#which means we have to elect people who want government to function

[silentauthor96]

Reminder from a politically obsessed Michigander: every progressive policy Michigan has passed in the last two years was made possible by citizen ballot initiatives that a) ended partisan gerrymandering and b) expanded voting rights and ballot access.

Recent legislation passed under Michigan's Democratic trifecta (both levels of legislature and the governor):

Red flag laws (gun control)

Free 2 years higher education (economy)

Free preschool (economy)

Free school lunch (economy)

Expanded child tax credit for working families (economy)

Expanded civil rights law to include LGBTQIA+ protections

Ended right to work (pro-union economy)

Codified abortion protections (these were also passed by citizen ballot initiative though)

Stopped local governments from blocking green energy projects like solar and wind (environmental)

Banned child marriage (marriage before 18. You'd be surprised how many Republicans went on the record against this)

Actually, don't take my word for it: here's a list

Edit: I feel I need to put a somewhat finer point on this because I worry some of y'all missed a critical point -

Voting AND organizing got us this progress!!!

Voting alone was not enough until we fixed the underlying system.

Fuck yeah!

[odinsblog]

When most people talk about expanding the Supreme Court, they're talking about adding a few Justices, two or four to the bench. But I am not most people. I do not think we should add a few Justices to get into an endless tit for tat with Mitch McConnell and his Federalist Society forces. I think we should blow the lid clear off this incrementally institutionalized motherfucker, and add 20 Justices.

I'd like to tell you about my Court expansion plan and explain why adding many Justices instead of fewer Justices is actually a better reform, fixes more underlying problems with the Court, and works out to be less partisan or political than some of the more incremental plans out there.

Let's start with the basics.

Expanding the number of Justices on the Supreme Court can be done with a simple act of Congress, passed by the Senate and signed by the President. Court expansion does not become easier or harder based on the number of Justices you seek to add to the Court. From a civics perspective, the process to add two Justices to the Court is just the same as the process to add 20.

Arguably, the rationale is the same too.

The current plan, supported by some Democrats, is to add four Justices to the Supreme Court. Their arguments are that the Court has gotten woefully out of step with the American people and the elected branches of government, which is true.

They argue that the country is a lot bigger now than it was in 1869, when Congress set the number of Supreme Court Justices at nine, which is also true. Basically, all of these arguments flow together into the catchphrase, “we have 13 Circuit Courts of Appeal, and so we should have 13 Justices.”

See, back in the day, each Supreme Court Justice was responsible for one lower Circuit Court of Appeal. Procedurally, appeals from the lower circuits are heard first by the Justice responsible for that circuit. But now we have 13 lower Circuit Courts of Appeal, meaning some Justices have to oversee more than one. If we expanded the Court to 13 Justices, we'd get back to a one to one ratio for Supreme Court Justice per Circuit Court of Appeal.

But it doesn't actually matter how many circuits each Justice presides over, because all the Justices do is move an appeal from the lower court to the Supreme Court for the full Court to consider whether to hear the appeal.

Their function is purely clerical.

It doesn't matter.

One justice could oversee all 13 circuits while the other eight went fishing, kind of like hazing a rookie on a team. And it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference in terms of the number of cases the Supreme Court hears. It's just a question of who has to work on Saturdays.

Indeed, I'm not even sure that I want the Court to hear more cases. These people are unelected, and these people already have too much power. More cases just gives them more opportunities to screw things up. I don't need the Court to make more decisions. I need the Court to make fewer shitty decisions. And for that, I need to reform how the Court makes those decisions. And for that, I need more people. And I need those people to make their decisions in panels.

Those lower courts, those 13 Circuit Courts of Appeal, almost all of them operate with more than nine judges. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has — wait for it — 29 judges!

All the lower courts use what's called a panel system. When they catch a case, three judges are chosen at random from all the judges on the circuit to hear the case. Those three judges then issue a ruling. If the majority of the circuit disagrees, they can vote to rehear the case as a full circuit.

The legal jargon here is called “en banc” when the full circuit hears the case.

But most of the time, that three judge panel ruling is the final ruling on the issue, with the circuit going en banc only when they believe the three judge panel got it clearly wrong.

Think about how different it would be if our Supreme Court operated on a panel system instead of showing up to Court knowing that six conservative Justices were against you, or the one or two conservative Justices that you invited onto your super yacht are guaranteed to hear your case.

You literally wouldn't know which Justices you'd get on your panel.

Even on a six-three conservative court, you might draw a panel that was two-to-one liberals, or you might draw Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett instead of Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch, which could make a huge difference. Either way, you wouldn't know which Justices you'd get.

Not only does that make a big difference in terms of the appearance of fairness, especially in this time when some Justices are openly corrupt, it also makes a big difference in terms of what kinds of cases and arguments people would bring to the Court. Without knowing which Justices they'd get, litigants and red state attorney generals would have to tailor their arguments to a more center mass, mainstream temperament, instead of merely shooting their shot and hoping their arch conservatives can bully a moderate or two to vote with them.

Now, you can do panels with nine or 13 Justices, but you pretty much have to do panels with 29 Justices. Overloading the Court with Justices would essentially force them to adopt the random assignment process used by every other Court.

That would be good.

Sure, litigants could always hope for en banc review, where the full partisan makeup of the Court could be brought to bear. BUT, getting a majority of 29 Justices to overrule a panel decision requires 15 votes. Consider that right now you only need four votes, a minority of the nine member Court, to get the full Court to hear a case.

I'm no mathlete, but I'm pretty sure that 15 is just a higher bar.

That brings me to my next big point about expanding the Court to 29: Moderation.

Most people say that they do not want the Court to be too extreme to either side. Generally, I think that argument is bollocks. I, in fact, do want the Court to be extreme in its defense of voting rights, women's rights, and human rights. But maybe I'm weird.

If you want the Supreme Court to be a more moderate institution, then you should want as many Justices on the Supreme Court as possible. Why? Because cobbling together a 15-14 majority on a 29 member Court will often yield a more moderate decision than a five-four majority on a nine member Court.

Not going to lie. The law is complicated, and judges are quirky. If you invited five judges off the street over for a barbecue, they wouldn't be able to agree on whether hot dogs and hamburgers count as sandwiches.

It's simply easier to get five people to do something extreme than it is to get 15 people to do something extreme.

Think about your own life.

If you wanted to hike up a damn mountain, that is an activity for you and a couple of your closest friends. You're not taking 15 people to climb a mountain. That's not even a hike. That's an expedition, and you're expecting one or two of them to be eaten by bears on the way to the top. But if you're organizing an outdoor activity for 15 people, you're going to go to the park, and your friends will be expected to bring their own beer.

Most likely, adding 20 Justices would moderate the conservative majority just by putting enough people and personalities in the mix that it would be harder for them to do their most destructive work.

Just think about how the five worst senators you know, or the five worst congresspeople you can think of, often don't get their way because they can't even convince other members of their party to go along with their nihilist conservative ride.

Note, I said Conservative majority.

The astute reader will notice that I have not said that I want to add 20 fire-breathing liberal comrades who will stick it to Das Kapital for the rest of their lives. No, I believe the benefits of this kind of court expansion are so great — panels and the moderation from having more justices trying to cobble together en banc majority opinions — that I'd be willing to split the new justices ten and ten with conservative choices.

A 16-13 conservative leaning court would just be better than a six-three conservative court, even if my guys are still in the minority. The only litmus test I'd have for this plan is that all 20 have to be objectively pro-Democratic, self-government. All 20 have to think the Supreme Court has too much power. You give me 20 people who think the court should not be rulers in robes, and I'll take my chances.

However, there's no objective reason for elected Democrats to be as nice and friendly as I am when adding 20 Justices. Off the top, seats should be split eleven to nine, because Mitch McConnell and the Republicans must be made to pay for their shenanigans with the Merrick Garland nomination under Barack Obama. Republicans stole a seat. Democrats should take it back, full stop. I will take no further questions about this.

From there, this is where Democrats could, I don't know, engage in political hardball instead of being SAPS like always.

You see, right now, Republicans are dead set against court expansion because they are winning with the Court as it is. I can make all of the pro-reform, good government arguments under the sun, and the Republicans will ignore them because, again, they're winning right now.

But if you put forward a bill to add 20 seats, the Republican incentives possibly change: obstruct, and the Democrats push through court expansion on their own, and add 20 Justices of their own choosing, and you end up with people like, well, like me on the court. Or Mitch McConnell could release Senators to vote for the plan, and Republicans can share in the bounty.

It puts a different kind of question to McConnell: Join, get nine conservative Justices and keep a 15-14 conservative majority on the court, or Obstruct, and create a 23 to six liberal majority on the court, and trust that Republicans will take over the House, Senate, and White House so they can add 20 of their own Justices in the future.

Note that McConnell will have to run that whole table while overcoming a super liberal Supreme Court that restores the Voting Rights Act and strikes down Republican gerrymanders. Good luck, Mitch.

My plan wins either way.

