#i have so many thoughts on economic policies and the budgeting that would get me doxxed its insane

[biphbia]

having different opinions on this site is like a crime

[communistkenobi]

Hi, you tend to have well-thought-out political opinions (I don't always agree with you, but your reading liveblog were the kick in the ass to make me read Orientalism, and you have managed to change my mind more than once), maybe might have a better answer here than me.

Is there an ideological reason that American (b/c it typically is, god help me) left-of-center types love electoralism so much online (and offline too, tbh. College continues to deal new and fun kinds of psychic damage), but only in the context of the general national elections? I so often receive various extensive breakdowns of reasons that I MUST vote for Biden in 2024, but less about the benefits of, like, getting really invested in my city council elections or the school board.

We have so many freaking elections for goddamn everything because the US/Canada are fuck-off huge that it's super easy to argue for the importance of participating in electoralism and instead I (especially recently) see so many people picking the worst hill to die on, that I really struggle to. Well. Understand why.

I’ll speak mostly to Canada since that’s where most of my formal knowledge comes from and also because I live here lol. Also a lot of what I’m talking about is coming from books I’ve read - Still Renovating by Greg Suttor for example is a pretty in depth history of social policy (primarily housing) in Canada, it’s very dry but is useful for this conversation. This is off the dome and not meant as a PSA or anything, it’s my own perspective, if people want sources for what I’m discussing I can go dig those up, but I’m just putting this disclaimer at the top in case this post leaves my circle.

To answer your question, my instinct is that it’s because north american democracy is increasingly necrotic and disconnected from the general public (with the usual list of caveats about how much liberal capitalist democracies have ever been “for the people”). Reading up on social policy in Canada directly post-WWII is pretty bleak when comparing it to today - social housing used to be a robust part of the housing market, people were paid far better and had far more economic security, our healthcare was freshly socialised and invigorated, the promises of the Keynesian welfare state were generally being met (for a predominantly white middle class electorate, of course), and so on. Even conservatives were basically on board with these things in the 60s, at least in Canada, although that obviously did not last long. And over the decades we have become entrenched in neoliberal cutbacks, the gutting of public institutions, the sale of public space and utilities, the downloading of responsibility for social welfare onto provincial and then municipal governments who have smaller budgets and more limited institutional power, the massive expansion in public-private partnerships, the militarisation of the police - these things really kicked off in the 80s/90s in Canada and have showed little signs of stopping or even really slowing down since (something that also obviously happened in the US). People make the joke that if libraries were suggested as a policy goal today it would be called a communist plot, but it’s true - all of the shit the government offered us forty years ago is unthinkable to even suggest now. Life in general has gotten more difficult as private wealth and deregulation has taken a progressively stronger hold on domestic affairs. This happened slowly over the course of decades, and as political horizons shrunk in terms of what you could expect/demand of your government, there was a real air of this being inevitable, not a result of conscious political decisions but just some organic outcome that no one had control over (“the invisible hand of the market”). Democratic civic responsibility demands we vote as citizens of our country, but for all the reasons outlined above plus a bunch of others I’m sure I’m forgetting, the liberal conception of democratic participation shrunk to the ballot box alone.

And while we all joke about everyone having the historical memory of a goldfish, I think the pandemic made this a deeply dissonant position to hold onto - we saw the government seemingly awake from a long slumber to exercise its might. It placed eviction bans on landlords, enforced mass quarantines and social distancing measures, provided economic relief to people who lost their jobs, stationed itself inside every building and public space to enforce mask mandates, rolled-out universal vaccination programs that were mandatory if you wanted to keep your job - we saw the government flex its power in labour, in housing, in healthcare, in civic life, and at the border in a way previously unheard of, particularly for people who were not alive to experience the welfare state of the 50s and 60s and even 70s. The state revealed itself as the life-structuring force it always had been before receding again, telling everyone to go back to normal as if nothing had happened, as if millions of people had not died in a global plague, as if it had not just demonstrated to everyone in the country that the state can at the drop of a hat order your landlord to stop evicting you and your boss to give you paid time off. This of course didn’t really happen in the US, or at least not nearly to this degree, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people.

So now when politicians perform this same incapacity to do anything, when they trot out hyper-specific policies that might benefit a couple thousand people at most, when they make stupid non-promises and shrink away from even mild forms of social democracy (eg Sanders-style campaign promises), I don’t know how much people buy it. I’m not particularly optimistic about the pandemic radicalising large amounts of people, but I think even if it doesn’t, we saw what happened! And we’ve all seen a million fucking articles about how people don’t want to go to work anymore, about labour shortages, we’ve seen essentially every sector of labour go on some kind of strike in the past two or three years - there is popular organised political participation happening far away from the ballot box, and is only growing in power by the day. Socialism is now a word that exists in the national consciousness, something that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Currently right now we are seeing an international conversation about (and global popular support for) indigenous sovereignty, we are seeing a full-throated articulation of what a LandBack policy would look like, and this comes on the heels of the national Canadian conversation of residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. Decolonisation is now a household term. In the case of the US, we are seeing people make the very obvious point that America can conjure billions of dollars to bomb hospitals and civilians, but any social policy to help its own citizens is too expensive, pie in the sky fantasy nonsense.

And by the same token, there is organised right-wing and fascist violence happening in the streets, massive increases in hate crimes, insane political stunts and demonstrations like the Freedom Convoy and 1 Million March 4 Children (inspired by the Capitol Hill storming in the US), Qanon plots to kidnap and execute elected officials - things that right wing parties are actively encouraging, particularly the PPC and CPC. More and more we see that electoral politics is the domain of the far-right, whose culture war issues have the best chance of being realised through the sacred portal of the ballot box. Democrats can’t even offer people legalised abortion now!

I think this is why liberals are in a state of hysteria. A healthy liberal democracy does not require constant, unrelenting reminders to “vote your ass off.” Liberals are very much aware, even unconsciously, that voting does less and less of what they want every single day - you see this openly admitted to by American liberals, who are now doing Hitler % meter calculations about which fascist to vote for come the next federal election. Voting itself is what matters, even as they openly, frantically admit it will do nothing but slightly delay the inevitable.

So to like directly answer your question: I think it has less to do with federal elections as a specific political strategy and more just an expression of anxiety about the fact that voting does not do what you want it to do, or what it once did - perhaps encouraging larger questions if voting does anything at all. If national federal elections don’t do anything, if you voting for the most powerful position on the planet doesn’t really change very much regardless of who’s in power, what is the point of voting at all? So I don’t think they are articulating an actual political strategy or way of doing politics, because by their own admission it’s not going to do much of anything (while at the same time being an existential crisis). I’m in a similar boat to you, I vote in smaller elections where I feel they will do some measure of good (in part because municipalities are responsible for so much more of civic life than they were a few decades ago), I have engaged with the Ontario NDP for several years (although that has come to an end now because of their position on Palestine). Electoralism is a compromise, it is an avenue for potential good, but not always, or even most of the time.

Thankfully there are other avenues for politics - labour organising, protesting, mutual aid support networks, getting involved with community work, even something like local neighbourhood councils. Those are places of political potential, and a single person’s presence in them can make a legitimate noticeable difference (speaking from several years of heavy involvement in community orgs). I have never really felt like I was making a change while voting, but I have felt that way helping community members not get evicted, or offering them free daycare a few times a week, or running programs from lgbtq kids who don’t want to go home after school. Those things legit save peoples’ lives, a lot of them are low stakes relative to their benefit, and they help stave off the alienation and loneliness I know everyone feels. Obviously you run into the same structural problems you would everywhere else, it’s not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but they are so many avenues outside of voting that do actually help people around you.

And I think if liberals admit that these actions are more powerful, more effective than voting, they are admitting to themselves that their core beliefs are wrong, that the communists and anarchists are correct and have been correct long before their dumbass was born. They can no longer point to any institution that gives a fuck about them as a defense against left-wing critiques of liberal electoralism. I think that is part of what animates their hysteria, their temper tantrums, their screaming about the only thing to do is do nothing at all. It is a full-throated defense of self-defeat. They are wailing as everything they believe in dies. I’d be pretty upset too if that were me! Luckily I grew out of that when I was like 19

[opinions-about-tiaras]

Hoo boy. So the first look trailer for Wicked is out and... well, I'm concerned. Thoughts below the cut.

Let me add my voice to what everyone else is saying first and get that out of the way; it looks awful. Visually, I mean. "CGI sludge" is an apt description. I get that they're trying to evoke the feeling of the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz but yikes, it looks terrible. Just a riot of color that evokes nothing and feels flat. The wonder and majesty of Oz this ain't. Even the costumes look cheap and ill-considered.

And look, I get it. This is a movie adaptation, of a stage adaptation, of a book that's basically Wizard of Oz AU fanfiction. They're going to do their own think. But Wicked (The Musical) already sanded off so many of the rough edges of Wicked (The Book) and it looks like this thing is gonna continue in that vein.

But at a certain point when you pour enough water into your wine, you're just drinking water, and it really feels like we've passed that point.

This is an enormously big-budget musical that seems almost ashamed its a musical; you wouldn't know this is musical theater from the trailer, at any rate. That's not a great sign. Neither is the fact that they appear to be doing some sort of "Elphaba's magical power is driven by her being overly emotional and out of control," which is a questionable choice to make when you've cast a black woman in the role.

Actually, let's talk about casting.

Your leads are WAY TOO FUCKING OLD. I know that doesn't make a difference in a stage production. This is not a stage production. Ariana Grande is 30; Cynthia Erivo is thirty-seven. These people are not college freshmen, and expecting us to believe they are is insulting.

Yes, I'm also aware there's a long tradition of expecting us to believe people in their mid-twenties are high school students. There are limits and this pushes past them. The costuming and makeup departments are working hard, but the amount of makeup they're having to cake on Grande and Erivo in order to make them look like fresh-faced youngsters is extremely off-putting. We're not sitting a hundred feet away in a theater, the camera is doing close-ups a lot. Black Elphaba is an excellent choice, but you could have found a much, much younger actress for it.

They also made some... weird choices for diversification of the cast. Not in a "it is historically inaccurate for these people not to be white" kind of a way, but in a "you're sort of undercutting your own themes" kind of a way.

Wicked (The Book) is very explicitly about white supremacy, imperialism, and class. So is every other book in the Wicked Years, when they aren't also about gender fuckery. The musical cuts a lot of that away, but its still there. The Gillikinese (Glinda the Goods specific ethnic group in the context of Oz) are an explicit expression of this. They're economically, culturally, industrially, and socially dominant, and virulently racist against all of Oz's other ethnic groups (the Munchkins, the Animals, the Quadlings, the "Winkies") for whom they have a charming variety of racial slurs and race legislation towards.

Casting a white British person as Fiyero Tigelaar is absurd in this context. Fiyero's whole deal is that he's from a racially disfavored group and is treated pretty shitty because of it! Yes, I am AWARE the role on-state was originated by a white dude. This ain't the play.

Similarly, casting someone who isn't so white they practically glow in the dark as Madame Morrible is kind of a misstep. Madame Morrible is the enforcer of the Wizard's race policy.

And so I have to question... what the hell are they padding this out with?

The stage play is two hours and 45 minutes long. That would translate to the screen fairly handily, on the long side but about where you'd expect a big epic to be these days.

Only they're doing this as TWO movies, like Dune did. Is doing.

