1,010 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2016
    1. Gloria Steinem responds to the election of Donald Trump.

      I’m being realistic, not negative. Almost every issue of equality now has majority support in public opinion polls, ideas of race and gender are changing, activism and iPhones are exposing the racial violence that has always been there, sexual assault from the campus to the military is no longer hidden, and Trump’s very public misogyny has unified women, educated men and inspired activism. It’s the Anita Hill effect, but deepened and multiplied. Trump has helped to expose desperation among those jobless and working poor who support him only because they oppose Washington.

    1. Mike Caulfield says Facebook's feed algorithms are far from its only problem. The entire site design encourages sharing of items that users haven't inspected beyond reading the headline.

    1. The forces that propelled Mr. Trump’s rise need to be confronted and defeated. It won’t be easy, given that tens of millions of Americans will vote for him and believe deeply in him. But if these forces are not defeated, what happened this year will be replicated in one form or another, and the Republican Party will continue to inflict great harm on our republic.

      • Anti-intellectualism [Actually, outright insanity. Complete disregard for reality. Trump and his followers "believe" whatever they want to "believe". The Republican party has become a party of frauds and liars.]
      • Political recklessness [Playing bullshit games instead of doing the duties they were elected to do. The refusal to vote on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee is one example.]
      • Appealing to nativism and xenophobia [No shit. This article is otherwise forthright. He should have said fascism and white supremacy.]

      Aside from the sins of the Republican Party:

      • Major media failed us by giving this asshole all kinds of free publicity.
      • Responsible journalists did their jobs. We need to support them, and we need more of them.
      • Entertainers pretending to be serious political commentators and fake news sites have become a danger to democracy.
      • Trump supporters: shameless racists, or just astonishingly stupid? [No, moron, Hillary Clinton is not just as bad as Trump.] Can we please improve education at least enough to counterbalance the ineducable?

      the greater sin of the Republican Party wasn’t that Mr. Trump won the nomination by carrying a plurality of votes in a large field. It was that people who surely knew better rallied to Mr. Trump once he became the nominee. Some advised him, others defended him and excused him, and still others tried to ignore him.

      And we should never forget who those people were, Paul Ryan.

    1. she is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She will not outright defy legality altogether. Above all, she can govern herself; the first indispensable qualification for governing others.
    2. The lesson Trump has taught is not only that certain Republican dogmas have passed out of date, but that American democracy itself is much more vulnerable than anyone would have believed only 24 months ago. Incredibly, a country that—through wars and depression—so magnificently resisted the authoritarian temptations of the mid-20th century has half-yielded to a more farcical version of that same threat without any of the same excuse. The hungry and houseless Americans of the Great Depression sustained a constitutional republic. How shameful that the Americans of today—so vastly better off in so many ways, despite their undoubted problems—have done so much less well.
    3. America's first president cautioned his posterity against succumbing to such internecine hatreds: “The spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” George Washington’s farewell warning resounds with reverberating relevance in this election year.We don’t have to analogize Donald Trump to any of the lurid tyrants of world history to recognize in him the most anti-constitutional personality ever to gain a major-party nomination for the U.S. presidency.
    4. I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined) and instead empower a bizarre new online coalition of antisemites, misogyists, cranks, and conspiracists with allegedly ominous connections to Russian state spy agencies?
    5. One of only two people on earth will win the American presidency on November 8. Hillary Clinton is one of those two possibilities. Donald Trump is the only other.Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated?
    1. But the thing is, this doesn’t make me different than Trump supporters; it makes me exactly the same as Trump supporters.

      While our very real fears may manifest themselves in different ways, and while those fears may look and sound dissimilar, they are really the same fears: The fears of being left behind, left out, and being turned against.

    1. But on issues of racism, race-baiting, religious intolerance, misogyny, sexual assault, white supremacy and demagoguery — there can be no gray area, Peter. These are disqualifying issues and you are completely wrong to support Donald Trump.

    1. Senate Republicans have refused to give President Obama's Supreme Court nominee a hearing, under the pretense that it is too close to an election, and "the American people should have their say on this issue".

      Now, they're talking about refusing to consider anyone that Hillary Clinton nominates.

      The people already spoke twice when they elected Barack Obama. The people are about to speak again.

  2. Oct 2016
    1. Trump is Bad for Business. Letter opposing Donald Trump, drafted by 12 business leaders and signed by hundreds.

    1. Books mentioned throughout this comment thread. Add your suggestions! - de Mesquita and Smith's The Dictator's Handbook - Machiavelli's The Prince - Sun Tzu's the Art of War - Saul Alinski's Rules for Radicals - David Nickle's Eutopia - Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (as per a previous CGPGrey video) - Erica Chenoweth's Why civil resistance works
    1. Reid, Clinton supporters hit Trump over Nevada pronunciation Published October 06, 2016 FoxNews.com Facebook0 Twitter0 livefyre9791 Email Print Now Playing What's Trump doing to prepare for 2nd presidential debate? Never autoplay videos Supporters for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Sen. Harry Reid attacked Donald Trump after the Republican presidential nominee told his supporters about the “correct” way to pronounce Nevada. Trump, during a rally Wednesday in Reno, insisted the correct way to pronounce the name of the Silver State was “Neh-VAH-da.” He declared that “nobody says it the other way.” Clinton supporters and Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, both used the moment to assail Trump. American Bridge immediately put up a video declaring that Trump was “looking like an idiot” for getting the name wrong. A statement from Reid declared that Trump’s stop in Reno was “disastrous.” "If Donald Trump wants to come down from the penthouse his daddy bought him to lecture us on how to say Nevada, he could at least pronounce it correctly,” Reid said in a statement. "Instead, Trump told us we pronounce the name of our state wrong minutes before he refused to take a position on Yucca Mountain. Predictions Map See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map → “I have news for Donald: it's pronounced Nev-AD-a and Yucca Mountain is dead.” Trump made a stop at the International Church of Las Vegas and the International Christian Academy before his rally in Reno. He said the Pledge of Allegiance with schoolchildren at the school. He also visited with Hispanic business leaders at a Mexican restaurant before departing for northern Nevada. Fox News’ Chad Pergram and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

      This article is actually written about Trump's pronunciation of Nevada as it is short and to the point. It almost seems like Fox had to just throw an article out there to cover the topic. Basically this article talks about Clinton supporter's attacks on Trump for the way he says their State's name. While the CNN article went deep into Trump's political and economic strategies, this one was a quick review of why people were mad at trump for the way he talks.