Either we get a 29 person court that is more moderate, we get a 29 person court that is uber liberal, or McConnell does run the table and we end up with a 49 person court or a 69 person court. And while Republicans are in control of that bloated body, everybody understands that the Court is just a political branch there to rubber-stamp the acts of the President who appointed them.

Perhaps then, voters would start voting based on who they want to be in control of that court, instead of who they want to have a beer with.

The court is either fixed, or neutered.

It's a win-win.

I know 20 is a big number. I know we've all been institutionalized to believe that incremental change is the only change possible. And I know it sounds fanciful to ask for 20 when the starting offer from the establishment of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and President Joe Biden, is zero.

But like a doctor with poor bedside manner, I'm less interested in people's feelings and more interested in fixing the problem.

If you give me two Justices or four Justices, I can reverse a number of conservative policies that they've shoved through a Supreme Court that has already been illegitimately packed with Republican appointees. If you give me a few Justices, I can reestablish a center-left, pro-democracy majority… at least until those new Justices die at the wrong time, under the wrong president.

But if you give me 20 Justices, I can fix the whole fucking thing.

—ELIE MYSTAL, In Contempt of Court

[qqueenofhades]

I just saw that Emmer is the current gop nominee. What do you think his chances are? He appears to be one of the saner gop (which isn’t saying much when the vast majority barely pretend at wanting to govern and would rather just attack anyone who is even a centimeter more to the left then they are). Part of me really hopes he just says screw the freedom caucus and maga crowd and decides to work the the democrats so we can have a semi functional government for a bit.

He's already doomed. He voted to certify the 2020 election and he supports aid to Ukraine (don't get me wrong, he's terrible on every other policy because he's a Republican) and this alone makes him "too moderate." Even though he signed onto the stupid lawsuit to throw out all votes in swing states filed by the felonious Texas AG Ken Paxton in December 2020. Trump has been railing at him on Truth Social and that means he's toast. I'd be surprised if he even got as far as a floor vote, and it's clear the Freedom Caucus immediately turned on him after Daddy Trump yanked the leash.

The Republicans don't want a speaker. They have no interest in electing a speaker. They will keep causing this chaos over and over, even while we're more than halfway through the emergency 45-day funding stopgap. They will, in all probability, let it run out and shut down the government sooner than elect a speaker, because they think a shutdown will be bad for Biden and/or they can pull their usual trick of Blaming The Democrats for it. I suspect it will be ESPECIALLY hard to sell this time, but the media will try to help.

Yet again: these people don't want to govern. They don't want to do anything except fight each other and scream about Real Conservatives. They want the government to be paralyzed (especially since they think it will somehow slow/stop the progress of the criminal cases against Trump). This is a massive mafia racket doing its damndest to protect its orange crime boss, who continues to sabotage the US government with the assistance of his loyal minions. It will be the same for Emmer and anyone else, so. Yeah.

[dailyanarchistposts]

We have been debating tirelessly on different ways to abolish caste and other social evils which permeate the society that we have today. Raising voices against oppression, forming political parties and contesting in elections and also trying to force the government to form and implement policies which will give the Bahujans their fundamental rights. We have come a long way through decades of struggle in gaining rights, but the present political scenario of the country is not looking hopeful to the Bahujan aspirations for breaking away the shackles of caste.

With the diluting of labour laws and enabling state sanctioned exploitation of Bahujan labour, implementation of NEP which further marginalize the Bahujan children and extinguish their hopes of upward social and economic mobility, a proposed EIA which will rob the Bahujans and Adivasis of their land and livelihood, implementation of CAA and NRC to deprive the status of citizenship, privatization of key public utilities and destroying the already weakened public healthcare system, the government is openly showing its motives as a corporate stooge which dances to the whims of Adani, Ambani and other Brahmin Bania masters.

Armed with a grass roots organization like RSS and corporate funded media outlets, they have complete dominance in creating narratives they want the public to believe and they also have a well-oiled IT cell to spread fake news against any dissenters who dare to raise voice against them. Even though there are voices in the society which are raising against these government policies, there is a lack of grass root organization and common vision is sometimes lacking. This doesn’t mean that all the opposing forces against the fascist regime, which is murdering our democracy, should be centralized under one political entity. Instead it is time to think about exactly the opposite, the expansion of the idea of democracy from merely being a political tool used while casting vote once every 5 years to inculcating an idea of democracy in all aspects of life — political, social and economical and decentralization of all aspects of society.

Anarchism is a political philosophy which rejects all coercive and oppressive forms of hierarchy, be it caste, class, color, creed, clan, gender, age, orientation or country. It says that every system of power hierarchy should be scrutinized and made to justify its existence, and any system which fails to justify itself and is trampling the freedom of the individual will have to be abolished. The idea of questioning oppressive power structures is inherent to the idea of anarchism. It prohibits a system where even a party or a few leaders decide on how the society will function. Instead it focuses on decentralizing power to local bodies and communities so that decisions are made at the lowest level possible, thus eliminating the concentration of power into a few hands. It also shares the view that people who are most impacted by policies and decisions are the ones who are most capable of making them.

Historically, humans have developed to live in societies which didn’t have the kind of huge inequalities as it exists today. There is an intrinsic instinct to cooperate and help each other which is visible when a disaster strikes or the self-organization that appears out of nowhere in organic movements against oppression. Solidarity and mutual aid are the foundations of an anarchist society. The “right to well-being” of all human beings, meaning “the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours” (Kropotkin, 1892). Two of the examples of societies which function close to anarchist principles today are Zapatistas of Mexico (Nacional, 2002) and Rojava in Syria (Democracy, 2018). Extreme corruption, colonization and environmental exploitation forced the indigenous people of Mexico to form an autonomous region where people directly form communities and decide the policies. Similarly, the people of Rojava, battered by the civil war, have formed an autonomous region with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchist and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity based on democratic confederalism. One of the principles of direct democracy is that there are no elected representatives for a fixed term, any member who is elected will just be a spokesperson of the community and can be withdrawn immediately if he goes against the decision taken by discussion and deliberations. The means of production will be owned by workers and run by worker councils. Conflict resolution mechanism and alternative systems of judiciary exists within the community run by the members. There won’t be police or other systems which grant power to one person or group to take away the life and liberty of an individual, rather power will be distributed equally or rotationally which is controlled by the community. During the current times of BLM protests all over the world, it is clear that the police institution is just a tool employed by the ruling and propertied class to control the lower class and there is mass class for defunding the police and transferring the resources to community welfare projects.

We need to look at how these communities organize themselves in the face of an oppressive regime and come up with innovative ways to decentralize and create institutions which we are brainwashed to assume will work only if they are centralized. Decentralized community gardens provide food for the community which is maintained by them. Systems of education, community defense, criminal justice systems, industry and healthcare can be decentralized and we need to focus our efforts in building such grassroot level communities which function along the principles solidarity and mutual aid. We already have systems of mutual aid in our communities, all we need to do is to transfer these tendencies to all the systems we live by.

The Indian social mentality of following a leader or waiting for a savior needs to change. Any system which can consolidate power in the hands of the few can change into authoritarianism. Even if the leaders are benevolent and have the will to serve the people, there are systems of coercion which exist in our society, where economic, political and social power resides in the hands of the few, that they will bind the leaders from doing their duty to the Bahujans. The leaders and parties we look up to keep failing and disappointing us time and again. Now, action needs to be taken directly at grass root level by the Bahujans by creating communities and networks of solidarity and mutual aid and practicing decision making and direct participatory democracy. The culture of outsourcing decision making to politicians or other ruling class needs to stop. This has to start at all sectors of industry, agriculture and services too, and also within family.

We can’t turn to the state for protection anymore as it the state apparatus which is being systematically abused by the ruling castes to exploit Bahujan labour to create their wealth. Along with the efforts to educate Bahujans through social media and other means to sensitize them of their exploitation, effort needs to be focused at the bottom most level to inculcate the habit of participatory democracy at individual, family and community levels, respecting the liberty of the individual. The fight for annihilation of caste cannot be won, unless all unjust power structures in the society cease to exist and power is decentralized and distributed to the people directly, where individuals themselves can organize and make decisions about their life without being coerced or exploited to create wealth for others.

References

Democracy, N. (2018, July 6 ). The Communes of Rojava: A Model In Societal Self Direction. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjIdnnE

Kropotkin, P. (1892). The Conquest of Bread. Paris.

