Kraft/Corbis/Getty

On September 14, the Senate and House passed resolutions granting President Bush the power "to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." A sole single member of Congress—Barbara Lee of California—voted no, fearing that the resolution was too vague, that it constituted a blank check.

Though there was broad support for military action against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was wary of getting bogged down in what is often called the "graveyard of empires." It therefore chose a combination of airpower and small contingents of special operations forces to pursue Al-Qaeda, keeping the U.S. footprint to a minimum but also following a strategy of seeking to minimize the risks to American armed forces. That risk aversion meant that by the time the bombing began on October 7th, there was nothing angry in the retaliation, and annihilation, while voiced, was never pursued in the war plans. Still, over two months, the Taliban regime was toppled and Al-Qaeda scattered. But by then, public interest was already waning and the military high command decided to deploy ground forces to pursue the many jihadists who survived.

It was the first of many military missteps—the belief that conventional forces were needed or that the task would be easy. Osama bin Laden slipped away across the Pakistani frontier and American forces stalled into conflict more akin to a perpetual traffic jam, the occupation of the country slowly accumulating to become America's longest war.

US President George W. Bush tours the World Trade Center disaster site aboard his helicopter Marine One September 14, 2001 with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (L) and New York Governor George Pataki (R). Eric Draper/White House/Getty

President Bush had pledged to eradicate Al-Qaeda but the administration was eager to move the war machine from Afghanistan to Iraq. The animus regarding Iraq, predating 9/11, created giant new smoke screens and self-deceptions. Though Al-Qaeda had already demonstrated in August 1998 in its simultaneous attacks on two African embassies that it had the capability to carry out large scale strikes, many of the Cold War veterans of the Bush administration believed that a nation state had to be behind the attacks. Thus the administration entertained every allegation of an Iraqi connection to 9/11.

And why? Because the truth of 9/11 was still too difficult to acknowledge. Osama bin Laden had laid out a worldview over the years, one that centered on opposition to the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Starting in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he said that the presence of Christians and Jews in Saudi Arabia was humiliating to the heart of Islam. He wrote open letters to the Saudi king asking how it was that a country that spent more per capita on defense than any other, and had purchased the best arms money could buy, couldn't defend itself. When U.S. forces never left, bin Laden took up the banner of "a million" Iraqi children who he said were being killed in a genocidal campaign of sanctions and bombing. He similarly decried Israeli attacks on Lebanon and on Palestinians. Islam was under attack from all directions, he said, and the Islamic world was being threatened by globalization.

Policemen and firemen run away from the huge dust cloud caused as the World Trade Center's Tower One collapses after terrorists crashed two hijacked planes into the twin towers, September 11, 2001 in New York City. JoseJimenez//Getty

None of this is to excuse the acts of terrorism, but Osama bin Laden voiced grievances that appealed to a much broader group of Muslims than anyone was willing to admit. But America was in no mood for introspection. To examine U.S. policy in the Middle East that might have fueled the attacks became un-American. To suggest that Saudi Arabia, in promoting fundamentalist Islam and in supporting bin Laden, might have been partially responsible for 9/11, was a geopolitical no-no.

Though the Iraq-9/11 connection deflated, the administration then put together every scrap they could find to prove that Saddam Hussein was continuing to develop (and even possessed) nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. "There is no doubt in my mind," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations and the world in February 2003. Like conspiracy hunters after 9/11 "truth," the Bush administration latched on to whatever confirmed their biases and ignored anything that questioned their presumptions. And the intelligence community failed to properly analyze the situation regarding Iraqi WMD, and then failed to forecast what would happen in Iraq once Saddam was gone.

George W. Bush said that "we'll fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them here." And to some degree, he was right; that has been the main achievement in two decades of war. A combination of relentless pursuit of terrorists, the counterterrorism focus, and the transformation of American domestic life did thwart another 9/11. Now, the Biden administration is taking several steps toward finally closing the 9/11 chapter, in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, in pledging to get the U.S. military out of Iraq, and in ordering a global "posture review" of U.S. military deployments. There is a move afoot in Congress to repeal the blanket authorizations behind the War on Terror.

"We went to Afghanistan because of a horrific attack that happened 20 years ago," Joe Biden said when he announced the withdrawal. "That cannot explain why we should remain there in 2021."