As this is likely to be marketed as a family film (I'm expecting a PG rating) they might just be making two ninety-minute films so that parents aren't off-put by the idea of their kids squirming in chairs for three hours. But given that the director and writers have spoken repeatedly about how this story was just "too big" to be contained in a single film, and that they're planning to add a whole bunch of stuff, that seems unlikely. I have a hard time seeing both movies clock in at a runtime of under four hours.

So what are you going to do here?

I had been hoping at first that they were going to re-add in a bunch of the themes and plot points from the novel. And maybe they are? But I sense that they're being timid here. That they're gonna pull their punches and make this a very straightforward, very paint-by-numbers story about a generically evil tyrant with the race and class stuff shoved way, way, way into the background. For that matter I expect them to dial the queerness back as well, which would be awful because my god is Wicked queer.

I dunno. This just seems like a lot of red flags.

[babbushka]

I’m confused, I was always taught that Reagan was one of the best and most progressive presidents we ever had, granted I went to a Catholic school way back when, what did Ronny do? (In a not accusatory or snippy way)

Hello my dear anon! Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to talk about this, because while I am firmly a believer that everyone can have their own political opinions, objectively, Raegan literally ruined the country through something called Raeganomics -- and that's not just an exaggeration.

Here are some of his biggest lasting legacies that make people remember him in a negative light:

Purposeful inaction on HIV/AIDs

Purposefully widened income inequality through 'trickle-down' economics

Suppression of unions

Slashing of public assistance

Excessive corporate influence on government

Explanations under the cut (with links to articles for further reading, if you're so inclined)!

Purposeful inaction on HIV/AIDs

One of the most notable things that Raegan was responsible for was his failed response to addressing the HIV/AIDs crisis. The first case was recorded in 1981, but one of the first nationally pieces of recognition, the New York Times, posting an article about it in 1982. This was when it was first called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Because it was affecting primarily gay men, the general public, and the government itself, did not feel any need to stop the disease from spreading. Literally, because it was the gay disease, the overall perception was that this was God sending a cure for the country.

Raegan said and did nothing, not about the disease, or about the deaths, or about the hate crimes that were growing more and more prevalent against queer people. So despite YEARS of begging and marching and millions of people dead -- it's not until 1985 when he even publicly acknowledges the disease that had thousands of Americans dropping dead on his watch. It's not until 1987 when the administration finally forms a committee to look into trying to cull the disease. 47,000 Americans are estimated to have been affected by AIDs by then. It's not until Ryan White, a straight white young man who contracts AIDs and dies when he is only 18 in 1990, that the disease becomes a matter of importance for the rest of the country, because suddenly they understood that disease does not discriminate. HIV/AIDs is still a disease that we deal with today, with over 1.1 million people living with AIDs today in the united states.

Purposefully widened income inequality

It is no secret that associated with the Raegan administration is something called 'Raeganomics', which, while being a very complicated economic theory, ultimately boils down to establishing a "trickle-down" economy. Where, in theory, those at the very top who hold the majority of wealth in the nation, allow that wealth to move down through the middle and lower classes by either investing it or spending it in communities.

And of course, as is well evident, that just, didn't happen. The wealthiest of the nation received large tax cuts in order to hold onto their wealth to trickle down, but instead of actually spending it, they put their money into off-shore banks and then asked for more. I could get into the why's or how's of economics, but just know this -- the tax rate used to be anywhere from 71 and 94% for the highest tax bracket, money that was used to fund this nation's infrastructure, roads and schools, maintain a healthy economy, provide public services and budgets for progressive programs.

Raegan slashed it down to 28%, and in doing so widened the income inequality gap almost immediately, something that we're still seeing today. The reason why you and your family pay more money in taxes than billionaires like Bezos and Musk is directly because of Raeganomics.

Suppression of unions

The backbone of this nation has always been fought by the Unions, which are organized groups of laborers who fight for better working conditions, safer working conditions, and good pay. The reason you have a weekend is thanks to the unions. The reason why we don't have child labor is thanks to the unions. And in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, unions were an incredibly powerful part of working society, because they ensured that workers would not and could not be exploited by the CEOs who want so desperately to exploit them. Well, thanks to Raeganomics and the tax cuts, CEOs were starting to play a much larger role in the The Raegan administration, and ultimately, Raegan sided with them to effectively put measures in place that slashed the importance or power of unions.

It first started with dismantling the Air Traffic Controller's union, then followed up with slashing taxes for the elite rich who employed the union workers. Then it continued when the recession that the tax cuts caused laid off workers in the auto industry, and still declined when he appointed a "management-sided" man named Donald Dotson to chair the National Labor Relations Board.

But what really put the nail in the coffin, was his push for something called the Right To Work law, which mean that state governments have the option to not fund or support unions, removed protections for unions, and that employees do not have to join unions if they don't want to. What happened as a result, is that companies began firing employees who threatened to unionize, turning the unions from having great PR, to being a thing of fear.

This is directly related to why minimum wage has been so low for so long. Thank Raegan for that.

Slashing of public assistance

Because of the enormous tax cuts for the ultra rich, the country fell into a deep recession, and as a result many programs were cut for the poorest of the nation. Food Stamps, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, Federal guaranteed loan programs for higher education, Legal Assistance, etc., all took a big hit.

The reason your student loans are through the roof? Raegan. The reason unemployment benefits are near impossible to navigate? Raegan. Directly his fault.

Excessive corporate influence on government

I think one of the things that's very important to understand is that Raegan was a film actor before he went into politics and became president (sound like someone else we know?) and he was actually neither a Democrat nor a Republican -- he was a Libertarian. And what Libertarians do, is look at America like a business. Which is exactly what Raegan did, and exactly why his presidency fucked up our nation. He thought that the president was like the CEO, and that the people were employees, which, is fundamentally not how that works.

So it's with no surprise that he allowed SUPER-PACs to completely take over political parties in accepting money donated heavily by them to write the policies that shape this country. The reason why so many politicians, particularly Republicans, are in their seats of power is because of the millions or sometimes billions of dollars that CEOs fund them, to write the laws they want. That's entirely Raegan's fault, and at his encouragement.

So, from these 6 major things alone, we have a country that has been ravaged by disease, thrown into poverty and recession, killed the middle class, boosted the wealthy 1%, accrued enormous amounts of debt, and prevented economic mobility for anyone to hope to climb out of it. And that's not even mentioning his war on drugs and increase of mass incarceration for privatized prisons, his insane military budget leading a larger budget deficit, the Iran-Contra scandal, among many many other things.

As I said earlier, people are allowed to think he's a great president if they want, but factually, his actions (and inactions) have fundamentally and irreparably broken the economic landscape of our nation for the poor, working classes.

I encourage you to research further into this, if you so desire. There's a lot more than I mentioned here, I only picked what I thought to be the most famous of his failures as a president.

[bopinion]

2021 / 36

Aperçu of the Week:

"Most people are unhappy because they demand too much from happiness. Ambition is the greatest enemy of happiness, because it makes you blind."

Jean-Paul Belmondo, French film legend (1933-2021)

Bad News of the Week:

Humanity can't afford climate change! Exclamation point! It's simple: the consequences of climate change that we do NOT successfully deal with are many times more expensive than actively addressing - and solving - it with commitment. And the pleasant side effect would be that we get a planet on which one can actually still live in the future. Actually, a clear win-win situation. So why does so little happen? Or often nothing at all? Two recent studies shed light on the problem:

Researchers from European and U.S. universities published an article in "Environmental Research Letter" showing that the costs of the climate crisis could be up to six times higher than previously thought: global GDP could fall by 37 percent by the end of the century due to climate change. The study puts the damage caused per ton of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere at more than $3,000 - a multiple of the price per ton in the EU emissions trading scheme of 60 euros - caused, for example, by a flight from London to New York City and back.

For Germany, researchers at the Agora think tank and the University of Mannheim, commissioned by the Forum New Economy, get more specific: The federal, state and local governments are not investing nearly enough to achieve the climate targets currently officially declared. Based on current budget plans, the financing gap until 2030 alone amounts to 460 billion euros - for example, for the expansion of the public rail network and local transport or energy-related renovations.

U.S. President Joe Biden made it clear - "Global warming is real!" - when he surveyed the damage caused by Hurricane Ida last week. He spoke of a "tipping point where we either act or we're going to be in real trouble. Our children are going to be in real trouble." Such statements are sadly lacking from Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. The one still sees the all-dominant economic salvation of his country in the export of fossil energy and lets inconceivably large areas of forest in Siberia burn down without doing anything. And the other, with its positioning as a production center for world trade, is responsible for incredible transport emissions (China is even the world market leader for - what feels like a German thing - potatoes!) and is currently planning or building around 400 coal-fired power plants at home and abroad, especially in Africa. Many thanks for that.

Good News of the Week:

The chaotic disengagement of the Western allies from Afghanistan also highlights a security policy problem. German politicians, like all other forces present there, have had to admit that their own room for maneuver will (have to) come to a standstill the moment the U.S. forces exit. Or, to put it another way: without the U.S., nothing (more) works militarily. Official NATO responsibilities or not. Already under Obama, the USA has withdrawn more and more from the Middle East. With the result that Syria, for example, became the geopolitical plaything of Putin and Erdogan. The former "world policeman" doesn't like that job anymore. A vacuum has been created and is growing.

But now the voices on the European stage are getting louder to fill this vacuum. For example, Manfred Weber, leader of the European People's Party (EPP) in the EU Parliament (the largest group and rallying point of all conservative parties in the EU), called yesterday for a military emancipation of the European Union: "Belarus, Ukraine, North Africa, the Middle East - the Americans will not solve these problems for us. We must now finally take responsibility and act independently." Specifically, the first thing he envisions is a European rapid reaction force. "We have hundreds of thousands of soldiers under arms. We don't have a problem with the mass, but with the capabilities and structures. We can't manage to secure the airport in Kabul. It's a question of will, of command and enforcement," Weber elaborates in an interview.

That makes sense. And it is realistic. Otherwise, global chaos will flourish. After all, the international threat to global security from terrorist forces has increased rather than decreased in the twenty years since 9/11. And there are more than enough failed states destabilizing their respective regions. And the alternatives to NATO - especially China and Russia - act for their own geopolitical benefit, not to create or secure peace, freedom and democracy. This is precisely what the EU should actually be able to do even better than the United States. For in European foreign and security policy, the development of technical and logistical infrastructure, easily accessible education and health care, an efficient security apparatus, a free judiciary and press, etc., traditionally play not only the supporting role of accompanying measures but are the focus of attention.

Our idea of democracy is thus not imposed, but is given a fertile breeding ground on which it can more easily emerge. Because its meaning and purpose becomes obvious. And incidentally, it also benefits Europe itself, keyword "reduction of causes of flight". Here, too, the old continent has a vested interest in itself. After all, you can cross the Mediterranean with a small boat that has been painstakingly patched together - but certainly not the Atlantic.

Personal happy moment of the week:

The day before yesterday we received the information for the new school year starting the day after tomorrow. For a long time it was feared - because children cannot be vaccinated yet and teenagers only recently, the progress of digitalization is still lame, the fourth wave is here, hardly any classrooms have air filtration systems and much more - that it could be the third "Corona year" in a row. But now it's official: full face-to-face instruction, all days, full class size, in all subjects (except for possible restrictions on physical education classes like swimming). Another piece of normalcy we're getting back. Nice.

