Tuesday, December 20, 2022

GOP scapegoating 'secure metal boxes'

On the scapegoating of ballot dropboxes

"All In with Chris Hayes" podcast episode: "The GOP is quietly ‘Trump-proofing’ our system behind his back" (Dec 16, 2022) — In the last three minutes of the podcast, there's a question about the Republicans' attempt to ban dropboxes that receive ballots.

Marc Elias (elections lawyer): "The one that is the biggest puzzle to me is the dropboxes. Because honestly, I'm not aware of any partisan valence to the dropboxes. I don't know that it helps the Democrats or hurts the Democrats or helps the Republicans — "

Chris Hayes (podcast host): "Who cares?!"

Marc Elias: "It's a weird obsession, though, Chris. It's just weird that they keep trying to ban secure metal containers."

Chris Hayes: "Yes, right, as if, I want to be like — It can't hurt you. It's just a box. It's a box of metal, and people are going to put their votes in there. ...obviously, there's a long history in this country of voter suppression, right? Particularly along racial lines, right? There's that. But I also think it's [the attempt to ban dropboxes is] playing a weird kind of ideological role right now, which is a means of avoiding the hard truths about the more basic stuff that happens in elections — which is, like, did you run good candidates and did you have a good message? If it's the metal boxes' fault, then you don't have to talk about that."

Marc Elias: "That's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that has happened is that, rather than confront bad candidates, bad issue set, bad campaigns, they have demonized voting. Which is an odd thing to do, if you're trying to win elections. But they've demonized it and then they bring these ridiculous post-election challenges like we're seeing in Arizona, sort of as part of the further 'theater of losing,' so that they can further their grievance as to what happened."


You may be interested: "What’s the Final Message of the January 6 Committee?". Written on Sept. 28, 2022, it's a 5-minute read on Medium.

puppy with big eyes

GOOD NEWS! As a result of a court victory, Kansas will stop enforcement of a voter suppression law that undermined the work of civic engagement organizations to register voters. Paige and I explain the case and what happens next. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM5t...

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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) December 19, 2024 at 12:15 PM

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Books to read

Articles to read

Time to leave Twitter. Cleaning out the Twitter bookmarks.

Friday, December 16, 2022

U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on Anti-LGBTQI+ violence: December 14, 2022

If the tweet embed fails, here's the House link

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Talking about literature and art on Twitter

Among topics I'll miss when Twitter finally goes lights-out (or I turn them out for my account) are these conversations about books and art.

tree

How IIJA, CHIPS, and IRA may affect climate

Native American philosophy (seen on Twitter)

Esther Gabara:

When Aníbal Quijano elaborated his critique of coloniality in collaboration with Immanuel Wallerstein, the two argued that the continent's history of violence against and resistance by indigenous peoples made it possible to 'speak of Americanity as a concept' that structured global modernity. Here this study has been influenced by methods and insights of long-standing research in decolonial thought led by distinct groups of theorists in the Americas, including, but not limited to, Ramón Grosfoguel (Puerto Rico/continental United States), María Lugones (Argentina/United States), Walter Mignolo (Argentina/United States), Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia), and Catherine Walsh (United States/Ecuador). All these thinkers recognize the influence of decolonization struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, Asia,Latin America, and the Caribbean on their current research that seeks to decolonize thought and life practices. Even so, they differentiate epistemological decolonization from that political process.

Research into Amerindian thought permeated theories of American negation in the generation of the 1960s and 1970s, in and beyond Acha's and Gullar's prefixes. The Argentine Rodolfo Kusch founded an interdiscipline he called antropología filosófica americana (American philosophical anthropology) in his landmark book La negación en el pensamiento popular (Negation in Popular Thought, 1975). Amerindian epistemological, spiritual, and affective imaginaries helped Kusch to comprehend the importance and shape of American negation and led him to break with Claude Lévi-Strauss's influential structuralist anthropology for its failure to comprehend the universality of indigenous thought...

* * *

Kusch thus identifies the limits of the European tradition he calls conocimiento (knowledge), which myopically focuses on objectivity and so produces knowledge that is ultimately univocal. Instead, he embraces the popular thought that he terms comprensión (comprehension), which values subjective emotions and opinion, and so creates forms of understanding that provide multiple answers to the same question.

Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas Under Neoliberalism, Esther Gabara (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

flower

"In the late 1880s, around the time when the Lake Mohonk gang was advocating for a dramatic expansion of the residential school system, a Paiute man named Wovoka had a vision. He said that the Creator had come to him with a new dance, one that would bring about a better world without white settlers and their endless expansionist wars. The dead would reunite with the living, and the buffalo killed by settlers would roam the plains again. It’s not difficult to understand why this message would be profoundly moving for people who had lost so much in the Indian Wars and whose children were being taken away for reeducation by the US government. It was a story about a hopeful future, where Indigenous culture flourished and the land came back to its original caretakers. Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) historian Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future, writes that the government had outlawed Indigenous dancing at that time, and therefore ‘the Ghost Dance was fundamentally oppositional in spirit.’”
Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 2: A Fake Frontier.