Nor does the unfinished business of eradicating Al-Qaeda or the return of the Taliban explain the decision to withdraw. The truth is that official Washington—and the Pentagon—has just grown exhausted with the fighting. And despite all the flag waving, the public is no longer supportive of the war effort. No one believes any longer that the United States—and certainly not the U.S. military—can bring democracy and stability to the countries where we've fought. The COVID pandemic, the divide at home, China and Russia, climate change and other geopolitical challenges have overtaken the threat of international terrorism.

There has always been a strong voice in America that has argued that the best way to honor the losses of 9/11 is not just by pledging that it never happens again, but to also pledge that the young men and women sent out there on the never-forget crusade were adequately equipped, both materially and endowed with a clear mission, all so they could be safely brought home.

Rescue workers sift through the wreckage of the World Trade Center September 13, 2001 in New York City, two days after two hijacked airplanes slammed into the twin towers, levelling them in an alleged terrorist attack. Mario Tama/Getty

The war is indeed over now��officially. But the U.S. military is not completely withdrawing, and it will continue to fight in these countries (and others) from "friendly" bases in countries like Kuwait and the Gulf States, resorting even more to remote warfare, relying on airplanes and drones, our generation's weapons and the very ones that the terrorist chose to use to teach us a lesson about vulnerability and power.

Could It Happen Again?

Twenty years after 9/11, al Qaeda central is mostly neutered, its charismatic leader dead and with no one equivalent to take his place. Of course we don't know what we don't know. But plotting on the scale of a 9/11 is ever more difficult, with the clandestine war against terrorists continuing, with a national counterterrorism effort bureaucratically focused on the matter, and airport security now institutionalized. And there is no question, at least in the short term, that the ongoing pandemic has slowed down everything, including international terrorists, making travel more difficult and largely closing off the United States, thereby increasing safety against external threats.

But Al-Qaeda isn't eliminated, and there are other affiliates like the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen, Boko Haram in West Africa and al-Shabaab in East Africa, to name a few, that continue to flourish. And there is a long list of terrorist plots and attacks—the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the Boston marathon, AQAP's threats to commercial aviation, trucks plowing into crowds in New York City and elsewhere—that suggest that while we may have prevented another 9/11 type attack, we may have just transitioned from the spectacular era to the mundane.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and members of the national security team receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House May 1, 2011 in Washington, DC. Pete Souza/The White House/Getty

As the Biden administration makes its grand gestures, and as the national security establishment officially shifts from the War on Terror to "great power competition," there are other dangers ahead. In our zeal to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, we ignore ISIS-Khorasan, a terrorist organization that is seizing the Al-Qaeda mantle and has shown its propensity for suicide attacks. As the intelligence community shifts its attention, it applies fewer resources to the terrorism problem set. New global challenges beyond COVID, such as climate change, increasingly seize the attention of the national security community. And the Department of Homeland Security, created to have a singular focus on terrorism, has grown into a giant bureaucracy that is more and more diffuse—immigration policy, cyber security, critical infrastructure protection, even the sanctity of the elections. And many of the terror hunters themselves are now focused on domestic unrest and extremism, drawing resources from international operations.

The 9/11 Commission ultimately concluded that while there were many mistakes and abundant organizational limitations that made the attacks possible, the disaster also was caused by failures of imagination. One of the still unexplored options for the future, beyond the airpower and special operations American way of war, is that war just might not be the right paradigm. After 9/11, anyone who rejected military action and argued that terrorism was a law enforcement matter was shouted down. And yet today, the military effort looks more and more like law enforcement, as fighters seek out individual perpetrators and go after the equivalent of crime families, judge, jury and executioners targeting enemies before crimes have even been committed. This is not a viable strategy that addresses the resilience of terrorism, but other approaches of either kinder wars or reeducation also ignore the fact that the U.S. still occupies the Middle East, stimuli for propelling more to seek out the very thing we hope to eradicate.

People walk through the Empty Sky 9/11 memorial in Liberty State Park on February 27, 2018 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Gary Hershorn/Getty

Twenty years after Pearl Harbor, the commemorations included ceremonies to remember the tragedy and subsequent war. But America had moved on to its greatest period of prosperity and growth. Germany and Japan had been made over into democracies, and though the nuclear arms race dogged society, even that shadow was beginning to dissipate in recognition that the planet was vulnerable. To put it mildly, it's hard to see anything equivalent emerging from the heartbreak of 9/11. Ultimately, that is its greatest tragedy.