Nacional, E. Z. ( 2002). A Zapatista Response to “The EZLN Is NOT Anarchist”. Retrieved from The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist

[halfricanloveyou]

it’s okay to be angry and hate this shit and you’re right about this but you NEED to vote. local and state laws are always included in the elections. and biden is bad but when you don’t vote people like trump get elected into office and do things like turn the supreme court into a republican majority and take away abortion rights and actively support multiple state level and national level candidates who’s platforms are based on hate, which influences hateful people to vote FOR those candidates.

voting CAN fix this but you all have to register and vote. and show up to every single election every time. you have to research your local and state candidates on TOP of the ones running for president. you have to vote in the primaries.

it’s not like you can go and get mad and storm government buildings to guillotine public officials. if you try you’ll be up against the US military. the only reason the last attack on the capitol was successful is because if they succeeded in killing democratic officials it would benefit the party that holds the most power. and right wing candidates love to spend trillions on the military (and let’s be real, even the democrats do but the republicans do it to a higher degree) so guess who the military is going to protect? guess who the military is going to target as the enemy? do you really think any number of everyday citizens you can try to rally would stand a chance?

biden won’t fix this. your rage and your feelings of helplessness won’t fix it either. voting WILL. you just fall for the propaganda being spread that it’s pointless to vote because persuading far left anti fascists to feel that way keeps them out of the polling lines.

“nothing you do will change the system so why bother voting? it will always be this way, so any candidate that has a platform you support will never win and won’t be able to make change anyways” is also facist propaganda. it’s just targeted towards the opposition instead.

NPR is a great resource to keep informed on political issues. despite what right wing racists claim, it’s fairly unbiased and goes into detail to get the full story without leaving parts out intentionally to turn their stories into propaganda. and please just fucking vote. don’t listen to anyone who tells you it’s pointless and won’t fix anything so you might as well not bother. they’re fucking stupid and they are literally spreading facist propaganda. revolution is great but educating yourself and the people around you is far far more effective than getting angry at people online.

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

[whinlatter]

Could you explain more what you mean by “shows how the wizarding world, which does not seem to be a representative democracy”? Like I feel I probably agree with you but I want to understand it more because like from what little we know of canon wizards do get a say in ministry (ex Fudge lied to public about Voldemort so the public wanted him out and chose Scrimgeour, etc) but cause we don’t see general elections but snap elections it’s unclear ?

The British wizarding world when asked to prove that it's a functioning democracy:

Would love to say a bit more about this (briefly mentioned in the author’s note for Beasts chapter six) 🤸‍♀️ It’s definitely true that the opinions of the wizarding public do hold large sway over the appointment of the Minister of Magic in canon in ways that could imply the existence of wizarding. democracy. But it just seems to me that if the wizarding world in Britain is a democracy, then it's so weak or partial a democracy that I don't think we can really call it one at all. I know that old Pottermore post insists Ministers for Magic are democratically elected, and, as you say, in canon, the Minister of Magic seems to be somehow answerable to public opinion and support in a way that implies some idea of popular self-government through some form of representative democracy. But my view is that, in canon, it's basically not a democracy, for reasons I've put below the cut. (Thank you for letting me waffle on about this!)

The reason I think the wizarding world basically doesn’t seem to function as a representative democracy:

None of the four Ministers of Magic in post in the core timeline of the series participate in (or win) a free and fair election during the canon timeline, and most well-informed characters refer to the post as one filled by appointment (possibly by the Wizengamot). In OotP, Arthur gives a bit of insight on the process of appointment when he's talking about Fudge and Dumbledore's rivalry: '[Dumbledore] never wanted the Minister’s job, even though a lot of people wanted him to take it when Millicent Bagnold retired. Fudge came to power instead, but he’s never quite forgotten how much popular support Dumbledore had, even though Dumbledore never applied for the job.” 'Applied for the job' would be a strange way of describing running for elected office, and Bagnold having 'retired' again doesn't imply an election was held. At the start of HBP, Fudge says he's been 'sacked', and while he says that the public were calling for his resignation, there’s no mention of a snap election. You’re completely right that there could have been one, but to me this sounds more like Scrimgeour is an internal emergency appointment (that he's an Auror suggests to me that it's a bit like bringing in the military, along the lines of a state of emergency provision). That Fudge can stay on 'in an advisory capacity' as a Ministry employee also suggests there are other governmental actors who have the power to 'keep on' outgoing Ministers, suggesting again that the Minister of Magic is usually an appointed rather than elected office. Obviously, Thicknesse becomes Minister in... not very democratic circumstances. And then Kingsley gets 'named temporary Minister for Magic' in a decision made by who bloody knows at the end of DH, which again suggests the existence of an unelected body called upon to appoint Ministers, at the very least, in times of emergency.

Even if we buy the idea that the Minister of Magic is elected sometimes, the Wizengamot doesn't ever seem to be, and it seems likely they're body with the power to appoint or dismiss the Minister of Magic without an election. Even if you take the Pottermore post on its own terms, it seems the wizarding community only get to elect the office of the Minister for Magic and not any representatives of an elected chamber who would legislate on their behalf, and who might sit in an assembly like MPs in a parliament or congressmen or senators from different regions. There also doesn’t seem to be a system where the proportion of votes corresponds with the number of representatives and therefore majority/minority control of an elected chamber, either with or without a party-political system. In canon, the Wizengamot really doesn't seem to be a body of elected representatives. They seem to be much more like an unelected legislative body of grandees, some with inherited titles, some appointed as an honours system, like the House of Lords in the UK, but also with the power to hold court trials. (There's a great meta on this that I really enjoyed - it's a bit ahistorical, but it's super rich and fun exploration of different models for the Wizengamot's strange blend of executive and legislative power in the British political tradition).

Popular opinion can matter in non-democracies, and popular opinion and support for political figures seems to matter a lot in the wizarding world. In GoF, Sirius gives us an insight, admittedly that of an outsider, of the process of ministerial appointments when he talks about Barty Crouch Sr. Sirius says Crouch was 'tipped for the next Minister of Magic' and had 'his supporters': 'Plenty of people thought he was going about things the right way, and there were a lot of witches and wizards clamouring for him to take over as Minister of Magic.' This sounds like strong popular support, likely communicated through wizarding media, but also just through hearsay and gossip through Ministry and adjacent circles. But what Sirius describes doesn't sound like a support base of voters, and certainly Crouch doesn't seem to have run against Fudge in an election.

Everyone seems to think of the Ministry as holding a broadly technocratic role in wizarding life (even though it's actually extremely political and also functions as the justice system). The Ministry of Magic seems to exist to both shield Muggles from knowledge of magic, to make and enforce law, and to function as a bureaucracy overseeing and ensuring the smooth running of education, trade, communication, transport etc. It doesn't seem to function as a social democracy in the sense of having any kind of welfare state. But this (false) idea of the Ministry as having a fundamentally apolitical social role lends itself to this idea of the wizarding world being a tepid democracy, with a populace broadly happy to give up certain democratic freedoms if it's in the public interest, trading off elements of self-government in exchange for greater efficiency or seeming sense of safety.

It seems possible, even likely, that Kingsley, as a progressive, would try to make his appointment as Minister official and legitimate through a free and fair election after the war (Lee Jordan says Kingsley's “got his vote” if he runs for office after the war - it's extremely funny to me that the only character to talk about voting in the entire series is the deeply unserious Lee Jordan in a jokey radio segment). We don't know that for sure, though, and when the series ends, it is with an unelected Shacklebolt caretaker government. The goodies might win, but democracy continues to elude the wizarding world as the series concludes.

...Basically, you know that scene in OotP when they're at the Hog's Head planning the DA? It's sort of a perfect illustration of the wizarding world's approach to democracy lol. Hermione is one of the nuisance progressives trying to do something mad like 'hold an election', Cho is the voice of the Wizengamot:

“Well, I’ve been thinking about the sort of stuff we ought to do first and — er —” He noticed a raised hand. “What, Hermione?” “I think we ought to elect a leader,” said Hermione. “Harry’s leader,” said Cho at once, looking at Hermione as though she were mad, and Harry’s stomach did yet another back flip. “Yes, but I think we ought to vote on it properly,” said Hermione, unperturbed. “It makes it formal and it gives him authority. So — everyone who thinks Harry ought to be our leader?” Everybody put up their hands, even Zacharias Smith, though he did it very halfheartedly. “Er — right, thanks,” said Harry, who could feel his face burning.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

In 2016, Christy Lopez was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide.

But as soon as Trump took over, things started changing fast. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson. Lopez, who had left the Justice Department in 2017 to take a teaching job at Georgetown, could only watch from the outside as the work she took pride in was ground to a halt. Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them. “If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” she told me. “But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.” Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle?

Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point. Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

If Trump returns to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term. The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals. We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them.

[...]

Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained

Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies. The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the top of the list. At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies. While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, he has promised to reissue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.” Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over.

The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus��� the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three Department of Justice divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct.

[...]

Election law politicized

On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election. The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president. Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys. What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress? It’s an example that illustrates the importance of the Civil Rights Division. The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example).

This is what a disaster of a 2nd Trump term will bring.

[jaynehat]

Working the polls in the USA

This November will mark my second election as a volunteer poll worker. I highly recommend the experience, especially if you're wanting to do something that directly helps democracy to function.

When you go to vote, your polling location may have an interest sheet asking if you want to volunteer to work at the polls. Just marking that you're interested doesn't commit you to anything, it just means you'll get an e-mail at some point asking if you're still up for volunteering.

In my case, my local poll judge contacted me later and I indicated I was still interested. After providing several options, we set up a training time that worked for me. Everybody - new or returning - has to be trained, because it is very, very important that we all be in compliance with the current laws.