    1. First Read's Morning Clips: It's Nev-ADDD-ah, not Nev-AHHHH-dah Share Share Tweet Share Email Print Comment advertisement OFF TO THE RACES: It's Nev-ADDD-ah, not Nev-AHHHH-dah Donald Trump's attempt to pronounce "Nevada" in the Silver State last night didn't go well. Tim Kaine praised his own Tuesday night debate performance. Trump says he's "getting a lot of credit" after Mike Pence's widely-praised debate. Pence is taking heat from Latinos after his "Mexican thing" remark. From the Washington Post: "Sen. Tim Kaine may have awakened Wednesday to poor reviews after the first and only vice-presidential debate, but his acerbic performance in Farmville, Va., revealed that the Clinton campaign's strategy for these debates extends far beyond the stage. Armed with pre-planned Web videos, television ads and tweets, the campaign has used key debate moments this week and last as a cudgel against the Republican ticket, showing a level of discipline and organization largely absent from Donald Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's campaign." Trump said yesterday: "They say Donald Trump loves Putin. I don't love, I don't hate. We'll see how it works." And here's Trump on the issue of Yucca Mountain: "Number one is safety and it is a little too close to major population, so I will take a look at it and I will have an opinion." The New York Times does a deep dive into Trump's business ventures. "Of the roughly 60 endeavors started or promoted by Mr. Trump during the period analyzed, The Times found few that went off without a hitch. One-third of them either never got off the ground or soon petered out. Another third delivered a measure of what was promised — buildings were built, courses taught, a product introduced — but they also encountered substantial problems, like lawsuits, government investigations, partnership woes or market downturns." Here's how Pennsylvania boosted its swing-state status, according to the Washington Post. An interesting data point from PRRI/The Atlantic: "White likely voters who still live in their hometown strongly prefer Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton (57 percent vs. 31 percent), while nearly half (46 percent) of those who live more than a two-hour drive away from their hometown are supporting Clinton compared to 40 percent who are supporting Trump." The Atlantic endorsed Hillary Clinton, only the third time it has weighed in on a presidential election since 1857. Via POLITICO: With hopes in Pennsylvania fading, Trump is hoping to make gains in the Mountain West. From the AP: "Donald Trump once called data "overrated" in politics. But with Election Day swiftly approaching, the Republican presidential nominee is spending millions of dollars on data and digital services in an effort to land donations and win over voters. Ushering Trump toward a more analytical approach are Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser, and Brad Parscale, the campaign's digital director and a veteran Trump Organization consultant." Sean Hannity is accusing Megyn Kelly of supporting Hillary Clinton. "Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has throughout his career given campaign contributions to state attorneys general while they weighed decisions affecting his business, a review of his political donations shows," notes the Wall Street Journal. From the New York Times yesterday: "The F.B.I. secretly arrested a former National Security Agency contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments. The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton managed to steal highly damaging secret information while working for the N.S.A." What will happen to Merrick Garland's nomination in December? The

      The first thing i noticed when i got to the NBC website was that all of the political articles are about Trump. That really says something about the style of politics that are alive in the U.S. today. Although the article title talks about "Nevada" and how Trump says the State's name, it actually takes a deeper look into Trump's past business dealings and political affiliations. As opposed to the Fox news article that actually did focus on his pronunciation of Nevada. On top of that the author in this article goes after Trump's VP candidate as well as others that are in Trump's campaign committee. This article seemed more like an attack on trump rather than a criticism.

    1. The Republican Party nominated an ignorant, bigoted, authoritarian candidate to be president of the United States. The best message that the country can send with the popular vote is that if you try to win the presidency by stoking race hatred and promising to degrade the Constitution, you will lose and lose badly—that a fascist does not have an even-odds chance of becoming the most powerful person in the world.

    1. “Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

      ...

      “I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

      “Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

    1. SB 1070, the 2010 “show me your papers” law that earned Arizona international condemnation and did nothing to resolve real problems with undocumented immigration.

      Public opinion matters.

    2. Endorsement: Hillary Clinton is the only choice to move America ahead

      Hillary Clinton: Not a Loose Cannon Shooting Verbal Spit Wads.

    1. USA TODAY's Editorial Board: Trump is 'unfit for the presidency'

      Strong (written) language. In the video, the paralanguage makes things sounds quite a bit more difficult. Fear of reprisals? Unwilling shift to clickbait?

  3. Sep 2016
    1. Palmer Luckey is funding "Nimble America," an organization that supports Donald Trump by mocking and badmouthing Hillary Clinton. Luckey sold virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014

    1. First — and this cannot be said enough — Clinton and Trump are not equally bad candidates. One is a conventional politician who has a long record of public service full of pros and cons. The other is a demagogic bigot with a puddle-deep understanding of national and international issues, who openly courts white nationalism

      ...

      Second, a vote isn’t just about the past — although comparing these two candidates on their pasts still leaves one as the clear choice — but about the present and the future.