— William M. Arkin is author, most recently, of on that day: the definitive timeline of 9/11 (PublicAffairs) and History in One Act: A Novel of 9/11 (Featherproof Books). He can be reached at [email protected]. His Twitter handle is @warkin.

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96thdayofrage · 7 years ago

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This has been a long time coming. Back in 2010, with the Tea Party riding high in the news, Nils Gilman (author of "Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America") wrote a blog post, "Rightwing productions of history," that brilliantly explained how fake history empowers the right — which writes "history" for immediate propaganda value, with only the most tenuous concern for what actually happened historically — while academic history was too nuanced and complicated to help the left in those terms.

“There's an underlying irony here, which is worth underscoring,” Gilman wrote. “While the political right has largely lost the interpretive battle for the American past among professional historians, they remain far more sensitive than the political left to the political importance of dominating popular understandings of key episodes from the past.”

The surprise election of Trump may have shaken things up, however. There’s been a flood of popular writing about histories of populism, authoritarianism and threats to democracy since November 2016. Where all this leads is unclear, but at least the political importance of history has become a vital concern for the left as well as the right — which creates new possibilities. To better grasp how we got here, Salon sat down to interview Gilman about his insight from the Tea Party’s heyday, and what inklings it can provide for the days ahead.

What led you to write "Rightwing productions of history" in 2010?

There were a lot of things going on at that point. One had to do with the contested legacy of the Vietnam War, and counterinsurgency. There was a whole series of books coming out at that time written by various people who are not academics. Some of them were more or less credible sources: scholars but not academics. There's a verystrong consensus among academic historians about the historical legacies of counterinsurgency programs, and the counterinsurgency program in Vietnam in particular. Basically, the last successful counterinsurgency waged by a power in the global North against power in the global South was — and this is somewhat arguable — Malaya in 1961, although Malaya became independent shortly thereafter [as the nation now called Malaysia], so it’s almost a rule-proving exception.

During the high colonial period, there were many insurgencies that were put down. What brought colonialism to an end, more than anything else, was the rising failure or inability to put down insurgencies in Algeria, in Vietnam and so on.

That was the dominant consensus view among academic historians. Now [in 2010] the U.S. finds itself embroiled in trying to lead the counterinsurgency in Iraq. And that historical view of counterinsurgency wasn't going to work as a usable past for people who are trying to foment contemporary counterinsurgency programs in Afghanistan and Iraq. So a series of books started to appear — some of them more credible as histories than others. Max Boot (who I've known since college) and Mark Moyar (who my wife has known since college) are people I would certainly call credible intellectuals — they aren’t just making up bullshit. But they are very much engaged in a project of writing history that's informed by the need to create a past that works for present political purposes.

I should note that I was actually working as a consultant at the time, trying to help people in the U.S. government try to think more historically about the insurgency processes they were engaged in.

You said “there were a lot of things going on.” What else did you have in mind?

There was also this domestic issue, which is that there are a lot of stories to tell about the past, not just one. If you ask almost any academic historian today, “What was the primary cause of the U.S. Civil War?” the absolute overwhelming consensus is one word: “slavery.” You know, complicated multi-causal factor, but you boil it all away — no slavery, no Civil War, right? But that's not a narrative that a lot of people are very happy with.

In fact, it wasn't the predominant narrative for a long time. It wasn't the dominant narrative really until the 1960s and '70s when there was a whole new historiography on that. And there are people who want to contest that history now. There's this whole industry of people funded by right-wing think tanks and right-wing benefactors, who are interested in creating a narrative about the past which is useful for particular political projects in the present.

I actually think the political right is much better at this. Partly because they lost the academy, they want [to win] these battles to a very large extent, and are hyper-aware that the way the narrative about the U.S. past has solidified over the last generation or two makes it much harder for them to pursue certain kinds of policies. So that's the general frame for the piece.

At the beginning you wrote, “Over the last 40 years of production of American history, historical memory has been quite radically transformed.” How would you explain to a layperson what you meant by that?

There's different dimensions to it. One major factor is that, 30 to 40 years ago we got civics lessons in schools, which were historical stories that were told to present the political values of the country. The Revolutionary War was an uprising against the despotic foreign government, and against taxation without representation. There was education about the republican virtues. There was a story told about the rising arc of freedoms in the history of the country. These things were all told in a pretty explicit way. My kids are school-age now. They don't get that kind of explicit civics lesson anymore. This is part of the retreat of public institutions from engaging in moral suasion in general and American civic life. So that's one part of the story.