I live in a mid-sized city, and training was in a government center downtown, in a big meeting room with a wide variety of citizens who didn't seem to have anything in common except for a desire to help out. Training took a couple of hours, and consisted of election officials presenting information at the front of the room, as well as via Powerpoint and printed materials. It included details like what to do if someone with a disability needs to vote from their car, which forms of picture ID are valid (this was a new requirement for my state this spring), and what to do if you're not sure about something.

There were options for half day and full day volunteers on voting day. I picked full day because the poll judge basically begged me to, since they had a shortage of full day workers. We would have been fine, it turns out, but it was kind of cool seeing the whole day through. Independently of each other, most of the poll workers brought in snacks for everybody to have. It was much appreciated. One guy even brought in red white and blue bunting and decorated the place.

I already had confidence in the integrity of the polls, but after having volunteered once, I have even more confidence. Everybody really is there just to make sure things go smoothly, and the number of people, including me, checking over every single tiny tick mark and scrap of paper was mind-blowing. After the polls closed, we went back and checked every single voter slip (these slips do not show who someone voted for, we NEVER have access to that info) against the voter registration book to be sure that all the names matched up exactly as they were supposed to. When all the checks were completed, we could have total confidence that the paper records of physical votes cast were in accordance with the digital votes cast at the machines.

Most of the poll workers had done this many times before and were up on how things worked, which helped my nervousness greatly. Also, while I am using the term "volunteer," you actually do get a small paycheck for doing this.

I am Gen X in my 50's, and I was the youngest volunteer there. I can see how this would be a great volunteer opportunity for a retiree, but I couldn't help thinking that maybe we could add a little youth to the mix as well. You could also choose to help out at an early voting place, if you want something that wouldn't be so crowded.

In conclusion: if you're looking for something to do to help out American democracy, volunteering at your polling place could be right for you.

[mariacallous]

On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied.

Occupied. Marunyak had been expecting the war to break out, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village might mean. Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official—genuinely elected, since 2006, under Ukrainian laws giving real power to local governments, not appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. That meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in Stara Zburjivka and help his constituents cope with a cascade of emergencies. “Already, within a few days, there were families lacking food,” he recalls. “There was no bread or flour, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers … Many residents began contributing the food they could share, and so we created a fund, providing assistance on demand.”

Similar plans were made to locate and distribute medications. Because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function, citizens formed nighttime security patrols staffed with local volunteers. Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians sent to Stara Zburjivka. “I told people not to be afraid, saying, when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them.”

He was. And he paid a horrific price for it.

The Russian soldiers who arrived in Kherson—like the Russian soldiers who occupied Bucha and Irpin, the Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhya, or anywhere else in Ukraine—were not prepared to meet people like Marunyak. To the extent that the invaders had any understanding of where they were and what they were meant to be doing (some, initially, had none), they believed that they were entering Russian territory ruled by an insecure and unpopular Ukrainian elite. Their actions suggested that their immediate goal was to decapitate that elite: arrest them, deport them, kill them. They did not expect this to be difficult.

Their theory of occupation was not new. Soviet soldiers entering the territory of eastern Poland or the Baltic states during World War II also arrived with lists of the types of people they wanted to arrest. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided such a list for occupied Poland. To the Soviet dictator, anyone linked to the Polish state—police, army officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families—was a “counter-revolutionary,” a “kulak,” a “bourgeois,” or, to put it more simply, an enemy to be eliminated.

Russia made similar lists before invading Ukraine a year ago, some of which have become known. Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and other leaders featured on them, as did well-known journalists and activists. But Russian soldiers were not prepared to encounter widespread resistance, and they certainly did not expect to find loyal, conscientious, popularly elected small-town and village mayors.

Perhaps that explains why Marunyak, age 60, was punished with such horrific cruelty after the Russians arrested him on March 21. Along with a few other local men, the Stara Zburjivka mayor was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat him. They gave him nothing to eat and little to drink. One time he was stripped naked and forced to stay in the cold for several hours. A gun was held to his head, and he was threatened with drowning. He was told that his wife and daughters would also be captured. Once, he said, the soldiers choked him until he lost consciousness. They kept demanding to know where he kept his weapons. Because Marunyak fit into no category that the Russians could recognize—perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them—they decided he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian “sabotage group.” He was not. He had no weapons and no military skills.

Days into his detention, Marunyak was briefly able to see his wife, Kateryna Ohar, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Ohar she would not see her husband for 20 years. He was then sent right into another torture chamber, where a different set of Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this form of torture, wires are connected to a victim’s fingers, toes, or sometimes genitals. Electric shocks are then delivered using the battery of a field telephone—according to one witness, soldiers described it as “making a call to Putin.” The practice of electrocuting prisoners was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in Russia’s Chechen wars, and it is now in use again throughout occupied Ukraine. But even when Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that his captors never wrote anything down. Their questioning was sloppy; he could not work out what they actually wanted to learn. Possibly nothing. Eventually, after days of captivity with next to no food, he was freed, with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He escaped the occupied zone.

Over the past 10 months, the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims of and witnesses to atrocities in areas of Ukraine that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts, with the goal of providing evidence that will be admissible in future court proceedings. The organization has found that Marunyak’s experience was not unusual. Oleh Yakhniyenko, the mayor of Mylove, another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Olena Peleshok, the mayor of Zeleny Pod, was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of Bekhtery village, was detained and tortured. In the formerly occupied territory of Kharkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers. The Ukrainian government believes that mayors, deputy mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Some have simply disappeared.

Many of their stories share not only gruesome details but also an atmosphere of unreality. Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they were “free,” the invaders insisted. But when Russian-speaking mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response. Dmytro Vasyliev, the secretary of the city council of occupied Nova Kakhovka, recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups; Vasyliev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them: “They couldn’t comprehend why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them,” Vasyliev recalled. “I said, ‘How can I look into the eyes of my son, my colleagues, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t get it.” Since his interview with the Reckoning Project, Vasyliev has died.

But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded Ukrainians, even as they assaulted local leaders, Russian soldiers seemed not to know how to replace them. Unlike their Soviet Communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland, or Estonia, or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, even no clear idea of the meaning of Russkiy mir, the “Russian world” that some of President Vladimir Putin’s ideologues extol.

Russian forces do find collaborators to replace elected officials, but many appear to be completely random, unqualified people, with no discernible ideology or previous links to Russia. In some places the invaders have displayed Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that these older ideas will create some sympathy for Russia among the conquered Ukrainians. But mostly they’ve offered nothing: no explanation, no improvements to life, not even a competent administration. They do immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.

After the mayors, town councilors, and other elected officials, the Ukrainians who disturb the occupiers most are volunteers: people who run charities, people who run civic organizations, people who spontaneously rush to help others. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country crushes spontaneity, independent associations, and grassroots movements. The Reckoning Project interviewed a man from Skadovsk, a part of Kherson province still under Russian control, whom we will call Volunteer A. (He requested anonymity because he fears for his family’s safety.) He had been a member of one of the neighborhood-watch groups that stepped in to replace the police, and had worked at a humanitarian-aid distribution center. After his father was arrested in April 2022, a few weeks into the occupation, Volunteer A went to find him—and was detained as well.

During the subsequent interrogation, Volunteer A was asked about other local activists and about his connection to the Ukrainian security services (none) and the CIA (even less), as well as (ludicrously) George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Like the Soviet officials who treated Boy Scout troops in occupied central Europe like members of a conspiracy, the Russians seemed incredulous that he was just a local volunteer, working with other local volunteers; their questions made it seem as if they had never heard of such a thing. He recalled being beaten simultaneously by four different men, struck by a baseball bat, tormented with electric shocks, and hit with a hammer in an effort to get him to admit he was part of a larger conspiracy. At least one of his ribs was broken. After the interrogation, he was told to make a video confession and to sign a statement declaring that he would not spread “fake news” about the Russian occupation. After a subsequent detention, he too escaped the region.

In another town in the Kherson region also still under occupation, Volunteer B, as we’ll call him (he also fears for his family), had a similar experience. Before Russian forces detained him, he had been running a makeshift pharmacy that collected medical-supply donations. He was interrogated and beaten and, like Volunteer A, asked repeatedly about the true purpose of his charitable work. Who was organizing it? Again, the Russian soldiers seemed unable to believe that no secret group was behind it, that ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social media and on the radio, and not as the result of some dark plot. He was asked to jot down a description of how his group worked: “The way it worked,” he recalled writing, “was that people brought what they had and got what they needed. Provided that we have it.” The Russians kept pressing for more details of the nonexistent conspiracy. Then they confiscated the painkillers he had accumulated, which had been destined for cancer patients.