I couldn't care less...

...that the international car show "IAA Mobility" in Munich, which ends today, was re-branded and even showed bicycles in two exhibition halls for the first time. As before, carmakers - now admittedly with electric drives and projects for other alternatives such as hydrogen - are concentrating on maintaining their business model of 'individual mobility". And they refuse to accept that mobility will have to be fundamentally rethought in the future. With the networking of different means of transport, sharing and on-demand models, restriction of avoidable transportation for people and, above all, goods, etc. Way to go...

As I write this...

...the summer vacations are coming to an end. And with it my own recreational time. Which actually (once again) doesn't deserve this term. So it should be easy for me to go back to work tomorrow. But still no trace of joyful anticipation. Mmmh...

[aristidetwain]

The Author’s Dossier: “Remembrance of the Judicator”

 @doctornolonger and @rassilon-imprimatur have both used their Tumblr blogs to write fun and informative “spotter’s guides” to the miscellaneous references in their licensed Faction Paradox stories. And, though they are of course further removed from Who than the further adventures of everyone’s favorite time-traveling goth cult, the adventures of Lady Aesculapius are indubitably another spinoff existing on the edges of the extended Whoniverse, no matter what a certain Wiki maintains. Besides which, I thought, “this looks fun”.

So while there may not be as much to say here as there might in future entries (fingers crossed on the existence thereof!), here is, without further ado, the official author’s guide to Remembrance of the Judicator, my short story from the Forgotten Heroines of the 10,000 Dawns 2020 April Fools’ Day event, available for free here. Obviously, this detail-attentive reread will spoil what little there is to be spoiled in this tale, so you should probably read it first if you haven’t already.

Enjoy!

REMEMBRANCE of the JUDICATOR

We kick things off with a classic “Phrase of the Creature” sort of title. The Phrase even begins with the letter “R”! This isn’t anything new ([1], [2], [3]) to the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids series, but I’d be lying if I said that classic Doctor Who’s famous use of such titles wasn’t on my mind when I chose this one; in fact, one of Who’s most famous “Phrase of the Creature” titles used “Remembrance” as its Phrase.

And you know what? Much as we might all admire 1988′s Remembrance of the Daleks, I think my plot justifies the use of the term “Remembrance” far better than Ben Aaronovitch’s. What are the Daleks remembering, exactly? Or is it that some other party is remembering them? If so, who and why?

So I hope you’re happy with finally having a “Remembrance of the X” story where what the X remembers actually plays a big part in the plot. Because to do this, I gave up on “Prisoner of the Jud…icator”.

“So on the bright side,” began Ashlyn Oswin, straining against her bonds, “we're not back with the talking cats.”

Starting ruthlessly in medias res: now there’s a trick that comes more from Duck comics than from Who. 1950′s and 1960′s stories, be they by Carl Barks or Vic Lockman, had a tendency to open with splash panels of the main characters in a ridiculous predicament and trying at half-hearted banter despite the situation, which would then spark a flashback to how they’d gotten there in the first place. Not that I employed a flashback.

Because who has time for flashbacks when you can instead reference a delightful bit of Ashlyn Oswin’s official James Wylder-sanctioned story? In fact, that Ashlyn spent some time in a dimension of talking cats was one of the things in her condensed character bio that came with the submission guidelines for the Forgotten Heroines Takeover event. The story, if anyone’s wondering, is The Days the Cats Spoke, from 2015. 

When Ashlyn says “we” aren’t back with the talking cats, is she just referencing that story and using a rhetorical “we”? Or did the Forgotten Heroines run into the same talking cats again at some point between Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot and the opening of this story? You decide!

“Everybody wants to be a c...” Miranda began to hum sarcastically. “Hush, you can't sing that here,” barked a guard.

It would be wrong to characterize Disney’s The Aristocats (1970) as a guilty pleasure of mine, in that actually, I wear my Aristocat fandom proudly. The Disney movies of the 1970′s are, I find, generally very underrated. They made up for the lack of showy big-budget effects with stellar character animation, great voice performances — and the earwormiest of earwormy tunes!

Pictured below: me, setting out to write this story.

Anyway…

“No copyrighted music, are we clear?”  “If you think I give a damn about that sort of thing, you have another thing coming,” the mysterious traveller in all of narrative space only known as the Tourist retorted, trying to take a daring stance.

The Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles’ policies regarding recognizable songs turns out to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s tried to upload a YouTube video lately. And significance the Tourist’s flippancy at the idea of caring in the slightest about copyright is, of course, immediately made obvious by a slight twist on that classic “mysterious traveller in all of Time and Space known only as the Doctor” line from the Doctor Who Target novelisations, and not-so-recently made hip again by Missy in World Enough and Time (2017).

In other words, as a first draft of Lady Aesc, the Tourist belongs to the same long tradition of riffs and remixes of the Doctor Who formula, divergent stories which are very much their own characters and their own stories, but who are also very conscious of being just different enough from old Theta Sigma that the BBC won’t mind. Copyright, to her, isn’t some scary taboo to be bandied about by scaly bullies, it’s an ongoing game of cat and mouse. 

Could... specimens of... of whatever species she was... drown like regular people? Clearly they could trip like anyone else. Or get chained up by sentient crocodiles like anyone else. The real question was, could you drown in a Time Sewer?

Just what is the Tourist, aside from a lovable grimdark prat? “Not a Time Lord”, say any lawyers worth their salt; as much a Time Lord as I can get away with making her, I suspect is more like what the younger James Wylder who made her up originally envisioned. Just like Aesc herself, the finished version of the 10k Dawns riff on the aesthetics of the Great Houses, namely the Firmament, would end up striking a perfect balance of the new and the familiar.

But in the meantime, the Tourist’s crew can get confused about whether or not she has a respiratory bypass system, albeit not in so many words.

I had mentioned some time ago, via in-character blog comments, that the Crocodiles get about through, and reside in, repellant Time Sewers. A take-off on that whole “alligators in the sewers of New York” thing, don’t you know? But this was the first time I took my readers into them and elaborated at any length on how they work.

The Tourist and her merry crew had stepped out in search of the fluid leak that was so rudely interrupting their lackadaisical rampage through the slice of omniversal reality known as the 10,000 Dawns, and been immediately set upon by—

Wait, liquid from the Sewers clogs up the Black Pyramid’s systems, and their response is to go out to look for a leak? Well, I’m sorry. But then, how else could I work in a reference to the reason that a certain rip-off of the Tourist had for stepping out of his own Ship back in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)?

If Pathway had been here, there might have been some hope. Things seemed to get suddenly more serious when Pathway was around. Possibly because of the katana. But, alack, Pathway was not here, being busy following a probable wild-goose-chase for a Numbered connection in Dawn 789.

In James Wylder’s Prototype, another story in the Forgotten Heroines Takeover which ran before mine, but which I hadn’t read when I submitted Remembrance of the Judicator, we see Pathway squaring off against one of the Numbered whose designation is… 789. Here’s the scary thing: I swear this is a coincidence. Dawn 789 was just supposed to be a random Dawn and I had no idea quite what the “Numbered connection” really was.

(Or did Wylder add that detail to his draft in reference to my story, even though his story happens first and was released first? Who knows!)

“You've kept us alive, so clearly we're valuable to you.” “You're not talking to a Centro stooge, you know,” Ashlyn muttered with a glare in Shona's direction, which was rather impressive as they were tied back-to-back. “Maybe these guys aren't even capitalists.” “I should say not!” grunted the Crocodile, waving its spear closer to them. “We are in fact a Collective! The Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles!”

Shona, like many other characters in the 10,000 Dawns series, has spent a significant of time fighting against the tyranny of various versions of Centro Systems, a world-spanning megacorporation who, in a lot of the Dawns, acts as a world government for whom capitalism isn’t just an economic system, but an actual political philosophy. 

The Crocs aren’t meant to be actual communists, of course — in their case, Collective is to be taken in the more sci-fi-oriented, “Hive” sense of the word. But the joke was too good to pass up. And anyway, whatever they are, they’re not capitalists either, even if they do try to make people sign contracts.

“Oh? Isn't this part of the 10,000 Dawns?” Miranda asked with a disappointed pout. “We were rather heading for the 10,000 Dawns here.” “Yeah, we had a whole thing going,” Ashlyn concurred. 

The “heading for the 10,000 Dawns” made more sense back when I imagined that this would be the crew’s first adventure after escaping the draft universes, rather than the last before the finale. 

Still, it all worked out: my story ran immediately after Alex Wakeford’s Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot, where some enemies whose tech has more than a little in common with the Crocodiles’ accidentally sent Ashlyn to a certain battlefield in what was clearly the bona fide Doctor Who universe. And of course, White Canvas (2018) established (if it still needed establishing) that this world isn’t part of the 10,000 Dawns, though it has had contact with them. 

So maybe, just maybe, Miranda is actually talking about their having been on their way back to the Dawns from Earth-5556…

“I'm only a humble guard,” the Retconning Crocodile answered, “I'm sure I wouldn't know.”

Wholly meaningless reference to a beloved bit of Doctor Who dialogue? Or a hint that however the Time Sewers work, it’s similar to how Gallifrey in the Stasis Cube worked? Who knows! …Not me.

“Ugh! I know!” she cut it off moodily. “But don't say it in front of them!” She gestured at Shona and Ashlyn. “Miranda's like me, but they — they don't understand metafiction the way I do.”

Take it away, The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob:

“Behind those shades and that too-cool-for-school attitudes, you're just another intruder.”  “I am far more than just another intruder,” answered the woman with the pyramid. “I'm the Tourist.”

The only direct allusion to Remembrance of the Daleks in this story, title aside.

(“You’re just another Time Lord!” “I am far more than just another Time Lord.”)

“Even if I had ever been human,” the Tourist answered through clenched teeth, “which by the way isn't admission one way or another—my method of travel would have turned me into something... more than human, one way or another, by now. Also, shut up, didn't you hear the reptiles?”

When Doctor Who decided to retcon, in 1969, that the Doctor was from an alien civilization that only coincidentally resembled humanity, perhaps the most intriguing piece of canon that was lost was the suggestion in The Evil of the Daleks (1966) that it was the Doctor’s travels through Time and Space which had made him “more than human”. At the end of the day, that is where the EDAs’ concept of biodata got started, too, I think.

“A little chaos between friends is a wonderful thing,” the Tourist boasted.

Not only is the Tourist a bit of a Doctor clone, she’s an unwieldily sturm-&-drang, “darker and edgier” Doctor clone. Sound familiar? Yep, the Tourist thus finds herself (nearly) quoting Sacha Dhawan’s Spy Master from Spyfall (2020).

“Not in the eyes of the Firmament it isn't,” the Head Crocodile boomed, thumping his staff against the marble floor for emphasis, and the four realized that it had retconned itself into having held a staff all along, just so it could do that. “Don't you see? They'll never allow your wanton interference to stand. Before day's end, I expect they'll press a massive Reset Button on the entire thing. The entire thing.”

I think it was the idea of Lupan Evezan (@drleevezan​), in The Frost King’s Treasure (2019), that the Crocodiles would have technological gizmos at their disposal which have the names of, and the ability to effect, various popular tropes. A literal Red Herring which briefly makes anyone who looks at it think it’s a major clue in whatever mystery they’re trying to solve, that sort of thing. Case in point… 

(Do the Firmament also call it a Reset Button, or were the Crocodiles just phrasing it in a way that would make sense to them? I’m not the person to ask.)