      There is a simple truth here: Either Clinton or Trump will be the next president of the United States. Not Jill Stein. Not Gary Johnson. Clinton or Trump

    1. By treating particular identities as “subject matter”instead of facets of personhood – by claiming that queer characters can “distract” from a central story, as though queerness is only ever a focus, and not a fact – you’re acting as though the actual living people with those identities have no value, presence or personhood beyond them.
    2. Identity is the micro level: the intimacy of self-expression coupled with the immediacy of belonging.
    1. many have long  advocated for learner-centered, constructivist approaches in education but these models have too often been the outliers rather than the norm

      Many of the programs and research downplayed constructivist education. A Nation at Risk. No Child Left Behind. It's difficult to write a "program" to sell for constructivism. Once that mindset is so public, it's difficult to create a different path, although we who believe have never given up.

  4. Aug 2016
    1. For Democrats, with their coalition increasingly split along class lines, this is looking more and more like the one issue that can keep the party coalition together

      Are the class lines smooth? This statement seems insufficient to describe complexity of the split.

    1. The problem in American politics is we’ve stopped being honest, and we’ve gotten all caught up and ultra-sensitive about the words people use instead of debating the ideas behind them. Trump is trying to blast through it.”

      Exactly.

    1. of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.
    2. I see my role as being a corrective to whatever consensus emerges that I don’t think is being subjected to enough critical scrutiny.
    1. the response is always, "What is the LGBT community going to do about this?" But the LGBT community doesn't run the schools where queer kids are being bullied, raped, and abused. The LGBT community can't shut down those "houses of worship" where LGBT kids are abused spiritually and their straight peers are given license to abuse them physically. The LGBT community doesn't parent the vast majority of LGBT kids. So the question shouldn't be, "What is the LGBT community going to do about this?", but rather, "What is the straight community going to do about this?"
  5. Jul 2016
    1. The statutes invented by humans are fixed into a shape of a new nature under which we must simply live. Those who for whatever reason fall outside of it are apparently fair game to be cast away, and the illegal and brutal practices they are subject to in the informal economy are justified.
    2. Within the workings of the informal economy bullying and violence is rife. The harshness of these conditions, and the sword of damocles of deportation, is precisely why this labour is so cheap, and so many businesses opt for it. Bullying makes workers subservient, and scares them away from industrial organising (although there are now amazing unions now fighting for workers in these sectors - the IWGB, IWW, and UVW.) It is not just those businesses that do well out of this exploitation. It makes things cheaper for everyone, and oils the cogs of the whole economy. Many people are happy to reap this work’s benefits without ever taking responsibility for the suffering it causes. 
    1. This was deny’d

      The Commons' motion to appoint militia commanders independently of the king met with resistance from Charles I.

    2. Militia

      The Commons drew up the Militia Ordinance of 1642 to quell the Irish uprising.

    3. Strafford

      The House of Commons drew up a bill of attainder declaring Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, guilty of treason. After the bill was signed by Charles I, Strafford was beheaded - very literally brought low "by the head"!

    4. help the Church,

      The House of Commons also volubly opposed Catholic practices in England before and during the Civil War.

    5. beter part

      Probably referring to the House of Commons, which drafted the Petition of Right, a document that prohibited the king from infringing on specific liberties.

    6. Ireland

      English Protestants were massacred in the Irish rebellion of 1641, a slaughter documented in John Temple's The Irish Rebellion (1646).

    7. Germanyes

      Referring to the defeat of German Protestants by Catholic forces during the Thirty Years War, contemporary with the English Civil War.

    8. Jane

      Lady Jane Grey ruled England for nine days before she was overthrown and executed by the notoriously Catholic Mary Tudor in 1554, at age nineteen. Known as the Nine Days Queen, she is the shortest reigning monarch in English history.

    9. Rome

      Roman Catholicism, due to the perceived Catholic leanings of Charles I.

    10. Edwards youths, and Clarence hapless son

      Referring again to Richard III's alleged murder of his nephews.

    11. flying for the truth

      Puritans migrated to New England in the 17th century due to the Catholic leanings of Charles I and rising religious tension in England.

    12. men of might

      Due to his marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, Charles I gained the mistrust of Puritans such as Bradstreet.

    13. consumption

      Paradoxically, even as the war has politically curative properties, its violence threatens to destroy England.

    14. purging potion

      The metaphor likens the Civil War to a medicinal concoction meant to rid the body (England) of disease-causing humors - or, in this case, of Charles I.

    1. I am seeking opinions as to the nature of this amendment. Is this good for homeowners or good for only big business? Is this Yes on 1? Or is this the REAL amendment?

    1. Yes On 1 For The Sun

      This FB page and amendment has said to be a sneaky back door legislation that will actually ensure power to the big dogs and make it harder for us to get solar. Please correct me if wrong.

    2. This bill is on alert as it may actually make buying solar HARDER and not EASIER. Please help me out on this one. Trying to annotate a better link but this will have to do for now. I am trying to comment on yes on 1 video..

    1. With the presidential election cycle coming to a close in November

      Surprised by the US focus of this piece, from the start. But this phrase is particularly awkward, coming from a UK publication. Sounds a bit like people from the US coming to Canada and talking about “the country” in reference to our southerly neighbours. Feels strange, especially from those who teach here.

    1. Marvel has always been political. Captain America started fighting Hitler and the Nazis before the USA entered the War. Fantastic Four fought the Communists. Captain America fought, then resigned because of Nixon. The Invisible Girl became The Invisible Woman, you had a character actually called The Black Panther from a fictitious, idealised African country.
    1. "Donald and Hobbes", several Calvin and Hobbes strips remixed into a lampoon of Donald Trump.

    1. De ce point de vue, il n'est pas nécessaire d'argumenter longuement sur ces dispositions car le convergence des structures de productivité peut produire des miracles et agrémenter le soutien du jeu des stratégies des forces en présence.