This man, who was also forced to leave his region, now believes that the interrogators’ real problem was that they feared volunteers were outside their control: “It really pisses [the Russians] off, annoys them,” he said, that anyone can be independent of the state and of the political system—any political system. This helps explain why the list of arrested and tortured volunteers is so long, and why their testimonies are so similar across the various zones of occupation. Ruslan Mashkov, a Ukrainian Red Cross volunteer, was detained by Russian soldiers north of Kyiv in March and interrogated. A woman in the Kherson region who had helped sort humanitarian-aid packages told an interviewer that she had been arrested, given electrical shocks, robbed of her money, and beaten. (She asked not to be identified by name.) Nakhmet Ismailov, another Kherson resident who had organized charity concerts and benefits before the war, was also tortured with electric shocks. Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all.

The invaders’ nihilism is particularly notable in their incoherent approach to the Ukrainian educational system. In theory, schools and universities are the focus of careful Russian thought and planning, just as they were once the focus of careful Soviet thought and planning. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Red Army, in an utterly devastated occupied East Germany, took time away from food provision and road reconstruction to issue an edict banning private kindergartens and to set up curriculum-training sessions for new preschool teachers.

In the spring of 2022, Russian occupiers did signal their interest in transforming Ukrainian schools. In Melitopol, which is still occupied, the Russian military abducted a handful of school principals as well as the head of the local department of education, although later the principals were released. In Kakhovka, Viktor Pendalchuk, the director of School No. 1, was detained and interrogated for two weeks before escaping to Ukrainian-held territory.

Still, a large number of schools in occupied areas at first remained closed, or else operated online, as they had done during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic. The occupiers pressured some educators to return. In one case investigated by the Reckoning Project, witnesses described a geography, math, and computer-science teacher—we are withholding his name because his village in the Kherson region is still occupied—whose home was visited by Russian soldiers in late June; they handcuffed his 18-year-old son, perhaps because he planned to go to university to study Ukrainian history. They put a bag over the teen’s head and then dragged him away. The teacher received a message, via an interlocutor, telling him that his son was alive, was being fed, and would be returned home if the teacher returned to his job. The teacher complied. The son did come back, and described being interrogated, threatened at gunpoint, and tortured with electric shocks.

By autumn, the occupiers had intensified their efforts to Russify the schools, causing a lot of distress among Ukrainian teachers who feared being accused of collaboration by their own compatriots if they showed up at work. But the process remained haphazard, differing from place to place. In at least one town in the Zaporizhzhya region, the Reckoning Project believes, all Ukrainian-language books were removed from schools, including children’s books; elsewhere, only upper-level Ukrainian books, on law and history, were removed. In one Zaporizhzhyan village, still under occupation, soldiers have forced schools to open by threatening to take children from their parents if they do not show up. Elsewhere, low attendance has been tolerated.

Residents of some areas have said that the occupiers imposed a Russian-language curriculum, but many of the lessons were poorly designed. In one school district, just four textbooks were assigned—on the Russian language, Russian history, math, and natural science—and all others were discarded. Asked what she had been doing in school during the time Kherson was occupied, a 14-year-old named Oleksandra recalled that students spent their time looking at their phones.

Higher education suffers from the same erratic policies. Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University, Kherson State Maritime Academy, and Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University, but managed to hold only a small number of classes. In June, while the city was still occupied, the Russians announced that Dmytro Kruhly, one of the teachers at the Kherson State Maritime Academy, would become rector. Everyone else was fired. Kruhly, who previously taught classes about “global maritime distress and safety systems,” announced that the new task of the university was to build a shipyard, but few steps were taken in that direction. After the liberation of Kherson, Kruhly disappeared from the city, probably retreating with the Russians.

Substantial evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools but the soldiers on the ground could not implement them. In Vovchansk, a small frontline town in the Kharkiv region, freed in September after six months of occupation, the Reckoning Project obtained a copy of a five-year education plan for schools in the city. The document runs to 140 pages of bureaucratic language, which appears to have been mostly copied and pasted from the educational plans given to schools in Russia, as if no special thought went into the needs of schools in newly occupied territories. It calls, for example, for an annual “Day of Solidarity in the Fight Against Terrorism” to commemorate the infamous 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, in Russia’s North Ossetia region; for lessons about the Nazi blockade of Leningrad in World War II; and for a course on the “basics of the spiritual-moral culture of the peoples of Russia.” The entire document contains only two lines about Vovchansk itself—about visits to the town’s “institutions of culture” and production sites.

Regardless of Moscow’s intentions, the Russians actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really seem to care what happened to the schools. There was no policy equivalent to the systematic Soviet imposition of Marxist language and history on central Europe in the 1940s, not even an equivalent to the imposition of a pro-Russian regime in Chechnya during the second Chechen War. In one occupied town in the Zaporizhzhya region, teachers were ordered to organize celebrations of May 9—the day Russia marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But the occupying authorities didn’t seem to mind whether attendance was high, or whether anyone learned anything about the war, or whether the celebrations were even real. “A couple of kids will be enough,” they were told. The ritual was for show. The point was to tell Moscow that it had happened, not to teach any real lessons about World War II.

In truth, each region of Ukraine does have its own history and traditions, and some of them are eerily relevant. In 1787, four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman empire and annexed the territory of what is now southern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian empress Catherine the Great visited the region. The trip was organized by Grigory Potemkin, who was once her lover and remained her favorite minister, and it is from this journey that we have inherited the expression Potemkin village. According to the legend, Potemkin built facades along Catherine’s route and populated them with actors in costumes, pulling them down at the end of every day and putting them up again at the next village, so that the czarina would see only happy peasants and prosperous homes.

Historians doubt that this elaborate piece of theater really happened, but Potemkin’s connection to the region was real: He was buried in a crypt in Kherson, and before the Russians evacuated the city they removed his bones. And the Potemkin-village legend persists because it reflects a phenomenon we recognize: the courtier who creates a false reality to please the distant monarch. For Ukrainians who have lived under Russian occupation, the Potemkin story helps explain what they have experienced. Marunyak, the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, put it like this: “I am following their activities. They are all done for a camera shot in Russia. Even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it is for real. It’s like a huge Potemkin village. It can’t function. They try to glue it together, but it doesn’t work.”

The Potemkin story might also begin to explain the horrific violence that ordinary Russians have inflicted on ordinary Ukrainians. Over and over again, victims told the Reckoning Project that this extreme behavior came from nowhere. There was no provocation. Nothing that Ukrainians have done to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain the beatings, the electric shocks, the detention centers, the torture chambers in garages and basements, the utter disregard for Ukrainian life. Only the Russians’ frustration with their own incapacity—their inability to make the Ukrainians obey them; indeed, their inability to understand Ukraine at all—might offer a clue. They were told to transform the schools, but they do not know how. They were told to find secret Ukrainian organizations, but instead they found small-town mayors and local volunteers. On the one hand, they have to send a report back to Moscow, proving that they are in control. On the other hand, they are angry because they exercise so little control.

This incomprehension also fits into an older tradition. The Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote a letter in 1928 to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had dismissed the Ukrainian language as a mere dialect. Ukraine, Vynnychenko told him, was real, whether or not Gorky wanted it to be real. “You can think that the Dnipro River flows into the Moscow River,” he said. But “the Dnipro will not flow into the Moscow River” just because you think so. Wishing Ukraine away will not make Ukraine go away. Rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people. Russia can try to alter the geography of the region, but that will not alter the geography of the region, no matter how many bodies are beaten or electric shocks are delivered.

The modern Russian occupation also belongs to the equally old, equally ugly traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country, and Ukrainian as a distinct identity. The occupiers thought that task would be easy, because, like Putin, they assumed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society are weak. But they are not. That clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers to broaden their use of violence. Wayne Jordash, a British barrister who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, argued in a Reckoning Project interview that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan, which was “to capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine. But as the occupation dragged on, “the idea of leaders got bigger. It was originally ‘Zelensky and the government,’ and it quite quickly, inevitably, became ‘local leaders,’ which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists, to teachers—anybody who had a connection with the Ukrainian state.”

Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.

Stara Zburjivka itself remains under occupation, although Marunyak, its devoted mayor, now lives in exile in Latvia. From there he tries to keep in touch with his former constituents, to help if he can, to advise or to listen, to keep together the threads of a society that the Russians are cruelly, haphazardly unraveling. “They didn’t understand anything,” Marunyak says now, “but just spoiled people’s lives.” They discovered a world different from the one they knew. And so they smashed it up, hit back at it, and are still trying to destroy it forever.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Don Ford

I’ve heard more folks than I can count say that the risk of COVID exposure has kept them from seeking needed medical care, and it shouldn’t be this way.

On our Twitter Spaces calls we’ve tried our best to build strategies that can help folks through this process, so they can be COVID safe, advocate for themselves, and also while receiving adequate medical care.

But there are so many people, and we could never help everyone if we take it case by case. As with many problems that are laid on the individual, this is a greater institutional problem, and we need that to be reflected in our government.

If that sounds about right, then oh boy, do I have something for you.

A federal agency wants to hear from you if you have had trouble accessing healthcare because of COVID… or rather, realistic concerns of COVID exposure.

x.com/StinkRatsCharms/status/1853117035699487229 Technically, this survey is not COVID specific…

But is there a greater accessibility issue for medical care?