At the same time, there's been a real change in many of the dominant narratives about the U.S. past. Academic historians have increasingly told stories in the name of inclusion, social histories. Fifty years ago, the dominant kinds of historiography focused primarily on political elites. The social history of revolution, which began really in the 1960s, and then became the dominant movement in the '70s and '80s, was about teaching history "from below," as the saying goes.

This was the history of various working classes and oppressed groups, and groups that had been written out of history. Because the political history focused on elites naturally was the history of "dead white men," as the saying goes. So people became interested in telling stories about the history of women, of working-class people, of African-Americans. This is done in the name of inclusion, but when the stories get told, they also become stories of oppression. As those became the dominant stories, the history of the past was no longer a history necessarily of the arc of history bending toward freedom. It was a history of a long series of only slowly, haltingly and hesitatingly overcoming oppressions — centuries of suffering. This became a story that was much less celebratory of the American past.

That created problems.

It contrasted very sharply with the kind of story that, at the same time, Ronald Reagan wanted to tell about his shining city on a hill, a glorious beacon that all others look out to. So you started to get a stronger and stronger divergence between the kinds of stories told. Certain political factions in the country — nationalists, and also darker forces like white nationalists, and people who were actually interested in perpetuating these oppressions that these social historians were trying to decry — were not very happy with this turn of historiographical events, where the dominant story was no longer a celebratory story about elites building a great and powerful country. It was instead the story about various kinds of predatory elites who had oppressed large segments of the country, not to say the rest of the world.

That was a much less useful history for people who wanted to promote U.S. power, plus the power of certain constituencies within the country. They recognized that the understanding of the past that has become the dominant view of academic history was an actual block for them to be able to enact the kinds of policies they wanted to enact. So alternative history started to be written, not by academic historians but by other kinds of people.

You tweeted recently about best-selling “historians” not being academics. What’s the significance of that, as you see it?

The fact that Bill O'Reilly is the best-selling "historian” in the country I think tells you two things. One is that there's a huge amount of demand for different kinds of stories than the ones told by academic historians. Second -- and this is a point I really want to make -- why is Bill O'Reilly spending his time writing histories? Two things: One is he feels that having the kind of story he wants to tell about the past is important for his political project, and two, he sees that such histories do not exist.

It's not just Bill O'Reilly. Jonah Goldberg wrote a ridiculous book called “Liberal Fascism,” where he argued that contemporary liberalism is a direct lineal descendent from fascism, just because there are some resonances between the anti-classicalliberalism of FDR and the anti-classical liberalism of the fascists in the 1930s. There were a whole variety of different anti-classical liberalisms that arose in the context of the Great Depression. It was a major rebuke of classical liberalism, and the question was what to do about it. One answer was fascism. Another answer was communism. A third answer was the kind of mixed economy that FDR put together.

FDR is actually another very important figure in this. FDR has had, I would say, close to a cult following among American liberals, generally celebrated by American liberals as the greatest president of the 20th century.

I must have read a dozen books on him as a teenager.

Exactly. I mean he was celebrated as the guy who saved the country from the worst political fate. He saved American capitalism, he won the war. There were all sorts of things about him swept under the rug in those kinds of hagiographic narratives, matters relating to African-American civil rights, the Japanese-American internment, etc. So there was some dissent. But basically, FDR was treated as a really important figure.

Republicans have had an explicit campaign to try to displace the memory of FDR as the greatest American president of the 20th century with the memory of Ronald Reagan. I think John McCain has an explicit project to make sure that more sites in the U.S. are named after Reagan than FDR. Why is that? It's a concerted campaign to control the symbolic understanding of the past.

One of the important things you highlighted is the asymmetry involved. There’s very little concern with getting the past right among conservatives, while among professional historians there's so much concern with getting it right that it becomes difficult to have a usable past.

This goes to the style of academic writing, which makes it hard to reach popular audiences. Every year the best-selling histories, whether they happen to have a particular political project or not, tend not to be written by academic historians. That's partly because of the stylistic job pressures within the academy.

There's a second dimension, which is that academic historians, for the most part, are motivated by trying to get the story right, and to understand the balance, the complexity and the nuances. Academic historians will always tell you two things: It started longer ago than you think, and it’s more complicated than you think. Complexity is the enemy of clarification, for political purposes. Political communicators have to make strong, clear statements. It’s not useful for them to be nuanced.