“Hold on, you're just quoting the Judicator's introduction paragraph in the original 10,000 Dawns webnovel, aren't you?” the Tourist interrupted, unimpressed.

And they are, too.

“No!” cried the Head Crocodile as all the other members of the Collective collapsed back into him.

See what I meant about the sci-fi sense of Collective? The Crocodiles are plural, but they aren’t really a set of actual individuals, or at least not all of the time. Someday I’ll write a story explaining this in more detail.

“To come to its conclusions,” the Tourist explained, talking down to Shona slightly (to her displeasure), “the Judicator draws from a sense of morality and from every record it can find of every law ever passed in history. So, if someone were to, say, go back in time and spam all legal records with an overwhelming number of new laws, stating that we specifically have to be let go under all circumstances — well — its hands would be tied, wouldn't it?”

This is an obvious, twofold loophole that jumped out to me when I first read 10,000 Dawns: feeding every legal system ever into a computer wouldn’t really get you the perfect jurist, would it? It’d first risk getting a blubbering wreck who can’t deal with the mountain of contradictions between the laws of 11th century China and mid-19th century Holland; and even if you get past that, it’s liable to be polluted with a bunch of useless, anachronistic laws. Nonsense like laws against being ugly in public would take up unnecessary but uncrunchable space in its databanks.

Still, I suppose the “but also it has to act moral” element mostly rights the logic. Our heroines are only able to exploit the loophole here because they have limitless time travel and because, as the heroines, they’re assumed to be in the right opposite the Crocodiles and thus favored by the Judicator.

“Ugh, enough soul-searching!” Miranda suddenly declared, and sprayed a portal onto the nearest wall. “I don't know how long it is before day's done. But in the meantime, let's have some adventures.”

[bombtimer]

On pseudo-public participation

Looking at my friends’ blogs, they have been already communicating their ideas based on their forte, along with sharing their personal stories. They are so academically eloquent and interestingly, they still have an individual touch that sheds new light on that matter. Sadly, I have difficulty to transform an academic perspective into a personal one; writing academically is fine by me since fewer emotions are involved. This is exacerbated by the pre-successful idea to launch a blog once discussed with my friends back in the Lab (LOL). Or another piece that I wrote for a nascent website which stopped producing contents ever since, which in turn traumatises me even more. Yet, as many academia that I follow mostly on Twitter do, I think it is essential to mainstream a perhaps-too-theoretical idea, not only to further the knowledge but also to contribute to, however cringey it probably sounds, the societal progress. 

Alright, enough reminiscing. Now let us proceed to the serious part. 

In this piece, I want to elaborate on my personal view regarding my dissertation, which revolves around the concept of public participation in the digital era. A theoretical framework will be presented, followed by the context of Jakarta, Indonesia as the place where my dissertation takes place upon. Several major arguments will be presented and summarised at the end, which therefore closes this writing. 

[Disclaimer: I do not give the bibliography therefore this piece might be deemed a personal opinion. I really should have drafted the article version of my dissertation hence it will be deemed ‘original’ in the academic setting. However, I am still working on it hence, sadly, the arguments will be limited. The ‘censored’ part is really open for discussion; over dinner or evening cafe session, perhaps?]

Putting public participation in the current smart city discourse

Public participation is naturally the simplest measure of how a citizen can express their political rights, exemplifying the bottom-up approach in the decision-making process. Arguably, the extent to which public participation is designed has been widely elaborated; from Sherry Arnstein’s seminal work of ‘ladder of participation’ to the latest suggestion of how participatory practices should be designed. The pertinent examples include public hearings, consultations, and the advisory committee. Furthermore, these extensive literature have noted the success and setbacks of public participatory designs across the world; whether the practices are more deliberative or not, and the challenges that are still adamantly present through decades; which include the difference in resources to commit to the whole policymaking process i.e. time, travel cost, income, and family structure.

As the digital era is also transforming participatory practices, the notion of public participation seems to be evolving by using map-based software in the decision-making. Many studies exhibit Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) or similar terms i.e. Collaboratively Contributed GIS (CCGIS) and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) as the way of integrating participatory mapping into policy-making. While PPGIS and CCGIS put the citizen with the decision-makers at the same table and at the same time, in VGI perspective the citizens are positioned as the living sensors which ‘capture’ and ‘emit’ both information and its coordinates to the other end where the data are then stored, structured, and analysed further. Indeed, the latter practice puts citizenship in the lowest ladder of participation, both in the traditional definition or in the most recent one. On the one hand, citizens as sensors provide invaluable contents for specific mapping—both aims and spatial resolution. The practice is also important during an emergency, like forest fire mapping, for example. Furthermore, VGI is argued to limit power relation influencing the participatory process, which is often present in face-to-face meetings and forums. On the other hand, as crowdsourcing data reflects the urban inter-referencing effects of smart city initiatives, some argue for its self-congratulatory nature i.e. to achieve a city’s success based on self-deliberated KPI metrics—rather than being truly adapted to the local context. 

Summing up, some question of the quality of VGI to be put on the table while some signify its benefits in more practical understanding. At this point, the choice is between scrutinising the use of VGI as a means to an end in public participation context; whether it is politically correct or not, or rather, devising the analytical framework to gain some insights from the crowdsourced data. Choosing to further the latter, the case of Jakarta, Indonesia will be elaborated.

Jakarta in a nutshell

Being one of the most densely populated metropolitans in the Global South, Jakarta has been storing potentials of becoming an abundant source of crowdsourced data with its approximately 10 million population. There have been some initiatives that use Twitter users to inform which area has been flooded or mobile app that crowdsources reports from the users regarding their surroundings. Some studies even recognise the success (if not the measurement of it) of these organic platforms in collecting public concern to be inputted to decision-making. With many challenges that this metropolis faces periodically i.e. traffic jam, flood, or waste disposal, the various applications which identify those problems define their significance.

Premise 1: Quantitative analysis actually speaks

From what I have learnt for one year, quantitative analysis sounds more when you present the assumptions in the beginning. Basically, there might be data transformation i.e. log-log transformation, winsorization, etc. (such a statistics nerd, sorry) if needed, but the most important thing is answering “What does your data represent?”. There is also spatial analysis, where the geographical attributes are taken into account. The intersection between these schools of thought, in my opinion, complements each other’s limitation. The classic example, of course, would be the Ordinary Least Square Regression vis-a-vis Geographically Weighted Regression. There might be a new insight emerged once you delve into the spatial features of the data.

For the case of public participation, I blatantly used the number of Qlue Indonesia reports in 6 months as somewhat representative of public participation. Qlue Indonesia itself is a company that built a smartphone-based application to report a problem e.g. waste being uncollected, damaged roads, and broken public facilities. For each report, a user will have to take a photo, give the location coordinates, and fill up some fields to elaborate on the problems. 

Yes, I know. There might be biases there; literature defines crowdsourcing to be not giving the whole democratic or rights to the citizens. Or in other words, crowdsourcing is not anywhere near participating in policy-making. Yet, my argument would be that now is the time to use whatever data we have in hand to try modelling our complex world. From this application, I get enough data (n ~ 50,000) for six months to analyse. Then again, every user in crowdsourcing platforms generates their own data, which somehow they participate in defining the problems; an initial yet important step in designing pertinent public policy. 

Once you started the quantitative analysis, it should be kept in mind that the result is not the most accurate of a predictive model. We are not chasing the perfection of such tools, but rather use the model to better elaborate our standpoint. Some say that modelling uncertainty of our model is way a better perspective, as we acknowledge all the assumptions and limitations of our work. After all, measuring public participation has been in a qualitative manner all these decades; we should take a very cautious design in analysing it from a quantitative perspective.

Premise 2: The biases, still?

Speaking about the biases, one must remember that the quintessence of public participation should be the representation. The ideal condition is where everyone has a say to be taken into account, let’s say in the development of social housings in a particular area. However, it is difficult to define 'everyone'. Should it be all city inhabitants? Or rather, should it be based on administrative boundaries? After all, one will say that it is the people of the surrounding project area has 'more' rights to allow such development impacting their daily life for some time.

The thing is, not many people have similar interests over a topic. People have ranging understanding an interests towards their environment, or what Steven Johnson and others called 'vantage points', a condition where people become more selective in processing information and developing knowledge. For example, people in a city-scale will resist the development of a nuclear plant, while if new waste disposal area is to be developed in a Subdistrict X, only people living in Subdistrict X will respond to such plan. Another example recognises the topic. One would be interested in the topic of municipal budgeting, while the other one is just into advocating better public transport. Some might collaborate and thoroughly inspect the budget for developing new bus route, but all should agree that there are people that do not have similar interest, nor the required knowledge to act on those things.

Note: This picture depicts that the female user count as a regression variable is highly significant only in the yellow area

This leads to the socio-economic and demographic features of society. As people come from different backgrounds and upbringings, their vantage point is shaped and changing over time. Such dynamics also generate a condition where priority has to be selected in the first place. For example, if all happens at the same time, a mother would tend to her children rather than attending a forum of new school zoning policy. Or, underprivileged people will think about travel cost twice if they want to attend the public hearing, compared to those who prefer voicing their concerns directly. In the cultural perspective, there would be many examples that there are certain dynamics, which cover body language and political stance, that may hinder the effective design of public participation. This includes that the elders may be more respected than other tribe members, which may be highly influential when a decision is about to be made.

To be more contextual, the current digital era has transformed public participation designs into more technology-aided platforms. Yet, the classic issue of the use of technology is the digital divide. One might argue that the reasons for people having access to technology are congruent to those of people participating in policy-making. Though it should be confirmed first, to some extent, current utilisation of technology might exacerbate the representativeness issue in participatory practices. People who do not have access to municipal reporting platform on their phone, due to incompatible phone for the app or lack of information on the existence of the app, just simply will not contribute in tagging any problem through the app.

Indeed, the biases in current practices of participatory designs are mostly caused by the converging representation of divergent society. These opaque layers need to be carefully addressed to generate a public policy, which one may assume its equity towards all.

Premise 3: Local knowledge, unravelled

While putting the citizens as the living sensors, one must contextualise the information within its spatial attributes and to the extent of additional information in each report. The latter implies the comment from each user. Several methods suggest text mining, which may result in sentiment analysis. Other technique may group the records based on several keywords into several topics. By this premise, first, we should list every word within the context that might be deemed positive and negative in value. Then, compare every word from the comment, iterate the value, and let the statistics define the results. The challenge would be using the pertinent library and tool packages (hello, machine learning) in the local language i.e. Indonesian and its informal words, which sometimes may be lacking. 

Combining this result with its spatial attributes will further the analysis, even possibly add into the debate of generalisation in geodemographics vs. the highly-granular big data. While several socio-economic indicators are not in high resolution, this coerces the analysis based on the administrative boundary. If the result is later presented to the decision-makers, the delivery of follow-up services will sometimes be blind by this geographical entity, which might be really disadvantageous in an emergency. But indeed, all of this made-up condition works if there is only one channel that is used for the citizens to report something.

