politics

Fuck this worm

I'm a federal employee being required to work during the shutdown (if it happens). I have a critical public safety related job. I'll probably get paid when it's all over. However, I have a lot of coworkers that are really getting fucked

Because I hate hearing about bourgeois bullshit I haven't been paying attention to congressional news. Well, now they got my attention. What the hell is going on over there?

Indigenous climate activist, artist, musician, and father Jacob Johns was shot in the chest during a peaceful protest by a white supremacist. Please circulate this GFM for his recovery! We must stand in Solidarity with Native activists!

My hopes of Dianne running and easily winning the primary and then the general election are gone.

BREAKING NEWS: DIANNE FEINSTEIN HAS PASSED AWAY AT 90

PUNCHBOWL NEWS TEXT OUT A FEW MIN AGO

Glad to see Jacobin, the magazine that was soooo stoked on SYRIZA and class-essentialism in 2016 coming around on labor issues and imperialism.

We're seeing an important deepening of analysis by the mainstream left and its a good thing.

This is what putting people in a pressure cooker of $8/hr minimum wage, state violence and $1500/mo rents yields.

Also, whatever you think of this action (I happen to be against it because it's illegal.), acknowledge that mobilizing this many people is the result of invisible forms of organizing, not neccesarily legible to the "left" whose traditions cross-polinate with the professionalized activism of ngos, labor unions and political parties.

It's just a shame that it was expressed this way. We need major social democratic reforms and avenues for disenfranchised people to exercise political power so these kinds of desperate actions don't disrupt our lives.

The provocative title is a way to call attention to the ways that overseas reporting and domestic reporting on social conflict differ. A detournament of imperialist propaganda if you will.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/703641

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/703640

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/703638

Comrades,

Thanks to the generous contributions of dozens of folks, we were able to raise the funds for our Construction projects on the Pine Ridge Reservation. We will be building a distribution center on the newly acquired land!

However, a small setback has popped up, and we Need your help Urgently! With the guidance of the traditional Headsman of the Oceti Sakowin, some of the Construction funds were used last night to save the life of a Native person. They had been bitten by a Black Widow spider and needed to immediately be transportation to be tested and administered Anti-Venom.

This leaves us about $300 short of the funds for a project to provide housing for a Native family. We need to replace those funds Urgently to get this done while we have our representative there. We know this may be frustrating to those who contributed, but well-being of The People must always be our overriding priority. We refuse to put a price on a Native life, and we support the decision made by our agent on the ground.

Please share and contribute if you can to this time sensitive need to help the community! Thank you so much for your time and attention.

Cashapp: $ZitkatosTinCan Venmo: @Zitkato

Essentially he did the following:

• Blamed the house speaker

• Took no responsibility

• Some fluff about being disappointed and embarrassed

• Blamed Russian propaganda

Seriously, he didn't even skip a beat before launching into a lecture about Russian propaganda. It was all in the same breath, and clearly pre-meditated.

The thing is, we know this motherfucker was a Nazi who fought in the fucking SS. We know what the SS was. We know who the Nazis were. This is not Russian propaganda. This is just a fucking FACT.

I worry that this is a broader symptom of the re-writing of history to "both sides" World War 2: the notion that the Nazis and the Soviets were equally evil because "muh totalitarianism". We all know here that that is unequivocally untrue, and furthermore some Jewish scholars (correctly) argue that this is a form of genocide denial: by saying that the USSR was equally evil to the Nazis downplays the utter depravity and evil of the intentional extermination of a race of people.

To find out who the real MVP was in WW2 all you have to do is watch this video.

Furthermore, the notion that the Holodomor was an intentional genocide is a load-bearing idea to the double-genocide theory, as they need some ammunition to back up their absolutely baseless claim.

This whole thing just seems (for lack of a better term) Orwellian. All this cheerleading about Ukraine and the intentionally disingenuous media coverage of the whole affair, the whitewashing of literal fucking nazis and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people are just uncritically lapping it up is deeply troubling to me.

I feel like we are watching history being re-written in real time

Washington CNN — Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced Friday that he is switching parties and will serve as a Republican-affiliated mayor of the blue-leaning city.

While the Dallas mayoral office is nonpartisan, Johnson previously served as a Democrat in the Texas legislature. He slammed his former party in an op-ed for Wall Street Journal published Friday, blaming Democratic policies for “exacerbated crime and homelessness.”

“The future of America’s great urban centers depends on the willingness of the nation’s mayors to champion law and order and practice fiscal conservatism,” Johnson wrote. “Our cities desperately need the genuine commitment to these principles (as opposed to the inconsistent, poll-driven commitment of many Democrats) that has long been a defining characteristic of the GOP.”

He added: “In other words, American cities need Republicans—and Republicans need American cities.”

Johnson’s announcement makes him the only Republican among the mayors of the 10 most populous cities in the US.

Johnson was reelected for a four-year term in May with over 98% of the vote after being first elected in 2019. President Joe Biden won Dallas County by more than 30 points in the 2020 election.

The Texas Democratic Party issued a scathing statement Friday, accusing Johnson of being dishonest with Dallas voters.

“[T]he voters of Dallas deserved to know where he stood before he ran for reelection as Mayor,” the chair and vice-chair of the party said. “He wasn’t honest with his constituents, and knew he would lose to a Democrat if he flipped before the election.”

“This feeble excuse for democratic representation will fit right in with Republicans — and we are grateful that he can no longer tarnish the brand and values of the Texas Democratic Party,” they added.

On the other hand, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott welcomed Johnson’s new party affiliation.

“Texas is getting more Red every day,” Abbott said in a post on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “He’s pro law enforcement & won’t tolerate leftist agendas.”

Both Wilcox and Kearney are correct that marriage, in the decades that it has been increasingly optional, has become the purview of the wealthy. It is an institution that allows the already economically stable to become even more stable by combining their resources. Marriage, once a narrow entrance into adulthood, now more frequently serves as a rewarding capstone life event, agreed to by two well-resourced people who have the advantages of sexual liberation, educational attainment, professional achievement, and economic security under their belt as well as the freedom to exit their unions should they turn out to be unsatisfying.

But where Kearney and Wilcox are wrong — incredibly, monumentally wrong — is that the solution to this structural inequity is simply encouraging more marriage for more people. They confuse cause and effect and are incorrect in the claim that marital privilege is the cause of the inequity rather than a further symptom of it.

Exploring the Peltzman study in her Atlantic article this past summer, Olga Khazan noted that one line of thinking suggests it’s not that marriage makes people happy; it’s that happy people are more likely to get married. I’d add that because marriage is no longer obligatory, it’s often entered into for happy reasons — that you are in love with a person who seems to be a good fit — and not because, say, you are young and pregnant and your community demands it.

It’s easy to see why the marriage solution is so appealing. Like telling people that it’s their responsibility to address the climate crisis by using paper straws, or advising Black men that they need to pull up their pants and be better fathers, it off-loads the responsibility for broad and systemic reform by tsk-tskingly placing it on individuals and their intimate behaviors.

“A year, a year and a half ago, we were told that these books didn’t belong in school libraries, and if people wanted to read them, they could go to a public library,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the A.L.A.’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “Now, we’re seeing those same groups come to public libraries and come after the same books, essentially depriving everyone of the ability to make the choice to read them.”