Great Inuit movie called Atanarjuat; not exactly the area you’re asking for but it’s really cool

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— Eric Hirsch🥥🌴 (@ehirsch.bsky.social) Jul 31, 2024 at 11:09 PM

Monday, December 12, 2022

YouTube: "We Are In A 'FOURTH TURNING,' What Does That Mean?"

The 2010s and 2020s are the "Fourth Turning."

Buy the book:

Book description: The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a human life, each composed of four eras - or "turnings" - that last about twenty years and that always arrive in the same order. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order. Then comes an Unravelling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis - the Fourth Turning - when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. By applying the lessons of history, The Fourth Turning makes some bold and hopeful predictions about America's next rendezvous with destiny. It also shows us how we can prepare for what's ahead, both individually and as a nation.


Update: Please note harmful uses of the idea. For example, transphobes may identify a "fourth industrial revolution" as the ground for transgender self-determination; they believe transgender people are "new" and that such an era must be rejected because it contains or affirms trans people. https://www.the11thhourblog.com/post/noho-t%C5%ABturu-noho-tangata-stay-real-stay-human

Also

"[Steve] Bannon’s Manichaean worldview started young. At a Catholic military school in Richmond, Virginia, he learned about the 1492 reconquest of Spain as the turning point in an ongoing clash of civilizations between the Christian West and the Muslim world. As an adult, he devoured books on Attila the Hun and great military campaigns. He was obsessed with history, specifically the concept of historical cycles — the idea that time was not, as Americans usually learned, a linear march of progress, but rather, more like the view of ancient traditions, a recurring pattern of distinct phases. Bannon especially liked the version of this theory in “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 book by historians Neil Howe and William Strauss, which ordered American history into generation‐long periods of highs, awakenings, unravelings and crises. The book predicted a coming rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, across the world and in America.

Bannon was not merely a student or passive observer of this prophecy; he wanted to be an agent of it, and an architect of the era that came next. So when he watched Trump glide down a golden escalator to announce his campaign for president, in 2015, his first thought was, “That’s Hitler!” By that he meant someone who intuitively understood the aesthetics of power, as in Nazi propaganda films. He saw in Trump someone who could viscerally connect with the general angst that Bannon was roiling and make himself a vessel for Americans’ grievances and desires."

— Isaac Arnsdorf, Finish What We Started, released April 9, 2024. Excerpt published in the Washington Post.

Here's another example from a June 2, 2023 blog post citing the idea:

[A video clip of Tim Pool and Joe Rogan talking about civil war is

"from four years ago, but I think we’ve escalated even more recently.

Just yesterday, Twitter blocked sharing and boosting a film titled “What is a Woman?” and the dispute was so serious that it caused their head of trust and safety to resign.

The film critiques gender ideology and the transgender activism movement. It was labeled as sensitive material and commenting and sharing were blocked.

I stumble upon pornographic content on Twitter all the time, and it’s never marked as sensitive. How is it controversial to have a discussion about what it means to be a woman?

It doesn’t make much sense, right? Well, unless you consider that we're in the fourth turning and in the middle of a full blown crisis that is about to blow like a volcano."

https://www.heidibriones.com/p/the-fourth-turning-is-upon-us-what

The author of this post tweeted "Don't call me cis" on June 20, when Elon Musk declared it was a slur.

Also pay attention to

"TESCREAL stands for "transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism." It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity. These are separate but overlapping beliefs that are particularly common in the social and academic circles associated with big tech in California.
* * *
Longtermism is the belief that we should discount short-term harms to real existing human beings — such as human-induced climate change — if it brings us closer to the goal of colonizing the universe, because the needs of trillions of future people who don't actually exist yet obviously outweigh the needs of today's global poor."
— "We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus," November 10, 2023, Charlie Stross, antipope.org

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Climate is a national security issue

Read: "Climate: Now a national security issue." By Russel Honoré. Salon.com. December 4, 2022. As a U.S. Army general, I prepared to do battle with enemies and face disaster. All of humanity must do that now

I also wrote on this topic in 2004, and finally published it in 2022: "Yes, Climate Change Is Expensive" (on Medium).

A year later

Watch the video in the article:

"Huge waves to hit California coast for third day, bringing flooding and life-threatening conditions." Elizabeth Wolfe and Robert Shackelford, CNN, December 30, 2023

Monday, November 28, 2022

We can't do serious things on Twitter if the owner only wants meme war

dog with ball

This man owns Twitter; it's not an ideal platform for journalists.