In a larger context, there is a parallel here with what's happening in the sciences, whether it’s “intelligent design” vs. evolution, or the attacks on global warming. Chris Mooney in "The Republican Brain" argued that the liberal tradition sees reason as the search for knowledge, but that's not what the science actually says. Our complex minds actually developed from being social animals. It's relationships and persuasion that the mind is much more attentive to.

I'm not a neuroscientist so I can't speak to that directly, but it certainly sounds plausible. There is a fundamental relationship between liberalism — not welfare-state liberalism but skeptical, open-minded, non-dogmatic liberalism, a willingness to revise accepted positions that is central to the mindset of an effective scientist -- that are antithetical to political systems that are entailed by dogma. So there is a connection there.

One framework I find illuminating is the one evoked by Karen Armstrong in the introduction to "The Battle for God" — that of logos vs. mythos. The scientific mindset, expressive of logos, is where a great deal of energy of the political left has gone for a long time, both the center-left establishment and more progressive forces. If you want to change the system, you have two choices — one is looking back to how things used to be or were "supposed" to be, and the other is to study things in a problem-solving way, to figure out how we move forward — and that seems to resonate with science.

I generally agree with that, but here's my caveat. Effective politics speaks the language of mythos at least as much as the language of logos. My view is that populism is that style of politics which focuses on not logos, policy wonk detail but politics as a form of expression, as a vehicle for identity, and that takes place in the realm of myth. Really genius politicians manage to have some artful balance between the logos and the mythos. They manage their policy agendas that are rooted in logic and evidence, yet are able to express to people in a common idiom why this is meaningful to them, in terms of the larger values and beliefs -- call that mythos -- that they want to believe in.

I think the fundamental mistake that people make — policy intellectuals, especially — is to believe that everybody sees the world the way they do. Most people don't see the world and see politics the way somebody like you or me does. We're like political nerds, interested in policy details, and that's not how 99 percent of people think. They think about politics as a vehicle for other things. Nowadays, they think of it as a form of entertainment. That's why we have the entertainer in chief as a president.