    1. I am joined by a trans woman about my age. People get afraid, she tells me, and nobody wants to feel afraid. But if you get angry, you feel empowered. Trump is playing on people’s fears, to get them angry, which in turn makes us, on the other side, feel fearful. It’s a domino effect.
    2. The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.
    3. Trump seems to awaken something in them that they feel they have, until now, needed to suppress. What is that thing? It is not just (as I’m getting a bit tired of hearing) that they’ve been left behind economically. (Many haven’t, and au contraire.) They’ve been left behind in other ways, too, or feel that they have. To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the “lamestream” media, the “élites,” the business-as-usual politicians. They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way. They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.
    1. the reason "hard-working Americans" — the quotes underscoring the euphemism — don't really rock with Hillary Clinton is a sense that some of the concerns she's championing are, if not anathema to them, then at least not theirs.
    1. RETIRED U.S. AIR FORCE Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.

  6. Jun 2016
    1. agnotology - the study of willful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favor. (Coined by Robert Proctor of Stanford University.)

      • tobacco companies
      • climate-change deniers
      • politicians

      Withholding evidence and outright lying are just the two most obvious tactics. They also take advantage of people's desire to be reasonable, by claiming there are two sides to a topic that doesn't actually have any reasonable opposition -- the "balanced debate" scam. And they influence people by conflating the main issue with others -- personal liberty, religious beliefs, capitalism vs socialism.

    1. Automated posts from social media accounts pretending to be real individuals are being used to influence public opinion. (The Chinese government uses regular employees to post "real" messages at strategic times.)

  7. May 2016
  8. annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net annotatingausten.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. pamphlets

      Unlike the typical pamphlets we may think about today, in this era, pamphlets were used for political information.

  9. Apr 2016
    1. true liberal democracy

      A “well-informed citizenry” require journalistic assistance. Which is why US elections are such a neat context to discuss literacy, public opinion, agency, representativeness, and populism.

  10. Mar 2016
    1. The fear now is that the avalanche of digital information might push things the other way.

      And that once again, those with power and money will give the rest of us a little gift ...

    2. Governments that were digitally blind when the internet first took off in the mid-1990s now have both a telescope and a microscope.

      Yikes

    3. Ever more data and better algorithms, they fret, could lead politicians to ignore those unlikely to vote for them.

      This is the crux of it all -- who has access and who does not have access means who has a voice and who does not have a voice. Who gets ignored?

    4. But it is beginning to spill out from the ivory towers, and is gradually spreading to other countries.

    5. The internet and the availability of huge piles of data on everyone and everything are transforming the democratic process, just as they are upending many industries.

      And this is a good thing, right? Unless of course, the "crowd" has views opposite your own, and then it is a bad thing. I like the focus here of localizing the impact of the flattening, improving lives in our cities and towns.

    6. “I will be using Facebook & Twitter. Watch!”

      "Where I won't have to say anything of real substance because it's only status updates anyway"

    1. I suspect a lot of Americans have had enough of 25 years of Clintonocracy, but who knows

      Not me, though. I am still one of the fans of the centrist theme and message of the Bill Clinton years but I often feel very lonely in that zone. I'm not saying Hillary does it for me, either. But Bernie is too far left for my taste.

    2. Ignore us at your peril.

    3. And there have never been as many Independents as there are right now.

      So, there is a possibility of some sanity ... unless of course, it is the nutjobs who have also opted out of the political parties and will make an even stronger lurch to the right or left than the primaries are showing right now.

    4. DINO

    5. independent voters

      This may be the key to the unknown element of the election -- while the primaries tell one story, the general election may unfold another - driven by those of us not affiliated with either party. Whose message will reach those people?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndkcb12X1c

    1. 10:57:02KNOXAnd the system is designed to exclude third parties. The system is designed from, from the, sort of, the aftermath of the Soviet Revolution. It's designed so that it's extremely hard for a third party to get on the ballot, to have a viable candidate, to raise money and the rest of it.

      Whoa. Anybody know anything about this?

    1. along with an incident in which a member of the crowd punched and kicked a protester and another that involved Mr. Trump’s campaign manager.

    2. politics news updates

    3. Mr. Trump’s rallies have been anything but usual

    4. the protester was part of a group behind Mr. Trump that had been jeering him as he spoke.

    5. The cameras showed the crowd member being quickly led out by police officers

    6. rally

    1. It’s in the realm of policy, however, where I find Bernie intellectually quite dishonest, and Hillary pretty damned honest. When you scrutinize his policy ideas, as wonky liberals have begun doing (finally) in the last couple of months, those ideas don’t stand up, on a bunch of different levels.<br> One of those levels is political—as in there’s no way, in the foreseeable future, there will be sixty votes in the Senate, much less support in a likely GOP-controlled House, to pass single-payer health care, or break up the big banks, or reform the political campaign system, or provide free college tuition for every student. You can excuse that by saying, Well, that’s his vision, his end goal, maybe not achievable in his first term but possible over time, especially if we get the “political revolution” he calls for.

      But there’s a deeper level at which these policy ideas are intellectually dishonest. Even if you could somehow get them passed, practically they either wouldn’t work or would be recklessly disruptive or both.

  11. Feb 2016
    1. According to numbers from the American Journalism Review and the Pew Research Center, less than a third of U.S. newspapers have a reporter present at the statehouse (either full- or part-time) and almost no local television stations assign a reporter to state politics.

      Net result: the public’s awareness of and access to the activities of state government is vanishing, at the same time that the decisions made by state-level actors are having greater effects on American lives.

      The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state. (Think C-SPAN, but way better, and focusing on statehouses.)

    1. Nobody’s happy

      Free things are often unhappy-making

    2. If the power authority were to demand immediate payment from them, it could set off a domino effect of defaults and insolvencies.

      sigh

    3. The commission, established in 2014, is the power authority’s first independent regulator; previously the public-owned monopoly regulated itself.

      This model backed many of the privatizations in Latin America. But the same regulators were working with new private companies in the market.

    4. Until now, the power authority’s terms gave cities no incentive to conserve. The more free power they used, the more they could receive.