Investigating how the public engages in decision-making needs to address the fact that there are multiple ways for one to notify the government about an incident. We talk about informal channels which might be different from a city to another, such as collective action in doing something, local governments in a village, or else. A multi-level, multi-approach set of analysis will prove that indeed there is a complexity in decision-making, even in its earliest step: answering “Is there any problem that we should respond to?”

And...

I know I tried really hard to deliver my thoughts on this matter. This piece only delves into several superficial entities of public participation, which might be flawed by thinking that the number of reports in a certain geographical unit equals to the level of public participation. Yet I argue that using the seemingly-superfluous information, indeed we can gain necessary information in identifying problems that occur around us. We can use different quantitative and spatial tools, along with addressing the biases of public participation which hopefully leads to the unravelling of the local knowledge. Some would be optimistic in using the tools and how-to aforementioned, particularly referring to the fact that data is all around us. However, I humbly suggest that we should look at the bigger picture, starting by identifying how to analyse our own society across the ladder of participation, one of the generalisations of the public that I personally like. By acknowledging the complexity, at least we progress in how to include ourselves in the decision-making process. 

[xxladylovexx]

The crusade to cancel my talk at Toronto Public Library

Meghan Murphy

October 18, 2019

This week, three Canadian writers launched a petition demanding the Toronto Public Library cancel a room rental for a sold-out event, ‘Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, the Law, and Women?’ Sounds frightening, I know.

The local women organizing the event, a group called Radical Feminists Unite, asked me in June if they could bring me to Toronto to speak about gender identity legislation and women’s rights, unhappy that the debate was not being given space in their city. This is not an uncommon sentiment. The events I have been asked to participate in generally have been organized by regular women who have serious concerns about how gender identity ideology and policy could affect, and already is affecting, women’s sex-based rights. Canada in particular has been resistant to this discussion. Due to media blackouts, harassment, bullying, threats of violence, smear campaigns, censorship, and ostracization, a few brave women have had to force the conversation, at great risk.

In January, a couple women took it upon themselves to organize an event in Vancouver, ‘Gender Identity Ideology and Women’s Rights.’ These women had no budget, no public or political power, no history in activism or organizing events, and no agenda, other than to open up a conversation they feel is desperately needed. The panel, held at the Vancouver Public Library, featured me and two other longtime feminist activists with impeccable records fighting male violence against women. The organizers and I received numerous death and rape threats, were protested, and were libeled by politicians and the media. The VPL forced us to move the event after hours (to 9:30 p.m. on a weeknight), claiming that protesters posed a risk to patrons and staff. They attempted to charge us thousands in security fees in an effort to pressure us to choose another venue, surely aware we didn’t have that kind of budget. The chief librarian, Christina de Castell, issued a statement saying the library did not agree with ‘the views of Feminist Current,’ my website. Castell did not say which views the library disagreed with (protecting women’s sex-based rights or the idea that sexist gender stereotypes are not innate?), but regardless, she should not have taken a position, as a representative of a public institution meant to be neutral, nor should she have spoken on behalf of the VPL, as not everyone at the library is in agreement with her apparent opposition to both biology and women’s rights. Vancouver’s mayor labeled me ‘despicable’. Canada’s national public broadcaster, the CBC, located across the street from the library, refused to cover the event or contact me for comment, despite hosting a panel prior to the event, speculating whether panelists might say anything constituting ‘hate speech’. Of course none did. Despite protests, the event went off without a hitch and was incredibly respectful, inspiring, and galvanizing. The impassioned talks are available on YouTube for anyone to watch and see for themselves.

But why bother? Listening to words and forming an educated opinion based on said words is no longer a popular pastime.

Things have played out similarly in Toronto. The primary difference is that it is now writers leading the charge. You know, people who should be invested in reading and using words correctly.

Not only that, but writers of all people should be defending freedom of expression and a public library’s decision to uphold its mandate, which, per the TPL’s response to the petition, is to ensure meeting rooms are available to the public ‘on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use’. The statement goes on to say: ‘As a public institution, our primary obligation is to uphold the fundamental freedoms of freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.’

This response was unacceptable to the writers and thousands of Torontonians (many of whom I’m certain would consider themselves ‘progressive,’ even ‘feminist’) wanting my talk canceled. Indeed, those who have signed the petition, ‘Stop Hate Speech from Being Spread at the Toronto Public Library,’ have publicly stated I am guilty of ‘hate speech’ and compared the organizers to a ‘hate group’. The petition, authored by Alicia Elliot, Catherine Hernandez, and Carrianne Leung, reads:

‘Those who want to disseminate hate speech today know that they can misrepresent, then weaponize the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ in order to get what they want: an audience, and space to speak to and then mobilize that audience against marginalized communities. While everyone has freedom of speech, we want to once again point to the limits of those freedoms when certain acts and speech infringe on the freedom of others, particularly those in marginalized communities. We also want to point out that hate groups do not have a right to use publicly funded facilities to meet and organize. This is precisely why TPL has a community and event space policy: to determine who and who does not have the right to use its facilities. There is a difference between denying free speech—and what is known as deplatforming, which is when you refuse to allow hate speech to be disseminated in your facility. This has been an effective tactic to stop those who capitalize on spreading hate speech, such as Meghan Murphy.’

The problem is I’ve never engaged in hate speech. I have made very basic statements about biology, such as ‘men aren’t women’ and ‘male bodies and female bodies are different.’ I have also argued that some spaces should be women-only, including changing rooms, transition houses, and prisons. I have said that individuals cannot change sex through self-declaration and that a boy is not a girl because he prefers dresses to pants. I have said that women have particular rights in this world due to the fact of being born female. I have said that women have not experienced discrimination in the workplace, in the home, in universities, and in politics because of anything they feel or because they somehow ‘identify’ with feminine stereotypes. In fact, it is the desire not to be limited to gender roles that inspired feminists’ ongoing fight.

Usually, I say this all warmly. I’m not generally an angry person but quite jovial, in fact. I don’t spend much of my energy hating anyone beyond slow walkers and morning people. I’m just telling the truth.

The writers who initiated the petition say they will no longer participate in events held at the TPL unless the library cancels my talk, which is fine, I suppose. It is their prerogative if they wish to hold readings for their friends in spaces untainted by free thought. Surely the condos their parents bought them have shared rec rooms available for such gatherings? Cozy bubbles seem better suited for those needing to protect themselves from triggers such as people with different opinions and experiences, anyway.

The whole scene strikes me as nauseatingly elitist, especially the entitlement with which these ‘progressive’ people approach members of the public — in this case, women with no particular social, political, or economic power — as though they should have the power to determine what we all think or say. As though they have the right to dictate what a library, of all places, should allow to be discussed within its walls.

These protesters are primarily middle- and upper-class people who have had access to opportunities most people in this world have not. Who live in relative safety, free from state persecution — who have the privilege of freedom in a world that continues to host dictatorships and incredibly repressive regimes that quite literally jail and murder those who fail to toe the party line. They have taken a postmodernist theory invented primarily within the walls of academia — that is, the notion that material reality is determined by inner feelings — and are attempting to impose it on the general public via force. These people have taken on the position of dictator, threatening to throw those who won’t adopt their nonsensical mantras in jail. Indeed, a former politician with the NDP, Canada’s leftist party, publicly claimed the event was ‘illegal’ while her supporters said I should be jailed.

On Thursday, Toronto mayor John Tory said he had contacted the library in an attempt to have the event canceled and is ‘disappointed’ the library declined to do so. What is in fact ‘disappointing’ (indeed, appalling) is that the mayor of Toronto does not understand the TPL’s mandate as a public institution and opposes freedom of expression.

These leftists seem unaware that opposition to free speech has not treated their presumed heroes kindly. They have so easily forgotten Emma Goldman, who was imprisoned for distributing information about birth control. And Rosa Luxemburg, arrested and killed by the GKSD, a German paramilitary unit instructed to suppress the communists. Surely the suffragettes deserved to be jailed and beaten for fighting to win women the right to vote, as their ideas were deemed too ‘radical’, not only by their opponents but other feminists and abolitionists. They have apparently not paid much attention to the female activists arrested and tortured in Saudi Arabia for advocating that women be allowed to drive. Journalists continue to be murdered in Mexico for reporting on police corruption and the drug war. But no matter. Protecting free expression is clearly a relic of the past, before we had multi-billion-dollar social media companies on hand to police dangerous speech. (‘On top of that, she has been banned from Twitter for violating their Hateful Conduct Policy’, the petition reads, as though In Big Tech We Trust is an appropriate mantra for supposed social justice advocates.)

At what point in history has suppressing subversive speech benefited the marginalized? Or anyone, really?

The CBC again failed to include the organizers or myself, the speaker, in its ‘coverage’ of the event. On a segment that aired Wednesday, Gill Deacon, host of Here and Now Toronto, spoke with Elliot, who stated that I was ‘trying to take away the rights of people’, ‘preach[ing] against human rights’, and did not believe ‘transwomen should have protections’ under the Human Rights Act or Criminal Code, claiming this constituted ‘spreading hate’. That none of this is accurate was of no concern to Deacon or Elliot. The CBC sees no need to allow me to speak for myself and explain my apprehensions because, I assume, my arguments are so reasonable people might agree with me. While Elliot claimed that I was ‘lying’ when arguing that gender identity legislation could override women’s rights, this has, unfortunately, already happened, as we’ve seen men transferred to women’s prisons, where they have assaulted female prisoners; women forced to leave shelters and transition houses on account of being made to share rooms with men; women and girls made to compete with and against males in sport; women’s organizations denied funding for having a women-only policy; and of course as we’ve seen a number of estheticians dragged to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for declining to wax a man’s balls, because that man claimed to be female. What Elliot says there is no evidence for, there is ample evidence for. Which of course she would know, had she ever read my work, listened to my talks, or engaged in conversation with me, rather than using her platform to spout bigoted nonsense.

Ironically, if not for free speech, these individuals would not feel so safe to libel those they don’t like — which appears to be the go-to strategy of the Woke and Online. One wonders why they believe their speech should protected — even when hateful or slanderous — but not the speech of others. It is a modern hypocrisy I will never understand.

Unfortunately for these protesters and petitioners, the TPL will not be canceling the event, and I will continue to speak the truth in the face of threats, slander, harassment, ostracization, and actual hate speech. I will do this not because I have anything personally to gain from doing so but because I could not live with myself otherwise. I will not be silent while women’s rights are eroded, and I will not lie either under duress or to make friends. My integrity is worth more to me than my comfort or popularity, and yours should be too.

Meghan Murphy is a writer in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her website is Feminist Current.

[kfritz20ahsgov-blog]

Political Interest Groups, and PAC Assessment

1.       Identify one national interest group that represents your issue. Include:

a.      Interest group name

ACLU

b.      A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the interest group.

The ACLU serves to protect all immigrant rights. They of course, are not in support of the border wall.

c.       Visit the interest group’s website.  Spend a few minutes exploring and reading about what this group believes, what it wants to happen in Washington, and how it seeks to influence politicians. List five important pieces of information which gives a picture of what this interest group believes.

1) Uses targeted impact litigation, advocacy, and public outreach to help immigrants

2) Have been at it for more than 25 years

3) ACLU has been at the forefront of almost every major legal struggle on behalf of immigrants’ rights

4) they focus on challenging laws that deny immigrants access to the courts

5) They have challenged constitutional abuses that arise from immigration enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels

d.      From your research, describe one (preferably current) piece of legislation, specific policy action, or candidate this group desires or endorses.