#american history #author interview #authoritarianism #authors #bill o’reilly

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Opinion: The voters the GOP wants to silence Fifty-six years ago this week, John Lewis was bludgeoned by Alabama state troopers on that bridge in Selma, alongside hundreds of heroic women, men and young people, for claiming a democratic birthright that continues to be denied to many in our own time. “Bloody Sunday,” as it came to be known, continues to haunt our national psyche. Selma, as it was unfolding and as we look back on it historically, illustrates the bottomless depths and expansive breadth of anti-Black racism. Malcolm X understood this, initially better than Martin Luther King Jr. He reminded Black folk, quite correctly, that full access to democracy was something they never had and warned them it was something they would likely never get. For many, that remains true today. These truths may not get someone elected, but they are the only chance we have to confront the great historic and contemporary evils that continue to plague us and the world. Bloody Sunday should not be remembered as a triumph of the American spirit. It is a tragic emblem of America’s stubborn, violent failure to recognize Black humanity. The nation still doesn’t recognize it. And it’s not just overt racists or the Republican Party. It. Is. The. Entire. Nation. That is the hardest lesson of Selma, one evident in the latest round of national cruelty to deny Black citizenship and dignity. The scores of voter suppression measures primarily targeting Black voters in Georgia and other states since the Peach State’s January 5, 2021 Senate run-off races should be acknowledged for what they are: old-fashioned anti-Black racism whose origin goes back to Reconstruction. While Americans should rightfully applaud (and many are) the voter rights advocacy and organizing done by Stacey Abrams, the voter education campaign waged by the WNBA and LeBron James’ continued investment in protecting the franchise for African Americans, the fact that they have to do such work almost 60 years after the Voting Rights Act is a national tragedy. James’ “More Than a Vote” campaign of voter education, information and protection is laudatory civic action. But just imagine the kind of investments someone with James’s resources and dedication might be able to make in an America with full and fair voting rights access for all. That so many are still spending precious energies, resources and time on something as basic as voting rights underscores the vulnerability of Black citizenship in our own time. It also highlights our collective moral and political failure to come to terms with Selma’s enduring significance. If we view the civil rights era as a national bedtime story, complete with a beginning, middle and happy ending, then Selma offers a dramatic third-act victory that helped propel the triumph of the first Black president 43 years later. But American history is never that simple. Popular myths about national racial progress treat the blood spilled in Selma as providing a symbolic sacrifice that permanently enshrined Black citizenship and dignity in the national consciousness. As we have all seen in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that gutted voting rights enforcement, this is patently false. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act is the best legislative antidote against this new campaign of legalized voter suppression. Passed in the House of Representatives in 2019, the legislation restores voter rights protections stripped by the Supreme Court and will ensure nationwide voting rights access. It is no accident that the White siege at the US Capitol building took place the day after Black voters in Georgia helped elect the first Black senator and gave Democrats a razor-thin Senate majority. The vote is one of the most important tools in a democracy to change social and political conditions. Yet the vote is only the beginning, the tip of the spear of the kind of deep citizenship and civic action that propels social justice and human progress. Every inch of ground gained (Senate seats, the White House, the very prospect of bills like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act or HR1, the For the People Act) prompts inevitable, insidious backlash. Efforts to build a truly beloved community in America require more than the vote but can only truly begin in earnest with free and unfettered voting rights for all Americans. The most pernicious aspect of contemporary voter suppression measures winding their way through state legislatures is the way in which they promote former President Donald Trump’s false allegation of voter fraud as a political, legislative, and policy effort to, once again, deny Black voters their just due. Contemporary voter suppression efforts are simply updated disenfranchisement techniques first institutionalized during the 19th century and now, through the assistance of the former president, the Republican Party and right-wing media outlets, buffed and polished to a high gloss that normalizes anti-Black racism through lies about voter fraud and cheating inevitably occurring wherever Black votes are cast. But what voting rights advocates characterize as voter suppression doesn’t begin to do justice to the moral and political turpitude underway, nor does it reflect the cascading reverberations that such naked racism against Black folk has on our larger body politic. By forever placing Black people in the position of having to defend their fundamental citizenship rights, the racism behind these political assaults helps to — in the eyes of the public and institutions in our democracy — negate the very idea of Black humanity. Black people remain, as ever, the ground zero to a national discourse around race, identity, and whose lives matter, whose lives don’t, and why. How can Black folk expect dignity and citizenship in a nation that permits continued attacks on their fundamental right to access the primary vehicle for social, political, and economic change? That unanswered question continues to haunt America. It deserves special and sustained attention this week as we grapple with commemorations of Selma as a signpost of premature racial progress and celebration, rather than a significant chapter in America’s still unfinished national political saga. Source link Orbem News #GOP #opinion #Opinion:StaceyAbramsandLeBronJamesshouldn'thavetofightthisbattle-CNN #opinions #silence #Voters

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

Text

Opinion: The voters the GOP wants to silence

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/opinion-the-voters-the-gop-wants-to-silence/

Opinion: The voters the GOP wants to silence

Fifty-six years ago this week, John Lewis was bludgeoned by Alabama state troopers on that bridge in Selma, alongside hundreds of heroic women, men and young people, for claiming a democratic birthright that continues to be denied to many in our own time. “Bloody Sunday,” as it came to be known, continues to haunt our national psyche.

Selma, as it was unfolding and as we look back on it historically, illustrates the bottomless depths and expansive breadth of anti-Black racism. Malcolm X understood this, initially better than Martin Luther King Jr. He reminded Black folk, quite correctly, that full access to democracy was something they never had and warned them it was something they would likely never get. For many, that remains true today.

These truths may not get someone elected, but they are the only chance we have to confront the great historic and contemporary evils that continue to plague us and the world. Bloody Sunday should not be remembered as a triumph of the American spirit. It is a tragic emblem of America’s stubborn, violent failure to recognize Black humanity. The nation still doesn’t recognize it. And it’s not just overt racists or the Republican Party. It. Is. The. Entire. Nation. That is the hardest lesson of Selma, one evident in the latest round of national cruelty to deny Black citizenship and dignity. The scores of voter suppression measures primarily targeting Black voters in Georgia and other states since the Peach State’s January 5, 2021 Senate run-off races should be acknowledged for what they are: old-fashioned anti-Black racism whose origin goes back to Reconstruction.

While Americans should rightfully applaud (and many are) the voter rights advocacy and organizing done by Stacey Abrams, the voter education campaign waged by the WNBA and LeBron James’ continued investment in protecting the franchise for African Americans, the fact that they have to do such work almost 60 years after the Voting Rights Act is a national tragedy.