Elon Musk tweets false CNN headline: Elon Musk could threaten free speech on Twitter by literally allowing people to speak freely
CNN Communications replies: This headline never appeared on CNN. Be better. (They plastered a sticker on the original tweet saying it's misleadimg info.)

Alexey Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, created an X account on February 19, 2024. In doing so, "she announced she would continue the work of her husband...More than 90,000 people followed Navalnaya’s account within 24 hours after it was created." The next day, X suspended her account for about 30–45 minutes. X claimed it was an error, but who believes X?

August 2024

We are here:

"The office of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has condemned Elon Musk after the billionaire claimed “civil war is inevitable” in Britain amid far-right riots.

The prime minister’s official spokesman said Monday that there was “no justification” for Musk’s comment after he used his online platform X, formally called Twitter, to weigh in on the violence that has shaken the country since last week."

— Graeme Demianyk, Elon Musk Criticized By U.K. Prime Minister For 'Civil War' Comment: Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said there was “no justification" for the billionaire's intervention amid far-right riots. HuffPost, Aug 5, 2024

Friday, November 25, 2022

People saying that LGBTQ people deserve to be murdered

Saying that trans people, and those who enjoy going to bars with them, can expect to be murdered is the same thing as saying that LGBTQ people deserve to be murdered.

See also: "Hate-Crimers and Their Pronouns". It's a 9-minute read on Medium.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Yes, Rowling is transphobic

Spotted today on the internet. Never heard of this person before.

Decides to Be: A TERF

According to her, she used to be a TERF. I believe her. They exist. She had decided to be this way. Then:

Announced: Not a TERF

Hi Fellow Humans I’ve changed from #Bisexual to #Pansexual. Don’t be scared it’s just a word. #Bisexuality refers to two genders, ignoring the gender spectrum. It’s fine to be #bi but I’m not any more. I believe in #equality and won’t stand for #Trans & #NB erasure. #LoveToAll
Thank you for asking! I myself am a #RecoveredTerf & feel strongly that #TransIsValid & needs respect. F**ked up fact - 42% of trans youth selfharm/die (suicide) due to #trans and #enby erasure or denial. I don’t think that’s equality, do you? Do you think we can do better? #Woke

Re-Announced: Actually, Yes, a TERF

Right, I’m done. 3 months ago, I was tasked with writing an article detailing 20 Transphobic JK Rowling Quotes We’re Done With After 12 weeks of reading her books, tweets, full essay & finding the context of these “quotes”, I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message
In the process, I peaked. JK Rowling is not an “intolerable transphobe”, she’s a (talented) woman who could have sat back & been beloved forever, but looked around & paid attention as the intersection of trans rights and women’s rights has had understandable growing pains. In many cases, one groups rights are being sacrificed for the other, with the most vulnerable women often paying the price. Here in Britain, we always want to support both sides but realise that in some cases (like DV Shelters), that is impossible. And JK was paying attention. JK saw the loopholes being created & knew that women needed a voice. So instead of sitting back & wishing everyone well, said “It’s got to be me, hasn’t it?”. She did something terrifying & amazing & used her voice, I suspect knowing damn well what was to come. That’s bravery.
3 months of dedicated research & I cannot find a single truly transphobic JK Rowling quote that stands up against the scrutiny of journalistic integrity. The abuse JK has endured is beyond forgiveness. Every death threat, r*pe threat & torrent of abuse, she has born w/ grace. Shame on those who have framed her under the guise of “reporting” when you must know, deep down, you are just chucking out clickbait & stirring up hate. Shame on those who followed that propaganda without critical thought. You’re burning the wrong witch. I stand with @jk_rowling

In All Those Months of Research, Why Not Read What *Trans* People Have Said?

Here's my issue. If you want to understand why someone is transphobic, you have to listen to what trans people have said to explain that. You can't just listen to the person themselves and then say, Oh, OK, it all sounds great to me — You can't say that. Not if you yourself are not trans.

Trans people have explained a billion times why that person is a transphobic ringleader of transphobes.


Yet, in 2023, BBC Scotland won't let interviewees say that J.K. Rowling is transphobic without demanding that they use their on-air time rehashing why she's transphobic (as if that were not an obvious fact everyone already knows), thus devoting their on-air time to dissecting and thereby amplifying transphobic discourse and making J.K. Rowling more famous rather than having 15 minutes of fame to talk about their own beliefs and ideas.

See the Vox article: "Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.: An exhausting — if not exhaustive — timeline of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia." The timeline is kept updated.

Glamour Magazine dissects her tweets.

What has JK Rowling said about transgender people?