While the framing is identifying barriers for disability access, that should include things that can make you disabled, and as this is the Congressional watchdog group who gathers data for the purpose of “accountability, integrity, and reliability”…

This action could be one of our best opportunities to push for regulatory changes.

The agency behind this has an excellent record of their results being widely accepted.

Here is an additional link —→ gaosurvey.gao.gov/jfe/form/SV_4NqcK4po5BfajZA

I should point out that this is limited to Americans, generally speaking.

Now, this isn’t going to instantly solve our problems, or be the final move in advocating for ourselves, but it is a VERY strong step forward.

The data this group creates is generally considered to be extremely valuable when dealing with Federal regulatory agencies.

We need to reach as many folks as possible to find those affected.

So, please, share this information with your communities.

And, speaking of reaching people…

The election is, of course, on people’s minds. There is going to be an additional call to action soon directed at the FDA, regardless of who wins the election tomorrow…

Hopefully, it’s decided tomorrow and not dragged out.

But regardless of who wins, the fight continues… just in different forms.

However, the President doesn’t actually change until January 20th, 2025.

That means there are two and a half months to advocate before anything officially shifts. So, regardless of who wins, we can push forward for as much as we can before the agencies could potentially change.

No matter what happens, it’s a different President, which means regulatory shifts.

And that means, it’s an excellent time to make some last minute pushes…

Specifically, pediatric Novavax access. The kid’s version is not some separate vaccine; it’s the same vaccine.

It’s tested and safe but the FDA is playing games to restrict market access.

Expect more information on this soon, but the FDA and CBER are making Novavax go in circles to prove their vaccine is functional, while vaccines go unused. Shots that could be protecting our children going to waste because of manipulative regulatory hurdles is extremely frustrating.

So, we’re going to need support from everyone who has needed Novavax or benefited from it, because if only parents who needed it for their kids did it alone, then we would never create the access that parents and society as a whole desperately need.

Until then, we brace for impact for our election results and no matter what happens we will continue pushing forward for that better tomorrow.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

There is a level of 'anarchy' that crosses the line from being leftist RIGHT THE FUCK into a "survival of the fittest" [or socially fittest] that -sorry not sorry- is actually very 'right wing' in the core underlying beliefs that you aren't examining, very ableist in ideology, and I am very much starting to get the sense that a lot of you 'leftists' are way too sheltered to be able to tell where that line is, or tell one kind of anarchy from the other.

I don't want to have to be the guy to point this out, but the people in society who are currently cops, in a world with no government, no policing force, will not vanish, lose their social privilege, or change their ways. They will still be socially privileged men with guns and certain beliefs, and now with no governing body to answer to and no accountability except to people surrounding them who hold the same beliefs that they do now. And you certainly aren't going to rise up and overpower them any more than you are doing now.

So maybe you personally aren't benefiting from social services or a disability pension... But I am sure you can see how if we eliminate government altogether, instead of restructuring it, that removes social services, that eliminates pensions and welfare. That eliminates taxes and the potential of UBI. That eliminates my means of survival.

A government -should be- at it's core the elected management of shared infrastructure and publicly shared services. Laws should be a standard we all agree everyone should be held to equally for our collective safety. A policing force should only be responsible for stopping people with expressly malicious intent that cannot reasonably be dealt with by other means [aka not a tantruming autistic man but a school shooter, someone willfully raping people at knife point, stop making strawman arguments about this that willfully ignore that some people are bad on purpose]

There ARE examples where a trained social worker would be better, YES, I Agree! But to imagine we live in a world where bad actors with guns don't exist is a daydream, the problem is addressing how the public service -police in this instance- is allowed to operate, what is left up to them instead of alternative services, the issue is not that we shouldn't have police of any kind. The issue is what we allow the government to govern [ie: what we do with our bodies], not with having any form of government. The issue is with how we allow laws to be used [ie: to disenfranchise black voters], not with the very concept of having laws.

And -follow me on this- all the social issues making those things issues the way they stand now, make a lawless ungoverned alternative WORSE actually, because racism, sexism, ableism, christianity, and etc will not vanish once you abolish laws and government. People will not suddenly find the extra energy or social ability to strengthen community ties in a way they don't find manageable now to any notable degree, and being forced to, under the duress of "well otherwise who would defend me" is uh... Do I have to point out how that's a recipe to push a lot of people further into abusive circumstances?

What we need to do is dismantle the ASPECTS of the system that are allowing it to function as a POWER STRUCTURE, not eliminate having any means of systemically holding each other accountable, or eliminate the infrastructure and social services provided by having a council of elected officials.

I am on board with releasing all non-violent offenders over night, tonight, the stats on recidivism are clear and more robust social services are the answer... But I am sick of the straw-man arguments some people are making where i am somehow only arguing against releasing violent offenders over night because I "imagine my opposition in the debate doesn't know what it's like to experience violent crime u.u". I only know that you don't know what it's like to be ME in MY POSITION experiencing a violent crime, which is a very different thing, and the reason I know you don't understand my position, is that all of your assumed solutions DO NOT APPLY to me in my life, and your proposed alternatives leave me to suffer and die. The thing is, you need to have a replacement system in position before abolishing prison entirely for those people, because just handing them back open access to their victim pool because "incarcerating people is bad actually" isn't the acceptable solution. What you are arguing for will get society's most vulnerable raped and murdered in an awful hurry. If you don't think that's going to blow back on every vulnerable group you claim to be protecting first and foremost, you aren't thinking rationally.

Societal biases, racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, homophobia, antisemitism, etc all may be a part of the system as it is, encoded in it, but they all exist without that system. Without government, laws, prisons and police of any kind, you are still at the mercy of the same people with the same biases and the same intentions. The goal should be to remove those biases from the system, not take any system away from a society that will still have those biases. Groups like the proud boys, the kkk etc... Will still all exist as organized groups without government.

The goal should be removing unfair power structures, or any power structures, without removing accountability. We need MORE accountability, actually, and that doesn't happen en-mass without a system of enforcement. The 'system' is needed for accountability. This idea you have where everyone deserving can somehow appeal to their community and be treated fairly is uh... delusion. My lived experiences tell me this is very much delusion, and with the use of no straw-man arguments whatsoever, just talking about my own life, I can tell you exactly how/why if you stopped avoiding the direct conversation and making separate vague posts about people like me, and started actually directly answering to the protests of the people you claim to be helping.

This goes for pretty much everything. The path to a better way of doing things isn't to remove all restrictions and systems with the faith that people will 'sort themselves out somehow', accepting that society's most vulnerable are just acceptable sacrifices. The path to a better way of doing things is to make policy changes and replacement systems until we get to what cooperative society should ideally look like. And I will gave you a hint, making people rely on their personal social connections in order to have any recourse against abuse AIN'T FUCKING IT.

And yes, that means FUCKING VOTING.

That means voting as far left as you can, not criticizing the leftiest candidate during election season, and then holding them accountable the rest of the 4 year term, or whatever your country does.

There are a lot of government systems or interference in our lives I think should be abolished or completely overhauled, but if your brand of 'leftism' or anarchy leaves me to be raped to death unless I can "appeal to my 'community' for help U.U", because you can't be bothered to examine or care about the real world implications of what you are arguing for, fuck your entire self.

Because I can tell you EXACTLY how your vision for my future will work out for me, and you haven't been listening.

When I make a post about how I am unsafe in my surroundings, or the ways in which I cannot access help from the system as it is, I DO NOT need to be told "Oh in anarchy we have a solution to that U.U It's called, 'get to know your neighbours better' u.u" Only to have people rage-quit being my friend when I want them to engage with the reasons I gave for that not being an accessible solution for me. Or gods forbid, ask them to only reblog the version of my post with MY ANSWER on it, instead of the one where someone is glazing me out of my own picture.

For me this isn't just a social performance and a debate about theory, this is about my life and my right to safety.

Believe it or not I understand anarchy, and many of the different types of it, and also what people actually seem to mean by it when they make arguments online... And I do already get along with a lot of anarchists, actually. I understand that a lot of this is why people found bodies of political thought that incorporate communism and anarchy together. I do not need this shit 'explained' to me. The point of contention is that the particular blanket arguments you are making are completely ignoring that people like me exist and also deserve safety, not that I am just not understanding you. The issue is I am trying to discuss specifics and you are trying to hand me blanket placations for social clout instead of actually engaging with any practical question of how we can get from here to a better world without throwing people like me under the buss in the process.

Understanding broad strokes anarchist theory isn't ENOUGH actually, you have to have down to earth conversations with real people, who are actually the most impacted, about how to actually -apply- that theory in a way that doesn't FUCK THEM [unsexily].

I shouldn't HAVE TO have friends, or appeal to my birth family, or make niceys with my neighbours in order to afford the right to basic safety and survival. Some people aren't found to be likeable people, Karen, and the punishment for that shouldn't be rape and death.

And my tone shouldn't have to be apologetic and soft in order to be dignified with a response. Even with my friends. Especially with my friends.