      Aaaargh

    5. And that is the catch. What most likely would be the biggest recurring expense for these attractions — electricity — costs Aguadilla nothing. It has been provided free for years by the power authority, known as Prepa.

      who could have seen a bad thing coming?

  12. Jan 2016
    1. Sanders is giving these views a voice. When Bernie asserts on national television that it is Wall Street that regulates Congress instead of the other way around, he strikes a chord that potentially enables people to resonate together — Republicans and Democrats alike. Second, Sanders defies the political class by projecting a vision of how our country could move toward justice.
    1. My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

      While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened.<br> . . .<br> my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

      The article goes on to say that support for Trump is likely to continue to grow. People tend to become more authoritarian when they feel threatened. And people are worried about terrorism -- and maybe about losing jobs to immigrants.

      The main reason for Trump's lead among right wingers might be simply that it seems like he could win. This is the most pathetic group of Republican presidential hopefuls I've ever seen.

    1. It will only happen if we fix our politics. A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.  This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests.  That’s one of our strengths, too.  Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.

      While technology doesn't solve everything, I firmly believe it has a critical role to play in fixing our politics. Better and easier ways for citizens to hold their government accountable, engage with their elected officials and each other, and way more exist. We're using one right now.

    1. As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them, you don’t truly grasp the issue. We can bemoan political gridlock and a divisive media all we want. But we won’t truly progress as individuals until we make an honest effort to understand those that are not like us. And you won’t convince anyone to feel the way you do if you don’t respect their position and opinions.

      The two-party system, formal debate, and typical advice for essay writing all emphasize picking A or B, and then defending it to the death. We should place more emphasis on the identification of alternatives and the collection of objective facts.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

    2. In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect

      We tend to assume that most people think and feel similarly to us. We then categorize those who don't as "other" and somehow inferior. This tendency is intensified when we gather with people who are in fact like-minded. And that happens in social media, where we tend to follow those with similar views.

    3. Sharing links that mock a caricature of the Other Side isn’t signaling that we’re somehow more informed. It signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views. It signals that we’d much rather show our friends that we’re like them, than try to understand those who are not.

      I agree. But on the other hand, "mocking a caricature of the Other Side" is a description of satire, which seems to be a valuable way to spread ideas.

  13. Dec 2015
    1. Churchill said that you must be a liberal when you are young or you don’t have a heart. But you must become a conservative when you get older or you don’t have a brain.
    1. But my favorite part was the “get ahead” part of this answer. Because, to me, it demonstrates how Clinton — as a Presidential candidate — thinks about public education in America. Education is a scarce resource that helps some poor kids individually “get ahead,” but only if they demonstrate talent and ambition. Educating the poor is not a thing Clinton believes benefits the nation, it’s just a thing that individual kids can do to enrich themselves.

      This is in response to Hillary Clinton's comment during the Democratic debate on Saturday, 19 December:

      “I don’t believe in free tuition for everybody. I believe we should focus on middle-class families, working families and poor kids who have the ambition and the talent to go to college and get ahead.”

      I haven't heard anyone mention that we can provide more education without paying an extra dime of tuition to any college. Neither schools nor teachers are necessary for learning and demonstration of knowledge.

    1. In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited.
    1. The DNC rents access to its master voter list to campaigns, which augment the data with their own information. The firewalls are supposed to block campaigns from spying on their rivals.

      An audit released by the Clinton campaign showed the breach was more extensive than the Sanders campaign described, with at least 24 occasions when the Sanders campaign "saved" lists of Clinton data, from four different users.

      Josh Uretsky, the Sanders campaign staffer fired for accessing the voter file, told MSNBC that his intent was to document and understand the scope of the problem so it could be reported. "To my knowledge, we did not export any records or voter file data that were based on those scores,” he said.

    1. Today, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz issued the following statement:   “The Sanders campaign has now complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them. Based on this information, we are restoring the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter file, but will continue to investigate to ensure that the data that was inappropriately accessed has been deleted and is no longer in possession of the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign has agreed to fully cooperate with the continuing DNC investigation of this breach. The fact that data was accessed inappropriately is completely unacceptable, and the DNC expects each campaign to operate with integrity going forward with respect to the voter file.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7m-nnl7LSQ

      https://twitter.com/DWStweets/status/678083696390512640<br> https://twitter.com/DWStweets/status/678083869661360128

      This smells. I want to see a 3rd-party investigation.<br> And I think DWS should resign as DNC chair.<br> (On the other hand...)<br> https://twitter.com/JudyReardon/status/678045914435596288<br> "Jeff Weaver keeps on saying Sanders staff who accessed Clinton data<br> were young staffers. Josh Uretsky is 39 and has a Ph.D."

    1. Thirdly, rather incredibly, the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information, information which is the lifeblood of any campaign. This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. It is our information, not the DNCs.

      Bernie Sanders says the Democratic National Committee is denying his campaign access to their own data, after failing to keep the data that belonged to different campaigns separate.

      https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats<br> https://twitter.com/DWStweets<br> Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz<br> Chair of the Democratic National Committee

    1. Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.

      Interview with Peter Sunde, co-founder of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. (He was incarcerated for one year after they were convicted of assisting copyright infringement.) "We have already lost." he says. "Well, we don't have an open Internet. We haven't had an open Internet for a long time."

      I'm not as pessimistic. But we are too complacent. A free Internet will contribute to a free society and democracy. A closed Internet will contribute to oppression and plutocracy. We need to fight the tendency toward devices that give the user little control. We need more open source hardware, nonprofit maker spaces, and cooperatives. We need to work on alternative Internets.

    1. Populism has both positive and negative definitions.

      The positive sense is synonymous with democracy -- the belief that government should be for and by the people.

      The negative sense is the tool of demagogues -- appealing to fears and prejudices. An ideology that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous 'others' who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice" (Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell)

    2. And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.
    3. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

      This accelerated hard with Ronald Reagan. The theory that lower taxes and deregulation will be good for everyone sounds sensible. But the wealthy don't care about the common welfare. They only care about amassing more wealth and power.