Here's What J.K. Rowling Has Really Said About Trans People, The Cut, 2023



kathryn on Twitter: and even if you give them a video essay with direct quotes from her terf wars essay and citations showing how she is transphobic they just still go ‘no no tell me a direct quote!!’ even though the video literally has direct quotes (this is the video)
Joe Szwaba tweets: The fact you *still* get people who claim she’s never said/done anything that indicates she doesn’t like trans people is denial of reality to an extent I can barely comprehend

Euan Yours tweets: ‘JK Rowling endorses fascist militia’s claim to be Griffindors’ is a wild thing to imagine explaining to someone 10 years ago
JK Rowling liking tweets from a 'Three Percenter' leader. The 'Three Percenters' are a far right militia that are considered a terrorist group in Canada
I'm sure you are all very shocked to learn that a far-right extremist group would be anti-trans and pro-'gender critical'

Please see:

J. K. Rowling, endorsed by Helen Joyce: The Misrepresentation of Compassion and Solidarity (on Rowling’s 2020 essay and what Helen Joyce said about it in Trans in 2021) (Medium)

J. K. Rowling, creator of monsters (DD)

For those who don’t want to read the new ‘Robert Galbraith’ serial killer tale

dog with ball in mouth

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies major at Boston University

"One step to keeping history’s darkest events from recurring is to learn as much as possible about how and why they happened.

BU’s new interdisciplinary major in Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies (HGHRS) will ask students to dig deep into the roots of those cataclysmic events and look for ways to head them off in the future."

"BU Launches New Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Major", Joel Brown, BU Today, Oct. 24, 2022.

flower

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Recent climate tweets

Earth seen from space

Monday, November 7, 2022

The trope about transgender people's bones

I'd really like it if you'd read "Our Bones Help Us Live," a 7-minute read in "The Identity Current" on Medium.

I was talking about this:

Tweet by Redneck Bubba: Trans women are not actual women...And men cannot get pregnant or give birth or have a menstrual cycle. NOT SORRY! Redneck Bubba is sharing a post from doctorofdivinebiology: You can shorten your penis as many times as you want, eat tons of hormones to grow your breasts or your beard, when future archaeologists find the skeleton of a transgender, this is the conclusion they will draw.

So:

"'Buhhhh a thousand years from now archaeologists will know your skeleton is MALE'
WRONG, they will be fighting for their lives against my tomb's elaborate traps in the heart of my cursed necropolis"
Gretchen Felker-Martin on Bluesky

"Nuestros cuerpos son llaves que abren sólo ciertas puertas. De hecho nuestros cuerpos hablan y nuestros huesos son nuestro último testimonio. ¿Nos traicionarán nuestros huesos?"
Cristina Rivera Garza, “Nota de la autora” (2017) to La Cresta de Ilión (The Iliac Crest), originally published 2002

Cliff Jerrison (@pervocracy) October 12, 2022 tweets: okay, fiiine even though it was the lowest quality bait, since apparently everyone is taking it here's the thing about 'but you'll always have female hip bones': NO SHIT, and a vagina too! 'You don't have cis anatomy' isn't a debunking, it's literally what 'trans' means!

C.J. continued:

Trans rights are not an "is" claim but an "ought."

Not "I can make my birth sex unrecognizable" but "I should not be forced to act in any particular way because of my birth sex."

which kinda just sounds like Feminism 101 For Small Babies and: that's because it is

and explicitly including pronouns and medical interventions and such among the freedoms not to be constrained by sex shouldn't actually be all that revolutionary

"trans rights are human rights" not as empty slogan but as "trans rights are the natural consequence of every human's right to self-determination"

I do not deny the angle of my pelvic bones; I deny that I'm required to base any major life decisions on it.

King Tut's golden mask for his sarcophagus

another article on this topic

If you'd like information on the pelvic bones of castrated men, see:
Kathryn Reusch, “Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration.” Castration and Culture In the Middle Ages, ed. Larissa Tracy. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013.

Image by Thorsten Dittmar from Pixabay

The 125 richest people on Earth hold investments with the carbon footprints of a whole country

From CNN:

On November 7, 2022, Oxfam published its

"analysis of the investments of 125 of the world’s richest billionaires.

It found that, contrary to average people, the wealthiest individuals’ investments account for up to 70% of their emissions.

According to the report, these billionaires’ investments produce an annual average of 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person, which is a million times higher than the average 2.76 tons of CO2 for those living in the bottom 90%.

Nafkote Dabi, climate change lead at Oxfam, said that emissions from billionaires’ lifestyles, their private jets and yachts are already thousands of times higher than those of the average person. But looking at emissions from their investments, their carbon emissions are more than a million times higher.

“These few billionaires together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina.

"How wealthy 'super emitters' are disproportionately driving the climate crisis — while blaming you": A new study found that the top 10% of households are responsible for 40% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Matthew Rozsa. Salon. August 22, 2023.

something is burning in the ocean. maybe an oil rig on fire.

In case you missed it

Have you seen inside the book 'To Climates Unknown'?

The alternate history novel To Climates Unknown by Arturo Serrano was released on November 25, the 400th anniversary of the mythical First ...