James’ “More Than a Vote” campaign of voter education, information and protection is laudatory civic action. But just imagine the kind of investments someone with James’s resources and dedication might be able to make in an America with full and fair voting rights access for all. That so many are still spending precious energies, resources and time on something as basic as voting rights underscores the vulnerability of Black citizenship in our own time.

It also highlights our collective moral and political failure to come to terms with Selma’s enduring significance. If we view the civil rights era as a national bedtime story, complete with a beginning, middle and happy ending, then Selma offers a dramatic third-act victory that helped propel the triumph of the first Black president 43 years later. But American history is never that simple. Popular myths about national racial progress treat the blood spilled in Selma as providing a symbolic sacrifice that permanently enshrined Black citizenship and dignity in the national consciousness. As we have all seen in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that gutted voting rights enforcement, this is patently false.

The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act is the best legislative antidote against this new campaign of legalized voter suppression. Passed in the House of Representatives in 2019, the legislation restores voter rights protections stripped by the Supreme Court and will ensure nationwide voting rights access.

It is no accident that the White siege at the US Capitol building took place the day after Black voters in Georgia helped elect the first Black senator and gave Democrats a razor-thin Senate majority. The vote is one of the most important tools in a democracy to change social and political conditions. Yet the vote is only the beginning, the tip of the spear of the kind of deep citizenship and civic action that propels social justice and human progress. Every inch of ground gained (Senate seats, the White House, the very prospect of bills like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act or HR1, the For the People Act) prompts inevitable, insidious backlash.

Efforts to build a truly beloved community in America require more than the vote but can only truly begin in earnest with free and unfettered voting rights for all Americans.

The most pernicious aspect of contemporary voter suppression measures winding their way through state legislatures is the way in which they promote former President Donald Trump’s false allegation of voter fraud as a political, legislative, and policy effort to, once again, deny Black voters their just due.

Contemporary voter suppression efforts are simply updated disenfranchisement techniques first institutionalized during the 19th century and now, through the assistance of the former president, the Republican Party and right-wing media outlets, buffed and polished to a high gloss that normalizes anti-Black racism through lies about voter fraud and cheating inevitably occurring wherever Black votes are cast.

But what voting rights advocates characterize as voter suppression doesn’t begin to do justice to the moral and political turpitude underway, nor does it reflect the cascading reverberations that such naked racism against Black folk has on our larger body politic. By forever placing Black people in the position of having to defend their fundamental citizenship rights, the racism behind these political assaults helps to — in the eyes of the public and institutions in our democracy — negate the very idea of Black humanity. Black people remain, as ever, the ground zero to a national discourse around race, identity, and whose lives matter, whose lives don’t, and why.

How can Black folk expect dignity and citizenship in a nation that permits continued attacks on their fundamental right to access the primary vehicle for social, political, and economic change?

That unanswered question continues to haunt America. It deserves special and sustained attention this week as we grapple with commemorations of Selma as a signpost of premature racial progress and celebration, rather than a significant chapter in America’s still unfinished national political saga.

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gravitascivics · 4 years ago

Text

A SHIFT IN THE CLASSROOM

[Note: From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings. Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject. It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts. The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments. This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

When considering the role civics education plays in society, one must consider the context in which that role is played. While this contextual relationship might be observed in any nation, the fact that the American political culture has taken a natural rights view as its dominant perspective, the political culture has influenced how civics is seen and how it is taught in a particular way.

The effect of the natural rights view makes itself felt both directly in the content of civics’ subject matter and indirectly in that subject matter’s main source of content – that being political science. That is, since the 1950s, that academic discipline has reflected this shift by its adoption of the political systems model and its utilization of behavioral, “scientific” methodologies.[1] These changes have seriously encouraged civics to present to secondary students a highly structural and procedural image of American governance. This posting describes how that has happened.

An overall reason for this turn in political science and civics education reflects the admired advancements in the natural sciences. And those advancements seemed to culminate with the space program that affected the imaginations of many Americans. Their imaginations were bolstered by the dual effects of pride over US’ accomplishments, but also by fear, given the early successes by the country’s main foe, the Soviet Union.

With the launching of Sputnik, the political leaders of the US were determined to catch up to the Soviet’s early lead in space exploration. Beginning in the fifties, they funded various initiatives among a number of institutions in American life including education. And that commitment proved to have a profound effect not only on science and math education, but also on social studies as well.