    4. Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.
    5. It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

      He is commenting on "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945" by Milton Mayer

    6. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.
    1. When Bernie Sanders talks about a 'revolution' in America, he's talking about getting millions of people deeply involved in the political process. I think he's also talking about getting millions of people personally involved, in their communities, in building solutions that don't need government involvement, such as volunteer-based tutoring, mentoring and learning organizations.
    1. To be very, very clear: Donald Trump is a bigot. He is a racist. He is an Islamophobe and a xenophobe. He profits off the hatred and stigmatization of traditionally oppressed groups in American society. That makes him, and his European peers, and racists in other eras in American history, a threat to crucial values of equality and fair treatment, and a threat to the actual human beings he's targeting and demonizing.
    2. So if Donald Trump isn't a fascist, what is he? Well, he's a right-wing populist. And while fascists are rare in 2015, right-wing populists are not. In fact, it's kind of weird that America hasn't had a real one before now. The UK has the UK Independence Party (UKIP); France has Marine Le Pen and the Front National; Germany has Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the anti-Muslim Pegida movement; Sweden has the Sweden Democrats; the Netherlands has the Party for Freedom and its leader, Geert Wilders.
    3. Of course, many fringe fascists themselves like Donald Trump and view him as the best they're going to get on a national scale. They argue he's sparking a big spike in activity around and interest in white nationalism. "Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that," Stormfront founder Don Black told Politico recently. But that does not make Trump himself a fascist.
    4. Griffin, who is a professor of history and political theory at Oxford Brookes University, puts it best: "You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist."

      Don't forget "narcissistic blowhard dunce".

    5. To be blunt: Donald Trump is not a fascist. "Fascism" has been an all-purpose insult for many years now, but it has a real definition, and according to scholars of historical fascism, Trump doesn't qualify. Rather, he's a right-wing populist, or perhaps an "apartheid liberal" in the words of Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism.

      Good article on the definition of fascism.

      Quotes from scholars:

      • The Nature of Fascism, Roger Griffin
      • The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton
      • Fascism: Comparison and Definition, Stanley Payne
      • A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, Stanley Payne

      And historical fascists:

      • Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
      • The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini
    1. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[31] she worked as a researcher and published several papers.

      Gosh, I wonder when the United States will elect someone with an equally good analytical background.

    1. Donald Trump is not the problem. He's a symptom

      The problem is an economic and social desperation that makes his base incredibly dangerous

  14. cityheiress.sfsuenglishdh.net cityheiress.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. Earl, nor Marquess, nor Duke,

      Earl: "Anglo-Saxon England: a man of noble birth or rank, esp. as distinguished from a ceorl or freeman of the lowest class" (OED) Marquis: "a nobleman ranking below a duke and above a count" (OED) Duke: "In some European countries: A sovereign prince, the ruler of a small state called a duchy" (OED)

  15. Nov 2015
    1. Morales was born into the Aymara indigenous ethnic group in the Andean highlands, a group of people who tend to back roads, industry and economic development, said Tegel. But indigenous populations in the tropical part of the country, generally speaking, don’t want that, he said. “They want to a certain degree to be left alone. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want economic development, but they want a different model and they want it done much more at a community level.” Economics is a huge issue in Bolivia — one of the poorest countries in Latin America — and a major driver in policy decisions, Tegel said. “That tension between his indigenous and environmental discourse and some of the projects he actually wants to do, including increasing mining in the country, is at the very least a paradox and something his critics are calling hypocritical.”
    1. Long a part of indigenous culture in which the leaf had been chewed or brewed in teas, coca cultivation is legal — though controlled — in Bolivia. President Evo Morales, himself once a leader of coca growers, has championed its cause, leading the United Nations to acknowledge his country’s right to allow its traditional use.
  16. Oct 2015
    1. Mr. Morales is also the first indigenous president of Bolivia, where 48 percent of the population declared themselves indigenous in the last census, and his government has proven itself adept at reconciling ancestral knowledge with economic modernization.
    1. EV: Decolonization means a lot to me, it means recuperating… our own path, something which we’ve been forced to lose, this [indigenous] path, this wisdom, this knowledge has been devalued, minimized as though it weren’t knowledge at all. And so now we are recuperated this, and we’re doing so in our own way. This for us is decolonization, a process which is done via the state but also via the social organizations, because this is an issue of how to organize, how to speak of our ancestral technologies. Yes, many things have been modernized, but in many cases we have a necessity to recuperate our own principles and values as indigenous peoples. 
    1. If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.

      Hurts to read.

    1. But forthose (such as the unemployed, housewives, and broadly the “informalpeople”) who lack such institutional power/settings, streets become acrucial arena to express discontent.

      Riots and defiant parades/organizational rebellions are led along streets... They're literally using their built environment in an abstract way that was probably never thought of being purposed in that way.

    2. I like to suggest that thisnew urbanity, the city-inside-out, not only it exhibits a profound processof exclusion, it also generates new dynamics of publicness that can haveimportant implications for social and political mobilization in terms ofwhat I have described as “street politics” and “political street”

      with new anything comes consequences/change.. it is to decide whether or not these consequences/changes have a beneficial or negative impact on society's well being.. is exclusion a consequence of capitalism?

  17. Sep 2015
    1. Llamarían Rosas a la avenida SarmientoInformación generalSería el tramo que une Plaza Italia con avenida del Libertador; la Legislatura lo aprobó, pero falta una audiencia pública

      Rosas vs. Sarmiento. Still a problem to this day

    1. due to digital communications tools, social media and the Internet
    2. And no tool digital communication tool fosters this more than collaborative annotation, which engages citizens with the primary sources of politics and directly with each other.

    3. activities through which people share their opinions

      This page and all the links are critical resources for this project.

