Tag: US politics

From the world pool: August 14, 2016

Socio-political commentary

Collected over the last month. I’m not doing nearly a good enough job keeping up with this!

US politics

Trump’s Assassination Dog Whistle Was Even Scarier Than You Think  Stochastic terrorism, as described by a blogger who summarized the concept several years back, means using language and other forms of communication “to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” Let’s break that down in the context of what Trump said. Predicting any one particular individual following his call to use violence against Clinton or her judges is statistically impossible. But we can predict that there could be a presently unknown lone wolf who hears his call and takes action in the future. Stated differently: Trump puts out the dog whistle knowing that some dog will hear it, even though he doesn’t know which dog. (via @PatrickWeekes)

This is particularly terrifying in the context of this recent poll: New Poll Shows Trump Supporters Mostly Believe Whatever He Says

And this chart: Who Lies More: A Comparison

In talking about Trump and the baby  “Sometimes brevity is the enemy of an accurate picture of just how bad something is.” (via @tressiemcphd)

Trump & Putin. Yes, It’s Really a Thing  (via @sarahkendzior)

Laurie Penny: I’m With the Banned

Likable. Because Hillary Clinton, you see, would like to be President. And the thing is, there’s no right way for her to do that, either. The problem is that, if she campaigns too hard, or works too much, she (again) looks “pathologically ambitious,” obsessive, “ruthless,” selfish, and over-confident in her own abilities. (Unlike, say, anyone else who thought they deserved to be the leader of the free world.) On the other hand, if she actually wins anything, or succeeds in any way, everyone is pretty certain that she didn’t earn it: She slept her way to the top! The media is being unfair to Bernie! This whole thing is rigged!!!! She works too hard, and wants to succeed too much, but when she succeeds, it’s apparently never due to all that hard work. The only way for her to campaign “appropriately,” in this scheme, is to sit back and let a male opponent win. Or to not run at all. (via @juliedillon)

Bernie or Bust Supporters Continue to Sabotage Clinton Just to Prove a Point  They are so desperate to see Hillary lose, several thousand have now huddled up around Jill Stein as the third-party spoiler. That means that their need for revenge is bigger than their need to preserve a moderate to liberal Supreme Court. It’s bigger than the safety of Muslim Americans under a spiteful Trump presidency. It’s bigger than respecting millions of hardworking Latino immigrants. It’s bigger than the fate of LGBT families whose rights will be stripped and reversed under a conservative Supreme Court. It’s bigger than the bare bones austerity budget Paul Ryan wants and needs to pass, reversing the course of decades of post-Roosevelt social policies. It’s bigger than demanding equal rights for women not be rolled back. It’s bigger than the environment because Trump has made it very clear that he doesn’t believe in climate change and wants to drill baby drill, burn coal till there’s no more to burn, and “bomb their oil and take their oil.” Their need for revenge is bigger than any other concern facing anyone poor, struggling, needy or oppressed. It has only to do with their anger and rage, their sense of entitlement, their hatred of women. (via @juliedillon)

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter did something huge today

Feminism

The Intersectional Woman’s Reading List

Environment

“CHASING ICE” captures largest glacier calving ever filmed On May 28, 2008, Adam LeWinter and Director Jeff Orlowski filmed a historic breakup at the Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland. The calving event lasted for 75 minutes and the glacier retreated a full mile across a calving face three miles wide. The height of the ice is about 3,000 feet, 300-400 feet above water and the rest below water.

As a visual spectacle, this is just amazing. But it’s scary, too: think global warming.

Censorship

Scaling the firewall: Ways around government censorship online

Education

In debt and out of hope: Faces of the student loan mess  I am so very glad I’m not living in the US with a student loan.

Art + Design

Simon Stalenhag

Getty Likely To Settle $1B Suit By Photographer For Appropriating Her Public-Domain Work “Getty Images was perhaps a bit overzealous when it attempted to collect money from prolific photographer Carol Highsmith for using her own photograph without Getty’s permission.”

Understatement, I’d say.