They support getting rid of the “Show me your papers” laws

e.       Where is this interest group located? Are there any local meetings you could attend? When?

They are from New York. There are some meetings in San Francisco about various issues. The closest one is on November 7th.

f.        Are there volunteer opportunities? If so, what are they?  

Yes there are. There are different opportunities ranging from trainers to representatives.

g.      Identify additional developments you find interesting from the website/group.

I found it interesting how they have so many different sections of the ACLU everywhere in the nation and they always have meetings.

·         Return to http://votesmart.org/interest-groups . Under the state tab, choose California.

2.       Identify one state interest group that represents your issue. Include:

a.      Interest group name

California Immigrant Policy Center

b.      A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the interest group.

This group also aims to protect the rights of all immigrants.

c.       Visit the interest group’s website.  Spend a few minutes exploring and reading about what this group believes, what it wants to happen in Washington, and how it seeks to influence politicians. List five important pieces of information which gives a picture of what this interest group believes.

1) They fight mass deportation and detention

2) They help with immigrant integration

3) They help with health and befits for immigrants

4) They help with economic justice

5) They are working on a regional capacity building project

d.      From your research, describe one (preferably current) piece of legislation, specific policy action, or candidate this group desires or endorses.

They support the ICE out of California movement.

e.       Where is this interest group located? Are there any local meetings you could attend? When?

They are located in Oakland, LA, and Sacramento

f.        Are there volunteer opportunities? If so, what are they?  

Yes. You can help collect funds and share your story for them.

g.      Identify additional developments you find interesting from the website/group.

I found it interesting that they don’t have an office in San Diego or San Francisco. They also have a lot of different programs they support.

3.       Finally, compare the two interest groups.  Which one seems more organized? More successful? Who is their target audience? Supporters?  Additional thoughts, concerns, observations welcome. Be sure to follow them on twitter.

The ACLU seems more organized for the sole reason that it is National. They have support and events all across the nation. They are both successful in their respective areas. Their target audiences are democrats that are against the wall and ICE. Their supporters are their target audience.

·      Please go to: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/alphalist.php

4.       Choose one PAC or Super PAC that pertains to your civic action issue. Include:

a.      PAC name

Americans For Legal Immigration

b.      A brief statement assessing the position/perspective of the PAC.

They support legal immigration and against illegal immigration.

c.       How much money have they raised/total receipt? How much have they spent? How much cash do they have on hand?

They have raised $151,947. They have spent $153,721. They have $403 on hand.

d.      How much of their budget is spent on: Republicans? Democrats?

Their budget is spent on Republicans.

e.       Click Donor. Who are some of their donors? How does this reflect the interests of the PAC?

I couldn’t find any known donors, but most of the donors that came up were farmers and most likely republicans which would support the Super PAC’s cause.

[lairofsentinel]

you know, right now, living in this fucked up country, which keeps strangulating your salary, increasing unemployment to crazy levels and in general, pushing you to poverty closer and closer, every fucking day something worse happens: a child of 12 y/o is forced to give birth after being raped by a man 60y/o, and all the fuckers pro-life clapped that despite the baby died and the child had to pass through c-section when the law allowed a legal abortion, and now she is dealing with an infection; you have to read every fuckgin day that an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband, or husband has killed his girlfriend/wife out of jealousy and fragile masculinity, once a week knowing that some lgbt person was attacked and killed by some random person who hates us, or a damn group of men raping in pack a single teenager, just because she was drunken or “she was in a wrong place”. Every week a religious old man, raping children. Thousand of them. It never ends. Catholicism is the worse illness around the world. It always was.  You pray to the universe not to get ill, because you can’t pay in dollars anything (nor the doctors, neither the drugs), or your dear ones, because the gov. did everything to make public health a disaster. As a scientist, I’m super down, because the gov. keeps on its policies of destroying the public education and science budget, while calling like “parasites” to teachers and researchers alike. Hell, you study superior school for more than 12 years, to be called a parasite by your own gov. and half of the population whose brain was washed by massive media.  Even worse, this year we have no money at all to go to congresses or schools, but the gov. paid an astrologist asshole to go to USA and give a fucking congress about the “year of the pig” in the Argentinian consulate. The same gov. that invites an indian “scientist” fucker that “cleaned” the gov. house from “bad vibres” and speaks about chackras and bullshit like that.  All this public policies brought terrible consequences, and besides all the political and social and economical disaster, we are dealing now with an epidemic outbreak that kills you.  It ‘s a completely preventable illness, that simply went out of control because the gov. fired all the personal specialized on it.  This gov. calls themselves “meritocratic”. They know shit about everything.  You try to think that somewhere out there from this hell, there is some peaceful country that still can do better... and then you see Brasil, the poor people from living a horrible shitty situation of having a fucked up president forced on them, that nobody voted (but hey, USA recognized him immediately, because they supported him all along the way) they went a step more into fuckery and voted a neo-nazi who hates women, lgbt, black people, and... well, everything that’s not a white cis hetero man.  Then you see Venezuela, the poor country living for years such terrible things, just to go into more fuckery, with a random guy calling himself president and, once again, supported by the gringos. And I remember all the analysis I’ve been reading long time ago, about how before the imperialist countries start falling to the last step, they are going to prey on latinoamerica, to force a neo-fascism that, sadly, part of the population supports too because the lost faith in institutions, in democracy, in justice, in everything, went too deep. Corruption is destroying latinoamerica, and half of the blame of all this is because the corporations and the imperial countries that support the abuse their companies do here. Because latinoamerica is the last piece of good natural resources still untouched, and they came to prey on them.   And you see all those problems, so much violence increasing, the certainty that one day it’s going to take you, if it is not you, it will be a friend, or a family member.... is such a desperate emotion.  Anxiety and depression are spreading faster than that killing disease outbreak that happened recently. The amount of suicides are increasing to alarming rates. Hell, I have friends that are speaking about suicide more than they should. Friends who never had those thoughts in their minds, now are thinking in them too often. And one can’t do shit, but following that general mood. Dead at least you are not going to worry about these things, about these so many things strangulating us all. The exploitation is so tough. The chances are so low. And the tiredness of one’s soul is so heavy.  Sometimes I just think it’s too much to bear, to analyse, to understand, to live, to survive. I’m a person who has no family almost. My mother and that’s all. The rest are friends. The feeling of wild loneliness that comes just to think if something bad would happen to any of them.... This kind of situation always reminds me the image of dogs being beaten by their owners. they keep loyal, beat after beat, but one day, they reach the limit, and they bite. The bite can go out of control, and can kill the owner. The violence reaching higher levels is such a bad omen, an unpredictable bad omen. That terrible point in which you start learning to walk in the street as if it were a war zone, not sure if that man is going to assault you, or that group of men are going to burn you alive, or if you are going to die in a robbery. Life doesn’t matter a shit here. Your own life, doesn’t matter a shit.  yourself are just a ball of meat and nothing else.  and the hole inside your chest is so deep, that you can’t even cry to vent. There is nothing that will help you to vent that thing.  Damn shit. I feel so fucking down. 

[andrewjohnsonmpls]

The Comprehensive Plan (2040)

Every ten years, the City of Minneapolis is required under state law to update its Comprehensive Plan – a document that guides land use and hundreds of policies. For years, City staff and policymakers have been preparing for this latest update, and will spend years after an updated plan is passed working on setting specific details and implementing components of the plan; in this way, the Comprehensive Plan is part of a continuous cycle of policy work.

Given the monumental challenges before us – climate change threatening our way of life, some of the worst racial disparities in the entire United States right here in our city, and an affordable housing crisis devastating families across Minneapolis – we wanted more than a light refresh of the Comp Plan, we wanted to revisit all policy areas and seriously consider the causes of the problems we face today and how we might work to address them during this next cycle of policy work. This work was informed by a wide-variety of open houses and input sessions to gather a diverse range of feedback from across our city. What our staff produced is a well-written draft, which you can find here. I encourage you to read it.

The initial draft of the plan, released this spring, was meant to be bold and start a conversation – that it did. That first draft proposed allowing property owners up to four units of housing (through new construction or conversion of an existing home) on what are today single-family home lots. Many residents, myself included, had concerns about the impact of this for a variety of reasons, and it became the focal point of criticism of the plan; in many ways that was unfortunate, as it overshadowed so many other important policy suggestions – most of which are also bold and would have widespread support if they received more attention. Public input on the initial draft plan was gathered over months, and with more than 10,000 comments received, staff went to work updating and releasing a final draft which was unveiled this fall. This final draft reduced the maximum allowable housing density for today’s single-family house lots from four units to three, downzoned many corridors from what was initially proposed, and added more detail and supporting information throughout the plan.

Since the initial release, I have held four meetings in Ward 12 in partnership with our three neighborhood associations (LCC, SENA, and NENA) to share information, answer questions, and most importantly, hear from constituents. Beyond these meetings and the emails and phone calls I have received, I have also been intentionally asking residents what they think at block parties, neighborhood meetings, and community events for the better part of the year. While meetings, emails, and phone calls have been fairly split between those that are supportive of the draft plan or have significant concerns (along with a handful of individuals who think it does not go far enough), I have found that most residents I approach and ask about this in the community are aware of the Comp Plan and think it’s fine. Where people have been opposed, I have sought to understand what their specific concerns are to see if they are being addressed or consider how we might address them.

After carefully reading the draft Comp Plan multiple times, spending hundreds of hours listening to thousands of opinions, and doing a ton of research, I brought forward more than 40 amendments to the plan which successfully passed (more than any other Council Member). These ranged from implementing technology solutions along Highway 55 (Hiawatha Ave) which will improve signal timing and relieve traffic congestion, to analysis of property tax trends on burdening homeowners and developing plans to mitigate those impacts (particularly for those with low or fixed incomes). Other amendments of mine included improving our recycling efforts and working to ensure every resident has access to high-speed fiber optic internet, to significantly improving snow and ice clearance from sidewalks and going further in supporting our locally-owned small businesses. On the land use maps, I worked with residents who expressed concerns to build consensus among neighbors and amended the proposed zoning to better fit the neighborhood.

With such a truly comprehensive effort, there are inevitably parts of both the plan and the process around it which I have mixed-feelings on. While every home in the ward received information on their doorstep about the Comp Plan and meetings through multiple editions of our local community newspapers, and while we worked to get notice out via many other channels (such as my e-newsletter, e-Democracy, NextDoor, social media, and of course traditional news media), I am disappointed that mailed notice was not included in the City’s communication strategy – something I had pushed for internally. I also disagreed with the decision by staff to hire a PR firm to counter misinformation, which seemed not only wasteful when the City has a Communications Department that could have been leveraged, but destined to entrench critics.