With this concern, the national social studies establishment attempted to promote the “New Social Studies” which called for the utilization of science protocols to instructional strategies – even to the study of history. While these instructional coaxing proved for the most part to be unsuccessful, the content of social studies subject matter did experience a move toward presenting objectified-based content while shying away from normative issues. The new focus became “what is” or “what was” instead of “what should be” or “what should have been.”

This change is in line with the natural rights’ belief that normative decisions belong to the individual and efforts, especially by a governmental entity – such as public schools – should keep an arm’s length distance from such issues. This reminds the writer of the relatively unintrusive message the Obama Administration promoted for good dietary practices it issued to the nation’s school systems in 2010 and the reaction that message caused. The Administration was in that instance accused of conducting an indoctrinating effort.

It seems that in the eyes of that President’s detractors, promoting good eating habits – to a nation that is experiencing serious levels of obesity among young people – crosses a line between what is legitimate, objective educational presentations, and what is illegitimate, normative or value-based presentations.

Civics is charged with teaching students the knowledge and skills they need to be effective citizens in a democracy. What “effectiveness” means seems to be the point of contention. Natural rights advocates limit its meaning to the structural/procedural aspects to what citizens need to know to fulfill the basic function of citizenship.

That would include being knowledgeable about the “popular” issues of the day (the ones drawing the most attention) and how a citizen performs basic expectations – such as voting and paying taxes. Yes, there is the aim that students at least at this point in their lives be exposed to the various structural elements of the political system (both those in and out of government). That effort is a rundown of the system’s groups, departments, agencies, and of the major processes (such as the formulation of laws) that the system conducts.

What is avoided is any discussion about how those activities should be conducted even if a potential topic or issue can be defined as harming or potentially harming the health of the polity such as in the above example of obesity. This limited concern – not limited material, the typical civics textbook is an amply-sized book – leaves controversies behind.

And then there is the question of what should be asked of students when they are presented the information their civics courses contain. Whether a civics teacher uses a didactic mode of instruction – one that basically dispenses information – or inquiry – one that poses questions or problems for students to answer or solve – for a student to be an effective citizen, the student needs to reflect on the material presented or discovered. Short of that, whatever information is dispensed tends to be quickly forgotten.[2]

It turns out, forgetting “stuff” is what people tend to do. Research seems to indicate that the mental exercise of encoding[3] – a necessary mental prerequisite – leads people to remember information. The process of solving problems or seeking moral justifications or condemnations naturally depends on the mind encoding relevant information. By calling for such mental manipulations, inquiry instructional strategies naturally lead to encoding as information is conceptualized and then compartmentalized in one’s thinking.

Purely didactic teaching, on the other hand, does not in itself provide an exercise that demands active encoding while the instruction takes place. Students usually are expected to take notes and, at some future time, review them and commit them to memory. What encoding takes place is incidental to that process while inquiry sessions demand simultaneous encoding while any instruction or related investigating takes place.

So, even if a teacher primarily dispenses information, to increase the likelihood that information is remembered, much less make it meaningful, that teacher needs to find ways to have those students encode the information they are given.

For example, a didactic lesson can begin by the teacher presenting the students with an “essay” question answerable by implementing the subsequent information the teacher presents. This would not only introduce the lesson, but help students begin thinking of why the presented information is important according to a concern reflected in the initial question.

And this brings one to the cultural relationships entailed in civics between its main source of information and its efforts to prepare students to be effective citizens. That is, there is a reinforcing relationship between political science and how civics is practiced in American schools. The next posting will take a look at that relationship and how it affects the quality of that instruction in American secondary schools.

[1] One can find an “appendix” chapter describing and explaining this development online; see https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSjZxpifP42VVnhFduKujgUDPJMddmcsh1uRY9DvpNicdYUONOHx56r1jRg4lgxK3ckaiQMJc4Gno0J/pub .

[2] See Kendra Cherry, “4 Explanations for Why We Forget,” Very Well Mind, n.d., accessed October 25, 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/explanations-for-forgetting-2795045 , for a description on the importance of encoding in remembering information.

[3] Encoding means that a mind formulates information in a form it can translate and consequently process. Even at this basic level, the mind must afford the stimulus in question some basic reflection and, of course, the more the information is reflected upon the more firmly it is encoded. See “Encoding,” AlleyDog.com, n.d., accessed October 26, 2020, https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Encoding#:~:text=The%20process%20of%20breaking%20the,and%20later%20retrieval%20is%20encoding.

#natural rights view #science #civics education #social studies

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