Geeking Out

How Pokemon Go Simulates the Ravages of Old Age Through Terrible Game Design.  All right, I confess, I’m playing it, in a very laid back sort of way, not trying to capture the local gym (our post office) but just collect, which is a challenge in a rural environment. I hope these are things they fix. (via @kyliu99)

Thought-provoking

A dissertation finds her readers.

The Case Against Honeybees  (via @KameronHurley)

E = E-commerce  As humans, we don’t prefer low quality. It was only through the rise of fast fashion — a business model based on the artificial creation of short-term trends combined with clothing that doesn’t last, what other industries call “planned obsolescence” — that consumers were, with of course very large marketing budgets, convinced to accumulate all of this stuff.

Useful!

How to Email Your Professor (without being annoying AF) Every semester, I see the tweets and Facebook posts. My professor friends, they are annoyed. Their students do not know how to write emails, they say. What they really mean is that their students don’t know how to follow the conventions of email etiquette in the academy. I used to be exasperated by student emails too. Until I realized that there was a simple explanation for why they didn’t know how to write them — they’ve never actually been taught how.

Wish some of my students had seen this.

On Writing

The Boy Who Lived Forever  You can see both sides of the issue. Do characters belong to the person who created them? Or to the fans who love them so passionately that they spend their nights and weekends laboring to extend those characters’ lives, for free? There’s a division here, a geological fault line, that looks small on the surface but runs deep into our culture, and the tectonic plates are only moving farther apart. Is art about making up new things or about transforming the raw material that’s out there? Cutting, pasting, sampling, remixing and mashing up have become mainstream modes of cultural expression, and fan fiction is part of that. It challenges just about everything we thought we knew about art and creativity. 

Quote of the week

I wake up from my reverie and we are still parked at South Station. I tune into the conversation around me and hear the kids. Let me emphasize KIDS. Kids making a game plan for what they will do if the police start to shoot them.

I glance up at the boy across from me. He is squirming. He wants off bad. He is texting fiercely. I’m assuming he’s telling someone what we are both observing.

The girl next to me notices my presence and says “Sorry for messing up your ride.”

I say “Don’t worry about it.”

My voice catches on the last word. My throat starts to sear. She asks “Are you upset?”

I respond “Yeah, I guess I am. I just don’t understand why they are calling the cops.”

She says “Because we are black.”

The 12-year-old turns to the group and quietly says “Black lives matter.” They all murmur in agreement.

—This week I had one of the most disturbing train rides of my life – and it changed my perspective on Black Lives Matter (via @pericat)

Just cool

Jupiter Approach NASA/JPL is excited to share the unprocessed images that comprise the approach movie acquired by JunoCam as the Juno spacecraft approached Jupiter.

When you really think about it, this is just so amazing.

Just for fun

Radioooo  Pick a country and a decade and listen.

Cat reacts to watching horror movie

From the World Pool: July 8, 2016

Socio-political commentary

What a fucking awful week.

Black Lives Matter.

The Raw Videos That Have Sparked Outrage Over Police Treatment of Blacks – The New York Times

Ohio Police Officer Gives a Furious Plea to Her Colleagues Who Are Afraid of Black People “Why don’t we just keep it real? If you’re that officer that knows good and well you got a God complex and you’re afraid of people that don’t look like you, you have no business in that uniform.”

This is what white people can do to support Black Lives Matter. Educate yourselves, put your bodies in the streets, and help dismantle white supremacy. (via @OwenJones84)

For white people preoccupied with “doing something”

How to tell the difference between real solidarity and “ally theatre”

Alton Sterling, Eric Garner and the double standard of the side hustle “We’re criminalizing poverty,” he says. “We’re saying you’re super poor, but to get to the next level [as a business owner], you have to have three years of business experience. In the meantime, we’re going to fine you, we’re going to arrest you, we’re going to confiscate your stuff, we’re going to kill you.” (via @tressiemcphd)

Iljeoma Oluo: Dallas is a tragedy for all of us – and shouldn’t shut down calls for justice

Diversity

How Samantha Bee Crashed the Late-Night Boys’ Club Bee took the same approach to hiring writers, creating a blind application process that didn’t favor people who’d already had success. (It spelled out, for example, how scripts should look when submitted, leveling the playing field for the uninitiated.) Lo and behold, she ended up with a writers’ room that looked kind of like America: 50 percent female; 30 percent nonwhite. (via @eilatan)

Pottermore problems: Scholars and writers call foul on J.K. Rowling’s North American magic.  The Ilvermorny origin story perpetuates colonialist perspectives, appropriates and erases Native American culture.