As for the most controversial element of the plan – allowing up to three units of housing on a single-family lot – after extensive consideration, I do not expect our community to see much change as a result. Property owners on a typical single-family lot who wish to take advantage of this will still be restricted to the existing height and setback limitations (in other words, they can’t build anything bigger than what is already allowed). And the economics for the most part are just not there, at least for rentals, to justify duplex or triplex development. But sometimes there are other reasons to build when the economics don’t make sense. Take Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), which the City Council legalized for all single-family lots back in 2014; the same can be said of ADUs - that there is not a good economics case to be made for building them. Yet we have seen nine ADUs built in Ward 12 over the past three years. In many if not all cases, there was some personal or family reason to do so. As many residents in our ward continue to age, it is undeniable that there exists a case for multi-generational households to consider building duplexes or triplexes. For individual with declining mobility, new construction is often a necessity – putting a bathroom and living quarters on the main level, along with bringing the washer, dryer, and utility access up from the basement. And having family just a floor away not only provides critical support, but obvious social value. The desire for seniors to continue living independently within our neighborhoods and the lack of housing options that help facilitate this need cannot be overlooked. When we legalized ADUs, we knew the vast majority of property owners would never build one (just 9 of more than 11,000+ homes in Ward 12 have), and I am confident that the same is true of this added flexibility for converting existing homes to multi-family or building new; our charming community with its quiet streets comprised mostly of single-family homes, a community I fell in love with just as so many of you have, will continue to be charming, quiet, and mostly single-family homes. Development of new housing units will predominantly continue to be focused along Hiawatha Avenue, where transit access, commercial amenities, and economically-sound opportunities for new construction are abundant.

Whether increased market-rate housing supply will help ease the affordability crisis is of debate and concern with the plan. In addition to the record levels of funding for affordable housing as part of Mayor Frey’s 2019 budget (more than $40 million), the City Council also passed an inclusionary zoning policy tied to the Comp Plan. This policy requires most developers to make at least 10% of their units in new projects available at 60% or less of Area Median Income (AMI) for at least 20 years, and offers incentives to make 20% or more units available at 50% or less of AMI for 30 years. Like the rest of the Comprehensive Plan, there will be regular reporting on progress towards achieving these goals, what if any unintended outcomes we may be seeing, and opportunities to adjust policies and even the plan itself along the way.

The Comprehensive Plan was passed by the City Council today 12 votes in favor to 1 opposed (CM Palmisano). For such a comprehensive rewrite of such a comprehensive plan to receive this near unanimous level of support is noteworthy and helps illustrate the level of thought and care that went into this update, the overall widely-supported policies within it, the compromises made, and the many checks and balances in place to ensure that it moves our city and our community in a positive direction – enhancing the neighborhoods we love while helping address the most pressing challenges that face us. I will continue working hard over the coming years to listen to our community and represent it well in the fine-tuning of detailed regulations as they relate to this plan. Thank you for everyone who shared your thoughts on this with me and I hope you will continue to stay engaged in our policy work together over the coming years.

(If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, please contact me or stop by my weekly open office hours).

[someonecalledforanurse]

Blog Post 2 - Monkey Pox

Monkey Pox is spreading in Alberta. As of June 17/2022 The Public Health Agency of Canada has confirmed (PHAC) has been working with provincial and territorial public health partners to investigate cases of monkeypox in Canada. As the investigation evolves, it is anticipated that additional cases will be reported in Canada. Provinces and territories have publicly reported 168 cases of monkeypox as of June 17, 2022 at 10:00 am EDT.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/diseases/monkeypox.html

I have been following this because, obviously pandemics are on the brain.  I feel like a lot of society has been dealing with PTSD from the lockdowns that occurred during the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

My initial thought when I heard about an outbreak of Monkey Pox was why? Why are we getting so much exposure to such new diseases or potential pandemics? Why now?  I asked this in class and the answer was access and globalization. Absolutely this makes complete sense, but do we have significantly more globalization (flights and imports/exports) than we did 5-10 years ago, Im not sure. Advances in technology and communication no doubt have helped with globalization on a communication and business level but couldn’t it technically lessen the amount of actually physical travel by humans because of the easily accessible communications that don’t require travel.  So, in a way doesn’t this blow out the theory of globalization causing pandemics? I needed to look into this so I thought I would look up some statistics.  What I found was that over the past 20 years globalization of people has rose slightly but not dramatically, globalization of information is what has drastically inclined the most. 

 So has the human globalization been the reason for the covid 19 pandemic, or was it just a coincidence? What are the chances of two potential pandemics in 3 years?  Is it the medical advances that have allowed us to track a pandemic where as any other years before perhaps covid 19 may have been classified by “this year’s flu”?   I have a lot of questions about this.  I have even considered the pharmaceutical companies economic benefit, in this past pandemic. They have a lot to gain from another pandemic occurring. 

 So how does this all tie into INTD 370

*Communicable and non-communicable disease, We have seen the impact not only on global economies, but how it has wreaked havoc on health care systems globally.  One positive thing from the pandemic that has stuck out in my mind is that the importance of health care professionals has been recognized my many more people and perhaps in the future, will cause our law-making politicians to cut elsewhere when they start trying to “balance budgets”.  One thing is for certain, our future generations will look back on this time and view us as pioneers, in the ways in which we continued to learn and discover and work amidst the, always evolving, difficult and worrisome times of the covid-19 pandemic.

From covid 19 we have seen the *trends of poverty and *disparities that come with a pandemic and is scary. Perhaps in the future we can now be more prepared to reduce these disparities when dealing with a pandemic . But perhaps we may not have to in our lifetime. I would be okay with that . 😅

*maternal Health and *children's health was drastically affected by the pandemic. I know, I was pregnant and had both my kids in the beginning and at the end of the pandemic ! Fewf, what a wild ride. I attended doctors visits alone and ultrasounds alone, and when I had to have home care because I had hyperemesis gravidarum and my husband was working away, they had to miss many appointments because they were just stretched too thin. This meant missed picc line dressing changes and although luckily it never ended up getting infected for me, I can see how an older patient or someone more disabled, it could have meant higher rates of infection. I have seen first hand the affect that a pandemic has on maternal and childrens health both physically and mentally and my only hope is we dont have to go through that again.

[patriotsnet]

What Do Republicans And Democrats Stand For

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-and-democrats-stand-for/

What Do Republicans And Democrats Stand For

History Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

Where Do Democratic Candidates Stand On Gun Control?

The Democratic Party traces its origins to the anti-federalist factions around the time of Americas independence from British rule. These factions were organized into the Democrat Republican party by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792.

The Republican party is the younger of the two parties. Founded in 1854 by anti-slavery expansion activists and modernizers, the Republican Party rose to prominence with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. The party presided over the American Civil War and Reconstruction and was harried by internal factions and scandals towards the end of the 19th century.

Since the division of the Republican Party in the election of 1912, the Democratic party has consistently positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party in economic as well as social matters. The economically left-leaning activist philosophy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which has strongly influenced American liberalism, has shaped much of the party’s economic agenda since 1932. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition usually controlled the national government until 1964.

The Republican Party today supports a pro-business platform, with foundations in economic libertarianism, and fiscal and social conservatism.

A Division Of Power In Government Is Common In The Us With The Republicans And The Democrats Often Splitting Control Of The White House And Congress

Joe Biden may have been announced as President Elect but there are still some crucial decisions to be made on how America will be governed for the next four years. The presidential election appears to have been a pretty resounding win for the Democrats but the picture is less clear in the Senate, when both parties retain hope of having a majority when the Upper House reconvenes next year.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement after Bidens victory was called, saying: âA Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate would be the biggest difference maker to help President-elect Biden deliver for working families across the country.

Sen. Chuck Schumer: âThere has been no evidence of any significant or widespread voter fraud. Joe Biden won this election fair and square. The margins of his victory are growing by the day.â

The Hill

All elections in Georgia, not just those for the Senate, require the winning candidate to pick up over 50% of the votes cast. This year neither of the states two Senate races had a majority winning so a run-off will be held on 5 January, with both the Democrats and the Republicans holding out hope of securing the vital seats needed to give them a majority in the Senate.

Why is control of the Senate so important?

Although President Elect Biden will be the head of the government, he would rather govern by concensus than executive order. Therefore most large-scale bills will need to pass Congress before they can be signed into law.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Also Check: Trump On Oprah Saying Republicans Are Stupid

Widest Perception Gap At Political Extremes

In one of the largest national studies of Americas polarization ever conducted, More in Commons Hidden Tribes report identified seven political tribes:

The Hidden Tribes of America

The Perception Gap study builds on these insights. It finds that the most partisan, politically active Americans a group we call the Wings have deeply distorted perceptions of the other side. The two groups with the widest Perception Gaps are the Progressive Activists and the Devoted Conservativesthe most ideological and committed groups of Democrats and Republicans.

And which is the most accurate segment? Surprisingly, its the Politically Disengaged. They are fully three times more accurate in their estimates of political opponents than members of either of these Wing groups. The V-shaped Perception Gap shows that the less invested you are in politics today, the less distorted your perception of politics.

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Most Republicans Say Critics Of Trump Should Not Be Accepted In The Gop While Most Democrats Say Their Party Should Be Accepting Of Biden Critics

Large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say their party should be accepting of elected officials within the party who disagree with it on some important issues. At the same time, very few in either party say their party should be welcoming of elected officials who support groups advocating for violence against members of the other party.

But there are clear distinctions between the two coalitions in their appetite for accepting members of the party who criticize the partys standard bearers: While most Democrats say the party should be at least somewhat accepting of elected officials who criticize Joe Biden, the majority position among Republicans is that the GOP should not be welcoming toward Republican elected officials who criticize Donald Trump, and an even smaller share of Republicans say that those who voted to impeach Trump should be accepted in the GOP.;

Eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners say the Democratic Party should be very or somewhat accepting of Democratic elected officials who disagree with Democrats on important issues, while 71% of Republicans and Republican leaners say their own party should be very or somewhat accepting of Republican officials who disagree with the GOP on some important issues. Just 4% of Democrats and 7% of Republicans say their parties should be not at all accepting of elected officials who disagree with the party on some important issues.

The changes did not affect the reports substantive findings.;

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Open Forum: So What Do Republicans Really Stand For

CHARLES MARKERT

Save

We stand against the destructive and evil policies of the Democrats. That should be adequate reason to vote for Republicans at all levels of government. In a nutshell Republicans stand for common sense and logic while Democrats stand for emotional demonstrations and parental control of the masses.

The Republican Senate has done an excellent and admirable job of holding off the onslaught of dangerous and evil legislation flooding in from the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. The Democrats are crying for people to unite, which means join a union and do what Democrats want. This canard of bringing people together reminds me of a quote from M. Stanton Evans when he said “there are 2 parties in Washington, the evil party and the stupid party. Every now and then the evil party and the stupid party get together and agree on something evil and stupid. That is called bipartisanship.”

Democrats have proven that they only have one interest and that is to overthrow President Trump. The Democrats are continuing to accuse Trump of everything that Democrats are already doing or intend to do.

I find it amazing how Mister Kennedy, can describe President Trump in the totally opposite terms from the truth and it gets published front and center. In the spirit of bringing people together, I would say that Mister Biden is nasty, cruel, corrupt, racist, Marxist, immoral and is a shill for the Communist Party USA and is clearly dangerous. There, I said it.

What Do Republicans Stand For

Republicans are considered more conservative than Democrats.However, there are liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.The Republicans tend to favor less government when dealing withdomestic problems, and individual and states’ rights. Republicanstend to favor economic laws that regulate as little as possible.They tend to favor ways to help the states and local governments,and allow private charities to help individuals in need instead offederal programs. Republican tend to favor more defense spendingand to be against funding for abortions. They favor enforcement ofImmigration laws and are against giving voting rights to illegalimmigrants. They want to balance the budget and find a way toslowly reduce the national debt.