    4. What is the relationship between young people's online activities and their political participation?

      Teaching that there is such a connection should be a priority for digital pedagogues.

    5. reshaping the manner in which young people participate in public life?

      Well, simply put, they are. When else in history would this have been possible for a farm boy. Seriously, though, young people have public personas today like they never have before.

    6. How can policy makers, educators and software designer promote frequent, equitable and meaningful political engagement among youth through the use of digital media?

      Two words: open annotation.

    7. the prospect that new media can become a bridge to young people's involvement with politics and other democratic institutions.

      Quote this somewhere...

  18. www.schooljournalism.org www.schooljournalism.org
    1. ASNE

      American Society of News Editors=possible partner/funder

    2. news literacy curriculum

      I like this idea a lot. Annotation seems as though it could play a major role here.

    3. John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

      Funders of this theme.

    1. active, informed, responsible, and effective citizens.

      Note adjectives here:

      • active as in participatory
      • informed as in well- and critically-read
      • responsible as in listening to others, acting reasonably
      • effective as in taking action that has results
    2. young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are far less likely to be informed and to vote.

      Emphasis on peer to peer learning, open, free software...

  19. Aug 2015
    1. But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

      A thousand times yes that "politics is about who shows up."

    2. So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

      This is also the source of so much hate toward Republicans spouted by Democrats. It's not uncommon to hear about Republicans who "vote against their own interest". However, voting against one's own interests is a radical and amazing thing to do. If everyone who held significant privilege and power voted against their own interests we might have a more equitable world.

    3. The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.

      The worst possible outcome.

    4. What's really being measured is heterogeneity of opinion, not centrism.
    5. There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

      The two paragraphs that follow are spot on. Nerds think government doesn't do anything right and they see government as this monolith thing apart from themselves rather than something they can and should work to affect, rather than circumvent.

      One thing I got out of reading Graeber's "Democracy Project" was the idea that it is not rational people that inhabit the middle of the political spectrum. Most people are more radical than the media makes it seem. The media reinforces the narrative that if you hold strong political opinions you are a radical. Your neighbors think you're crazy. You should probably just follow the herd, more.

      While there are definitely fundamentalists at the political extremes, there are also great thinkers.

    6. A voter with one extreme conservative opinion (round up and expel all illegal immigrants immediately) and one extreme liberal opinion (institute a 100 percent tax on wealth over a million dollars) will be marked, for the purposes of polling, as a moderate.
  20. Jul 2015
    1. sovereign wealth funds

      "sovereign wealth funds" is like a gajillion word score in Tory bingo.

      Thinking a lot lately about translating ideas/policies of the left into language the right can hear/engage with/adopt without feeling they've lost.

    1. a divorce from Wall Street, could help Democrats win back sizable segments of working class whites

      I don't see how this would help Democrats if a large segment of working class whites vote Republican. Republicans are already in bed with Wall Street, same as the neo-liberal Democrats. Why would the Dems moving away from Wall Street change that?

    1. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

      Interesting conjecture. Seems accurate.

    1. The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in. It is woven into the fabric of government service delivery, of war-fighting systems, of activist groups, of major corporations and teenagers’ social groups and the commerce of street-market hawkers.

      Precisely why I consider the various "Pirate Parties" to be extremely relevant in modern politics!

    1. It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.

      It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

      I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

      • 140 character limit
      • Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
      • Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

      I'm sure that's only the surface.

  21. Jun 2015
    1. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

      The only counter-argument that comes to mind for me didn't form itself until I had read this last paragraph a few times.

      If your identity marker connotes tolerance then it hopefully has the opposite effect. Insofar as the experience of marginalization promotes empathy such identities might be good evidence for intelligence, and I do think individuals who feel oppressed or marginalized tend to empathize with others who suffer for different, marginalized identities.

      These identities will only breed stupidity if the individual feels a competition for scarce resources that overwhelms their empathy, whence the perniciousness of the belief in zero sum attention economics as a greater threat to activism than inaction, ignorance, and exhaustion.

    1. The data show that in some circumstances in which a woman may choose to end a pregnancy, majorities of Americans — Democrats and Republicans — are on the same side, sometimes supporting the legality of the procedure and sometimes not.
  22. May 2015
    1. Gridlock

      I find myself thinking here about intersectionality, and about a certain critique of identity politics which seems to target those whose identities are marked. White men e.g. can critique and transcend the grid, while those whose positions in it are sites of political organizing are accused of reifying the grid. Not sure if Massumi is even in that neighborhood...

    1. inspirational organizational

      Indeed, it becomes a matrice. It is not a coincidence if free software share its source : the core of the paradigm is both the source and the sharing itself. It is a recursive and viral paradigm.

  23. Apr 2015
    1. The children who thought that having a black president, despite the fact that he was, on domestic policy, worse than EVERY other democratic nominee, are why the US is so fucked right now.

      Wow. Hadn't heard it put so bluntly before.

    1. “Honestly,” said Wiener, “it is perplexing to me why people are so insistent that local communities should not have control. The behavior we see on (our) street is a very localized issue. We should be able to address it.

      Our local communities passed sit-lie, Scott. Not only that, but on the very same ballot was a measure that would increase foot patrols.

      We can't, from one side of our mouths, say that we should have local control, and then from the other side that police don't get discretion in how they address use of public space but instead must enforce a law like sit-lie.

      Our local community got it wrong. If we can get it right at the state level, then fine.

      I don't care at which level it happens, I care that our laws encode compassion.

    1. There were actual politics at stake, and it would’ve been an ridiculously dangerous move to substitute identity affinities for political analysis.

      Yes!!! Reminds me of this quote from Graeber's "Democracy Project": https://instagram.com/p/tjcYY9Og32/?taken-by=tilgovi

  24. Feb 2015
    1. "We provide half a billion dollars (annually) to the District. One would think they would be much more compliant with the wishes of Congress," Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican and one of the most vocal pot opponents, said in an interview Thursday.