What the fuck ever happened to "any system that doesn't protect the most unpleasant, inconvenient and unconnected person, is a failure of a system and we should do something else."? It stops applying the moment I am an inconvenient person and things start requiring more thought from you than just shouting about 'anarchy'... IG.

Idk how to tell you this, but a stubborn and willful lack of officially coded system for doing things is still a system actually, and can be critiqued by the same measures.

All arguments of "we should eliminate the system instead of trying to work with it" are literally just "we should burn down the current system before replacing it with anything and if people die in that harsh transition then that's an acceptable cost to me".

If you want 'anarchy' whatever that means to you, the way to get there is through consistent policy changes until the government and police etc... is backed out of anything you don't want them in. That IS social revolution. It's just done in a way that's sustainable and actually gives people like me a shot at surviving it. It isn't glorious and violent, or fast, it is slow, hard work. It is voting, discussing things in detail, hashing out a firm plan and organizing to stick to it. It is paying attention to little policy decisions and doing the work of designing the new systems to take the burden off the ones we have, in specific details, and implementing changes.

Not hammering on about broad strokes ideology to talk over anyone raising concerns, for clout, and then refusing to vote.

And yeah, it's going to require listening to people with perspectives outside your own instead of stubbornly refusing to engage with potential allies and friends because they don't believe in the exact same pure thing as you. It's going to require setting your feelings aside sometimes when people don't grovel while telling you why they have a problem with what you just said. It is going to require actually understanding other people.

Because this violent or sudden over night revolution you think needs to happen instead will make sacrifices of all the most vulnerable. All the minorities, everyone you claim to be protecting or fighting for. The groups of men with guns will still be groups of men with guns. Your violent anarchist revolution is a pipe dream, a child's daydream with a bunch of willfully ignored skeletons collecting at the bottom.

Laws, administrative bodies, enforcement, accountability, a system of justice and, yes, currency, unfortunately are all actually necessary for society to function well with this many people and are not -inherently- evils, and the things that can turn them into evils are there regardless.

The fact that so many people see 'government' as somehow being opposite of collective cooperation is uh... A symptom of having a lot of bad policies. And maybe we should collectively agree to change those policies. Maybe.

[tiggymalvern]

But we literally *can* stop sending US made weapons to them? We can literally stop sending money to them? I am not trying to be a jerk/hateful, I'm just so confused by what you mean by "nothing the US can do to stop this" when we quite literally could stop sending them weapons and money...

The Israeli people choose the Israeli government. The US has no say in that. They only get to work with what they're given.

Do you think Biden likes being called Genocide Joe? Do you think he doesn't know that the assault on Gaza is screwing over his chances of being re-elected? Do you think he hasn't heard all the talk in left-wing circles about sitting out the election and not voting? If Biden had a way to stop Netanyahu from flattening Gaza, he would have already done it.

The US has contracts with Israel to send them weapons. If the US decides to unilaterally breach those contracts, there will be penalties and diplomatic repercussions. Netanyahu would instantly cut off all contact with Biden, and Biden would lose what little influence over Netanyahu he has. Which honestly isn't much, because Netanyahu has multiple criminal cases pending, and the only thing standing between Netanyahu and jail is the fact that Israeli law says you can't put the prime minister on trial.

Netanyahu's share of the Israeli vote is getting smaller. He's only managing to stay in power by dragging together coalitions with more right wing extremist groups. Right now, he believes that firing up his right wing base by attacking Palestinians is the key to keeping his position, and keeping his position is keeping him out of jail. Netanyahu has absolutely no incentive to stop. Israel is not a poor country and they've been stockpiling weapons and military equipment for decades. They still have more than enough to flatten Gaza, whether the US sends them weapons or not.

The US could stop sending money to Israel, sure. That's not under Biden's control, though. The budget is decided by Congress, and Congress is held by Republicans. Those Republicans refused to fund anything Biden wanted to pass a few months ago until money for Israel was included. They were about to shut down the entire government again by not passing a funding bill for anything. Giving money to Israel was one of the prices they demanded for allowing Biden's government to function at all. And hell, it's not just Republicans - there are too many Democrats in favour of supporting Israel too. Biden would have had to start a civil war within his own party to try and change anything, and he still would have failed.

Biden would love it if the Israeli people decided to elect another moderate like Yitzhak Rabin. Someone who was willing to compromise and look for a way forward and support a two-state solution. Biden could and would work with someone like that to achieve a peace. Instead he's stuck with a vicious, narcissistic criminal in Netanyahu, a man who literally does not give a damn what happens to anyone except himself.

The realities of national and international politics suck, but that doesn't make them any less real.

[qqueenofhades]

I just saw an article that said like half of trump supporters would vote for someone else if given a good option, and now all I want is someone else to get the nomination but have Trump refuse to drop out so he splits the vote. I would love nothing more than for the republicans to get 0 electoral votes…well that’s not quite true, what I would really love more than anything is for republicans to get 0 votes in general, but unless all of them forget when the election is and forget to vote for themselves that seems unlikely 😂

Basically, there is about 30 to 35% of America that is just outrageously cruel, racist, stupid, evil, and anti-everything (science, medicine, progress, voting, reason, education, history, civic society, gay people, women, non-white non-Christians, immigrants, anything that is not a fascist white nationalist theocracy) and they are beyond help. They will go down with Trump and his awful cronies to the bitter end, because they think that the primary function of government is to punish their enemies and nothing else. There is no public, social, or economic policy you can offer that will ever appeal to them, because they don't care. Nothing matters as much to them as Hurting The Other. In other words, they suck, and they are loud, dangerous, and militant, but they are not by any means the majority, they consistently suffer when their views are exposed to the mainstream public, and candidates backed by them have been regularly defeated in general elections, because they are just too extreme.

Then there are the rest of the Republican voters, who like low taxes, guns, and "small government" (aka that which doesn't run any risk of helping black people), but aren't quite the militant deranged TrumpCultists. They want a less openly criminal or at least slightly more palatable "moderate" old school GOP alternative, which has absolutely zero chance of getting past the primary-voting rancid shitgibbons mentioned above. We often get various thinkpieces wondering whether the indictments will strip these voters away from Trump, and yes, on the one hand, it is possible -- if, and only if, someone apart from him is the nominee, which for many reasons is deeply unlikely. If it is not, then anyone thinking that Republican voters will vote for anyone other than the Republican candidate, i.e. Trump, is kidding themselves. These people show up every election and vote for every R-name on the ballot. The fact that Democrats have to be wrangled and argued at so hard to do the same is one reason among many that we are in our present mess.

It is true that Trump is barely statistically viable as a candidate at this point, two-thirds of Americans think the charges (especially the J6 charges) against him are serious, and a plurality think he should suspend his presidential campaign (he won't, since it is his last chance to keep from going to jail for probably the rest of his life). It's also true that post-Dobbs, Democrats and Democratic-voting independents have been incredibly more motivated to turn out, and that Trump has never won the popular vote in any election (he only won in 2016, as we all painfully recall, because of the Electoral College). The Republicans have also consistently underperformed in every election since the Greasy Orange God King came along, and this trend is only accelerating.

None of that, again, means that we are safe or can relax or let our guard down about 2024, but it does mean that the only way these shitbags can win is by cheating up the wazoo, which they always try to do. There legitimately are not enough Americans who actually support their heinous crap to properly vote for them otherwise, and if nothing else, we can and should take comfort in that.

[luckyfirerabbit]

I just gotta get this off my chest

I'm not going to sit here and defend Biden or his administration, or his party. Nearly the whole of the US government (if not the whole of it) is complicit and accessory to the willful genocide of Palestinians, and are directly and openly supporting a fascist, genocidal colonial state. My country has been a long standing pillar of Zionist ideology if not one of the cornerstones of it. Notable Zionist figures (Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said "People have to understand that the backbone of Israel's support in the United States is the Evangelical Christians") have declared that American Evangelicals are one of Zionism's greatest allies, and I'm not going to deny that either.

Secondly, I completely understand and agree with those that have become disillusioned with the Democratic party, especially since the current situation with the genocide in Gaza. I have no intention of voting for a majority of the Democrats I voted for before over the matter, such as Raphael Warnock, who my roommate reached out to about demanding a ceasefire, only to be met with Zionist rhetoric and a promise to "take it into consideration". (Warnock also worked on the committe that drafted KOSA, and also intends to vote in favor of it once it's out of committee.)

And I'm sure many of you across the globe are well aware of the absolute shit hole our political arena is. Specifically, in this case, how our party system works. There's no law preventing more than two parties, but the parties we have rigged the game in such a way that it is near impossible to have a viable party outside of them. Which brings me to my supposed point.

Telling voters to "just vote third party" isn't really the answer you might think it is. I WISH it was that simple. I LIVE for the day when it's that simple. But it isn't, and unless a GREAT MANY THINGS happen between now and the next election, this will not chang this election cycle. Political movements can take years/decades to build, and in the US your opposition WILL create every obstacle they can -although money is usually all they need to accomplish that end, and the monetary corruption in US politics is insane. We would need an actual miracle to have a viable third party before we have to elect a new president.