What is Latinx?

Orlando: Love wins, actually

President Obama Designates Stonewall a National Monument

Feminism

Underwritten Female Character trailer

Why stuntwomen are in more danger than men  Performing life-threatening stunts is scary enough – but to swordfight or crash into cars wearing skimpy costumes rather than padding requires a special kind of courage

Study reveals that women are literally working themselves to death  So why do long hours take a different toll on the body based on gender? Before you shout “women are the weaker sex,” consider this: The researchers hypothesize that one reason women are experiencing more adverse health affects is because, beyond carrying a full-time job, women are also saddled with the brunt of housework and childrearing—what many sociologists refer to as the “second shift”—which increases their work time and stress levels.

US politics

The GOP’s war on voting is working  WI DMV rejected nearly 1/5 of voter ID applicants, 85% of whom black, Latino, or Native American. (via @mchris4duke)

Who are all these Trump supporters?

British politics

The top six plot twists in British politics after the Brexit referendum

Everything that’s painful about Brexit, summed up in 190 eloquent words

Laurie Penny: I want my country back  This was a working-class revolt, but it is not a working-class victory. That’s the tragedy here. The collective howl of rage from depressed, deindustrialised parts of the country bled white and reckless by Thatcher, Blair and Cameron has turned into a triumph for another set of elites.

Canadian politics

Canada Post’s lockout is a sham

B.C. parks down to 7 full-time rangers  “One of the most endangered species in all of Canada is the Northern Spotted owl,” said Barlee. “We have fewer rangers than spotted owls.” This is disgraceful.

Geekery

Why Does My TV Make Everything Look Like a Soap Opera? 

The evolution of the book

Thought-provoking

The Negro Motorist Green Book and Black America’s Perpetual Search For A Home  The fact that the American Dream presents two very different faces depending on the color of yours is why Victor H. Greene created the Negro Motorist Green Book in 1936. Greene, an African-American postal worker, and an early social entrepreneur, saw opportunity in the fact that Black people wanted to enjoy the vast American landscape, but had to take into account inconveniences like being refused service, spat on, or lynched. Jewish newspapers had long published comprehensive listings of establishments for readers to avoid and the analogy to Black life was not lost on Greene. He developed a solution to what he termed the “embarrassment” that comes with being refused service for the color of your skin. Greene created a travel guide that listed all the restaurants, filling stations, museums, hotels, guest homes, grocery stores and establishments that readers would feel safe being Black in.

Quote of the week

“It’s a sheriff’s star.” “Their body cameras fell off.” One of the privileges of power is lying without needing to be believed.

—Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams)

We had no idea of the shooter’s identity or motive and yet before the night was over former congressman Joe Walsh had declared war on Black Lives Matter and President Obama. “Real America is coming after you,” he threatened. The New York Post declared “Civil War” on its front page. The Drudge Report declared, “BLACK LIVES KILL” and The Wrap echoed both sentiments, asking, “Is This War? When #BlackLivesMatter Veers Into Violence.”

And so, with this added grief, I and so many other black people in America must push forward knowing that this horrific act of violence will be used to silence us, to tell us that we have no right to demand protection under the law and justice for crimes committed against us. We are so sad and scared and disheartened. We have worked so very hard to simply be seen as human, but the progress we made was so fragile, the fear and hatred toward us so strong, that it can be shattered with an act of violence that horrifies us as much as anyone else.

I and many others have been desperately reaching out to my community, reminding them that what we demand is not too much, what we say is not controversial, what we fight for is not wrong. Black lives matter. That is all. That is all we want our country to believe.

Black lives matter. We will not stop saying it.

—Iljeoma Oluo

Just for fun

Kulning – Ancient Swedish herdingcall 

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