      It's almost unbelievable to me that a representative can say something like this. It really speaks to how comfortable we've gotten with money politics.

    1. At a World Cancer Day symposium, Shripad Naik, Minister of State for AYUSH, asked scientists to look to traditional Indian medicines to treat the disease.

      The Minister of State for Ayush is an idiot. They should be the one asking scientists for advice, not the other way around.

  25. Jan 2015
    1. After 2004, I believed the story that the protesters in Ukraine and elsewhere were mobilized through text messaging and blogs.

      believes the story ... it's a story he believes.

    2. We were supposed to be saving the world by helping to promote democracy, but it seemed clear to me that many people, even in countries like Belarus or Moldova, or in the Caucasus, who could have been working on interesting projects with new media on their own, would eventually be spoiled by us.

      Applies to these activities wherever undertaken, including any country in the West, he just so happens to be interested in former Soviet Block countries

    3. If you’re trying to figure out how a non-neoliberal regime can function in the twenty-first century and still be constructive towards both environment and technology, you have to tackle these kinds of questions. There’s no avoiding them.

      Inter alia neo-liberalism is reactionary.

    4. It’s primarily from data and not their algorithms that powerful companies currently derive their advantages, and the only way to curb that power is to take the data completely out of the market realm, so that no company can own them. Data would accrue to citizens, and could be shared at various social levels. Companies wanting to use them would have to pay some kind of licensing fee, and only be able to access attributes of the information, not the entirety of it.

      Yes, well at present the security services are complicit with the present economic and legislative model, and this makes imagining any change to existing structures very difficult because such changes will be resisted by the rather shadowy security services. Cameron does a deal with them, he makes a point somewhat in support of their agenda in return for which he bigs up his position on security with the cost of looking an idiot - not a huge cost for a politician it seems.

    5. But if you turn data into a money-printing machine for citizens, whereby we all become entrepreneurs, that will extend the financialization of everyday life to the most extreme level, driving people to obsess about monetizing their thoughts, emotions, facts, ideas—because they know that, if these can only be articulated, perhaps they will find a buyer on the open market. This would produce a human landscape worse even than the current neoliberal subjectivity. I think there are only three options. We can keep these things as they are, with Google and Facebook centralizing everything and collecting all the data, on the grounds that they have the best algorithms and generate the best predictions, and so on. We can change the status of data to let citizens own and sell them. Or citizens can own their own data but not sell them, to enable a more communal planning of their lives. That’s the option I prefer.

      Very well thought out. Obviously must know about read write web, TSL certificate issues etc. But what does neoliberal subjectivity mean? An interesting phrase.

    6. On the one hand, we can foresee these companies extending their reach ever further into everyday life, to a point where it would become difficult to even articulate why you would want a different model, since our use of these technologies and the politics embedded in them also permits or restricts our ways of thinking about how to live.

      The indoctrinated future - probably closer than we think.

  26. Nov 2014
    1. When we get to the point where someone sees the mere existence of a political conflict that requires us to criticize allies as a no-win scenario, something has gone very wrong. For the actual work of politics– convincing people to come over to our side in order to make the world a more just and equitable place– those politics have utterly failed. We have been talking about privilege theory for 30 years. We’ve been talking about intersectionality for 25 years. We’ve been getting into cyclical, vicious Twitter frenzies for a half decade. This is not working. And I doubt hardly anyone actually believes that this is working. They’re just having too much fun to stop.

      I've recently decided, for myself, that Twitter is not a viable platform for political discussions. I simply can't do it anymore. I spend more time getting derailed by confusion stemming from trying to be terse when discussing subtleties than I do actually discussing the issues I wanted to discuss.

    1. Perhaps a belief endures in these women that sidling up to men with power, rather than organising for it collectively, will yield individual gains.
    2. The recognition of feminism is that women exist at a social disadvantage to a history that privileges and resources men at their expense.
    3. ...and yet they really do believe that by pandering to the blokes, they'll be treated with respect and equality!

  27. Aug 2014
    1. Of course, the radical feminist position that masculinity is natural and healthy, and femininity artificial and harmful, is also inherently sexist

      Of course. That's an important theme. It's as though it's being suggested here that radical feminists chose this view, when I think it's more correct to say that they are reacting to it.

    2. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

      Might one argue that since these feminists feel their fight has been co-opted and, despite the many ways trans individuals are less assured of their safety and rights than cis women, the radical feminist is actually the more oppressed insofar as identity politics has left them behind? In which case, might we celebrate that time is given to this minority rather than criticize the piece for being one-sided?

    3. frequently providing physical descriptions

      I count only three instances, none of which are offensively dwelling on appearance in the way that media often is scrutinizing women's bodies. One of these descriptions is particularly well meaning: it is given only to color the story of abandoned transition with the image of hormone-induced stubble. To mention that there are physical descriptions of any of the activists in the piece here is obvious pandering.

  28. Feb 2014
    1. In addition to broad economic trends affecting domestic politics evenly, Fisher also notes the uneven distribution of effects stemming from intellectual property rights (1999, Sect. II. C.). The positive effects of intellectual property rights accrue strongl y to a small number of rights - holders (the paper assumes that there are no significant negative effects to rights - holders); for this reason, rights - holders have significant motive (and potentially greater means) to overcome the significant barriers to acti ve political lobbying.
  29. Jan 2014
    1. Let's rethink the idea of the state: it must be a catalyst for big, bold ideas

      Reframe role of government

    1. This map requires Adobe Flash Player.

      Get the data and ask them to redraw it using D3.js

    1. The formula is simple: divide the population by the number of congressional or legislative districts and use the existing geo-political boundaries to come as close to the required number as possible.

      How can we get this enacted/mandated?

    1. The federal government already spends enough on student aid to cover tuition for every public college student in America. Maybe it's time to try.

      How can we start this moving in Congress?