With that being said, I would also like to point out that the answer also isnt to vote Republican. Most of the US evangelicals espouse the Republican party, and a Republican president would be doing exactly the same thing Biden is doing now, if not worse. Because Zionism isn't a party issue, it's baked into the whole system. Which is going to make voting Anti-Zionist exceptionally difficult.

The Republicans have shown us time and again who they are. They've been saying all the quiet parts out loud for years now and we need to believe them. Voting Republican is not the answer.

As much as I would love to make a massive shift away from Zionism and genocide, I have to reconcile with the fact that this will take decades, and we have issues right now that need addressing here at home. There are lines that are tenuously being held and we need to keep holding them.

Until there is a viable third party, the best we can start with is harm reduction. That also means voting for candidates that are far less from ideal. I am going to assume Biden will be nominated for reelection, but I sure as hell am not voting for him to be. Unfortunately, if he is, I will, because Republicans have been crowing about their hate boners for the poor, disabled, LGBTQ+, children, POC, women's rights, education, social programs, etc etc, and so on. I don't want to vote for Genocide Joe, but I WILL NOT vote for a Republican and I will not piss away my vote on what are currently functionally non existent third parties.

I am going to actively vote against the party that has shown their hand at wanting me and my loved ones dead or disenfranchised, and I'm going to vote against the presidential candidate this is most likely to let them get away with it. But I am also putting the other party on notice; I will not blindly vote for them just because "they're not the other guy". I am going to work to snatch your seat if you prove to be more harmful than you're worth.

While there may be obvious solutions to these situations, there is nothing fast or easy about these solutions. Change is a long game and we need to start playing it now. And, by the same token, holding the lines we've been able to cross since last election is equally important.

[beardedmrbean]

Like most other Finnish newspapers, Savon Sanomat morning news wrap-up reports on Thursday's government announcement that the entire eastern border will be closed again on Friday from 8pm, and the border crossing points will remain closed until January 14.

This means that the Vaalimaa and Niirala border crossings points were open for less than two days before being shuttered again.

The paper reports that more than 120 people crossed from Russia on Thursday at Vaalimaa and Niirala seeking asylum in Finland.

In an opinion piece, Ilta-Sanomat columnist Petri Seppä writes that the opening of the border was a kind of trial balloon. Finland wanted to test whether there would be an improvement in Russia's actions compared to what was seen in November.

Seppä notes that the trial promptly boomeranged back to Finland, and the Finns got slapped on both cheeks.

Russia made no move to end the problems on the eastern border and return the situation there to a controlled and normal state, Seppä continues.

"Russia does not even try to respect the border practice that has been agreed upon and found to be good and functional over the years - that those traveling without the necessary travel documents are not allowed to reach the border."

The IS commentator says it is reasonable to assume that only a small vanguard reached the Finnish side on the first day the border was open, and points to expectations by the Border Guard that the number is likely to increase.

"The government should think now about when it will again be worth the bother of sending Russia a test balloon," writes Ilta-Sanomat columnist Seppä.

Disappointment and frustration

Helsingin Sanomat is among the papers that spoke with travelers who crossed or were planning to cross the border with Russia on Thursday.

One of them, Katja Räihä, described the government's latest move as a "terrible decision".

Räihä was planning a a long weekend to visit to Vyborg along with her six-year-old daughter Alina and her husband Roman Pilipenko.

Traveling with them was Räihä's colleague Elena Kuvaja who HS writes was visibly saddened and shocked by the government's decision.

"I have lived in Finland for 30 years. We are dual citizens. Our relatives live on both sides of the border, and now we are not allowed to see them," said Kuvaja. "Closing the borders in this way is not a solution. This only causes inconvenience to ordinary people."

A young woman who arrived from St. Petersburg to do seasonal work in Finland declined to give the paper her name.

"Oh, what do I think about the borders being closed? I'm not surprised at all. They [the government] opened the borders just to see Russia's reaction," she said.

"Many Russians living in Finland have suddenly rushed to Russia. There are many reasons - some to see a doctor, some have children and grandchildren in the country with whom they want to spend the holidays."

Again, a Sámi Parliament Act

Hufvudstadsbladet reports that the government headed by Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) government has approved a proposal for a new Sámi Parliament Act - a bill including revised rules on who has the right to be included on the voters' roll for elections to the assembly which represents Finland's indigenous Sámi people.

As the paper points out, several governments have tried to pass similar bills, but all have failed at the finish line.

Yrsa Nyman, a legislative advisor at the Ministry of Justice, told the paper she is happy that the work has come this far.

"This is the fourth government term during which attempts have been made to have the law changed. Considering that both the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination have found that Finland is in a situation that violates the rights of indigenous peoples, it is very good that it has reach this stage early in the government's term," said Nyman.

The new proposal is basically the same as the one put forward by the previous government just over a year ago. The bill does not define who is and who is not Sámi, rather the focus is on who is entitled to vote and stand in the Sámi parliamentary elections.

Hufvudstadsbladet says that the new proposal is clearly better than the current legislation, but a little weaker than the proposal that the Marin government put forward a year ago. The earlier draft law would have expanded requirements for consultations with the Sámi on projects affecting their community. This one does not. According to Hufvudstadsbladet, the government wants to make permit processes for investments in Sámi areas easier and simplify bureaucracy.

Setting a bad example

Iltalehti looks at recent preliminary data from Statistics Finland indicating that land use — agricultural and forestry — in Finland was a net source of emissions again last year.

The first time the land use sector as a whole was not a carbon sink was 2021.

On Thursday, the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation Association called for stronger action by the government to turn this around.

Iltalehti quotes Hanna Aho, a climate expert for the association, as saying that Finland is becoming an example, a warning to the world about how replacing fossil fuels should not be done at the expense of forests.

"The collapse of these carbon sinks has been known for a year and a half. The passivity of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's (NCP) government in the matter and the cancellation of existing measures violates the objectives of the Climate Act. The government must make a decision on new climate measures and update the climate plan for the land use sector in order to achieve the goals," argued Aho.

[potted-dandelions]

If we were truly a democracy, we would live in perpetual fear of the day when the majority of voters were stupid or crazy enough to vote against the secret ballot (Murphy's Law, after all). That would not be the end of our democracy but it would be the death of our personal liberty.

To reign in government corruption, those entrusted with power must be held accountable for their actions. Republics accomplish this with public records of all important votes held in the legislature to alert the People when to replace their representatives for legislating poorly. In exchange for granting our representatives the power to legislate and govern where they agree, we reserve the right to vote for them in secret. Nobody wants to answer for their voting habits when, say, applying for a job or a loan, but most would gladly hold others accountable.

In America, our representatives have to answer for their voting records every two years, senators every six. The Electoral College insulates us from electing the President directly, but presidential electors cast public ballots. Our secret ballots are not to be taken for granted. Indeed, it might not be long before some grifter argues against the secret ballot citing nebulous and spurious 'threats to our democracy.' In time, they might whip up enough moral panic to cost you your privacy in the voting booth forever. All for the greater good, of course.

Right away, your ballot would accompany every background check others request for you. In a few years, it would weigh on your credit score. That'll damn sure influence the choices you record on your ballot; you'll side with the majority every time as a simple matter of survival. Your agency will vanish if that happens. No longer able to vote your conscience, you'll resign yourself to letting public opinion surveys choose for you. Even the few brave enough to answer surveys honestly would bow to public pressure come Election Day.

Democracy truly cannot be. Just when you think you've achieved something closer to a true democracy, it ceases to function as intended and rapidly mutates into some form of monarchy, maintaining all the outward trappings of democracy with none of the accountability. It's too easily corruptible to survive.

Perhaps they'll con you out of your privacy with promises of more direct control over the decision making process. Digital direct democracy looks mighty tempting lately. But who's got time for it? We hire representatives to make policy for us because we've got better things to do. Imagine coming home from your 8-hour workday and having to sit for another four hours of Zoom meetings debating public policy after dinner. If it had nothing else going against it, direct democracy would be more than exhausting enough to warrant a republican form of government.

That's why even ancient Athens, the first democratic city-state, left most of the politicking to orators and lawyers. Every head of an household was expected to participate in a number of (secret) votes every month, but few had the means to dedicate their daily lives to politics.

This is the most important part of the social contract that people usually gloss over. There is an ethical burden that goes along with the franchise. It's not a right and neither is it a privilege. Voting is a duty. Not everybody is up to it and that's ok; abstention is a right. But those who do vote bear responsibility for all the government's actions thenceforth (that is, as much as much responsibility as each snowflake bears for the effects of the blizzard). It's a responsibility not to be taken lightly because it affects us all; be glad it's private.

The secret ballot is armor against becoming a true democracy. We hold our representatives responsible for their votes while absolving our neighbors for theirs. As long as that arrangement holds, we remain a republic, which is good news because true republics are less corruptible.