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Republican Vs Democrat: What Are The Differences

When it comes to U.S. politics, two prominent parties dominate democrats and republicans. Each party, despite some of their common grounded principles, stands for a very different system where beliefs and applications might vary.

Here is an unbiased breakdown of some of the major differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

The Plausible Solution: Just Win More

What Do Democrats Stand For?

Whether the public sees Democratic demands for these structural changes as overdue or overreaching, the key point is that they are currently exercises in futility. The only plausible road to winning their major policy goals is to win by winning. This means politics, not re-engineering. They need to find ways to take down their opponents, and then be smarter about using that power while they have it.

They certainly have issues to campaign on. In the few weeks, we have learned that some of Americas wealthiest people have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all. Even as the Wall Street Journal editorial writers were responding to a Code Red emergency , the jaw-dropping nature of the reportfollowed by a New York Times piece about the impotence of the IRS to deal with the tax evasions of private equity royaltyconfirmed the folk wisdom of countless bars, diners, and union halls: the wealthy get away with murder.

Of course this is a whole lot easier said than done. A political climate where inflation, crime and immigration are dominant issues has the potential to override good economic news. And 2020 already showed what can happen when a relative handful of voices calling for defunding the police can drown out the broader usage of economic fairness.

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America Should Deport Illegal Immigrants

Republicans believe that illegal immigrants, no matter the reason they are in this country, should be forcibly removed from the U.S. Although illegal immigrants are often motivated to come to the U.S. by companies who hire them, Republicans generally believe that the focus of the law should be on the illegal immigrants and not on the corporations that hire them.

What Does The Democratic Party Believe In

The Democratic Party is generally associated with more progressive policies. It supports social and economic equality, favouring greater government intervention in the economy but opposing government involvement in the private noneconomic affairs of citizens. Democrats advocate for the civil rights of minorities, and they support a safety net for individuals, backing various social welfare programs, including Medicaid and food stamps. To fund these programs and other initiatives, Democrats often endorse a progressive tax. In addition, Democrats notably support environmental protection programs, gun control, less-strict immigration laws, and worker rights.

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Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

Reality Check : The Fight Is Asymmetricaland Favors The Gop

While Democrats gesture on Twitter at building new systems, Republicans are working the current one with ruthless effectiveness.

The threats to a free and fair election that have emerged since last November are realand require nothing more than the willingness of state legislators to use and abuse the existing tools of government. Arizona, whose two new voting rules were just validated by the Supreme Court, also took the power to litigate election laws away from the Secretary of State and gave the power to the Attorney General. In at least 8 states, Republicans are advancing legislation that would take power away from local or county boards. Many more states are moving to make voting harder. It might be anti-democratic, but it falls well within the rules.

Also within the rules: How McConnell helped build a federal bench almost certain to ratify the power of those legislatures to pass laws far more restrictive than the Arizona rules upheld last week. He creatively eviscerated Senate norms to keep Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court and hand Donald Trump an astonishing three nominations in a single term. And hes recently suggested that, should a Supreme Court vacancy open, hed block even consideration of a Biden nominee if the Republicans take the Senate back in 2022. This is abnormal, anti-democratic and a cynical abuse of powerbut its legal within the existing rules.

Recommended Reading: Who Gives More Democrats Or Republicans

Views Of The Democratic And Republican Parties

Just under half of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while a slightly larger share have an unfavorable view.

The GOP is viewed more negatively 38% say they have a positive view of the Republican Party, while 60% rate it unfavorably. These views are modestly changed since last summer, with the share of Americans rating the GOP unfavorably slightly higher than it was in August and the share of Americans with a negative view of the Democratic Party down slightly .

About three-quarters of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents view the GOP favorably, while 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents view the Democratic Party positively.

Nearly all Republicans who say they strongly identify with the Republican Party express a favorable opinion of the GOP. Among Republicans who say they not so strongly identify with the party, 77% say have a favorable view, while 56% of independents who lean toward the Republican Party say the same.

Democrats who very strongly identify with the Democratic Party nearly universally view their party favorably, as do 87% of Democrats who describe themselves as not-so-strong Democrats. About six-in-ten Democratic leaners have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party.

Within both partisan groups, views of the opposing party are overwhelmingly unfavorable across-the-board, with more than eight-in-ten strong partisans, not so strong partisans and leaners alike saying this.

Democrat Vs Republican: Us Political Parties

What do Republicans and Democrats stand for in the US? The Democrat vs Republican debate is the biggest division in American politics today, but that was not always the case. While the Democratic and Republican political parties now seem like a universal feature of American politics, there is actually no discussion of political parties in the American Constitution. Indeed, parties have shifted and evolved over time, and the Democratic and Republican parties are only the current largest parties in the country. The most recent Democratic president in the US is Joe Biden, who was elected in 2020. The most recent Republican president was Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016.

The symbol of the Democratic party is a donkey, while the symbol of the Republican party is an elephant. The exact origins of these images are not entirely clear, but they were popularized and codified by cartoonist Thomas Nast in the late 1800s. Today, the symbols are highly recognizable and are ubiquitous ways of depicting the two parties.

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Also Check: Why Are Republicans Siding With Trump

The Republican Party General Policy And Political Values

The Republican Party is often referred to as the GOP. This abbreviation stands for Grand Old Party. Its logo is an elephant. The Republican Party is known to support right-leaning ideologies of conservatism, social conservatism, and economic libertarianism, among other -isms. Thus, Republicans broadly advocate for traditional values, a low degree of government interference, and large support of the private sector.

One main standpoint of the Republican Party platform is a strong focus on the family and individual freedom. Generally, the Republican Party therefore often tends to promote states and local rights. That means that they often wish for federal regulations to play a lesser role in policymaking. Furthermore, the GOP has a pro-business-oriented platform. Thus, the party advocates for businesses to exist in a free market instead of being impacted by tight government regulations.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Former President Barack Obama substantially increased U.S. troops in Afghanistan early in his tenure, gave military support to rebels to help them depose the leader of Libya and personally ordered drone strikes to kill alleged terrorists in a number of countries. Liberal Democrats thought he was too hawkish, while foreign policy experts in Washington, particularly Republicans, slammed him for being too much of a dove.

The liberals may have won that debate — at least within the Democratic Party. The next Democratic president may be significantly more anti-war than Obama; that is, wary of deploying or increasing the number of American troops anywhere. That’s at least the general consensus on foreign policy and national security that emerged from the 15 Democratic presidential candidates (both from the party’s left and left-center wings) who responded to FiveThirtyEight’s eight-question survey on their foreign policy stances.1

Before we get to the results, a few brief notes on our questions. Obviously, it’s hard to confine foreign policy to eight questions, so we tried to avoid subjects where we thought the candidates would all have the same answer. For example, virtually all Democratic candidates would re-engage the U.S. in the Paris climate accord. We also tried to avoid questions where we couldn’t come up with a fairly concise question. It’s a safe bet that any of the Democratic candidates, if elected president, would be more critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin than President Trump has been, but it’s hard to design a question that would illustrate the differences between the candidates on that subject. So there are some major foreign policy issues (like how the U.S. should deal with Russia) that are not represented.2

In any case, here are the results:

The clearest conclusion is that the candidates generally favored four anti-war stances as a bloc; this includes not only more liberal candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but also more center-left figures such as Michael Bennet and Amy Klobuchar:

Ending the U.S. involvement in Yemen. All 15 would end the Trump administration’s policy of the U.S. military offering logistical and other support to the government in Yemen in the country’s civil war against the Houthi rebels. This is not particularly surprising — both houses of Congress earlier this year passed a resolution calling for the end of American involvement in the civil war. Democrats on Capitol Hill voted overwhelmingly in favor of the resolution, which was vetoed by Trump.3

Getting rid of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). All 15 generally support the repeal of the AUMF. That provision was initially passed in the wake of 9/11 as Congress’s way of greenlighting U.S. attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. But it has also been used by the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations to justify deployment of U.S. forces anywhere those administrations saw as a terrorist threat — without any additional approval from Congress. Repealing this measure, in theory, would force Congress to pass a new provision authorizing U.S. forces to fight terrorism. (And several candidates said that the U.S. should pass a new AUMF if it gets rid of the 2001 version.) A new AUMF would likely be more limited in scope and give more power to Congress in deploying U.S. troops to conflicts abroad.

Getting all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. Ten of the 15 also said that they would look to remove all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in their first term. This was a bit surprising to me. On the one hand, the conflict in Afghanistan has become known as a “Forever War” — U.S. troops have been there for nearly 20 years. On the other hand, the removal of nearly all troops from Iraq during the Obama years was blamed for creating an atmosphere that allowed for the rise of the Islamic State group.

Reducing overall defense spending. Twelve of the 15 also support a net decrease in defense spending. The U.S. spent more than $600 billion on defense in 2018, a total that is more than a third of overall global spending on defense and dwarfs the military budgets of even China ($250 billion) and Russia (approximately $60 billion) combined. I figured liberal candidates like Sanders would take this stance but was surprised that many of the more centrist Democrats did, too.

“We could cut our spending by a third and still spend more than all of our global adversaries combined,” Tim Ryan said in a statement from his campaign. The statement continued: “I would like to see the money allocated to economic stimulus, reducing our national debt and given back to the states for investments in public schools, infrastructure, and job training programs.”

Many of the campaigns did not respond to our questionnaire, most notably those of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris. (Biden and Harris’s campaigns did not respond by our publication date to our previous questionnaire on criminal justice reform, either.) That said, from other reporting, it’s fair to say that Biden, Buttigieg and Harris are part of the general consensus of foreign policy views among the candidates. For example, all three support the end of U.S. military involvement in Yemen, and Buttigieg backs the effort to repeal the 2001 AUMF.

The candidates were also basically unified around four other issues that didn’t necessarily fit into a broader frame (as the questions about military spending and use of force did).

Keeping the U.S. embassy in Israel in Jerusalem. Foreign policy experts and some Democrats harshly criticized the Trump administration when it moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem last year. But only three candidates, all long shots — Joe Sestak, Andrew Yang, and Marianne Willamson — said they would move it back to Tel Aviv. That the candidates were broadly unwilling to reverse Trump’s move is perhaps evidence that the pro-Israel part of the Democratic Party still has some sway, even as Democratic voters are becoming skeptical of Israel’s government. There was a bit of an ideological split among candidates on this question. More moderate candidates like Booker and Beto O’Rourke clearly stated that they would not move the embassy, while liberals like Warren and Sanders were more non-committal on that issue.

Being non-committal on meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without “preconditions.” Most of the candidates emphasized that they wanted to meet with Kim but would want to have some parameters for such a meeting. (So basically “no,” but they likely didn’t want to say “no” and seem resistant to diplomacy.)

Strongly criticizing controversial Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, but emphasizing that the U.S. should involve itself in a diplomatic process and not deploy forces there.

Leaving the door open to continuing some kind of tariffs on China. Generally, the candidates attacked Trump for conducting trade policy in a way that is “reckless,” a word invoked by the campaigns of Bennet, O’Rourke and John Delaney. But nearly all of the candidates also criticized China for what they cast as unfair trade practices.

I don’t want to suggest that the Democratic candidates agree on everything in terms of foreign policy. I think it’s clear that a Warren administration would be more favorable to tariffs than that of the more establishment Delaney. Biden has already rejected the idea of a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and would likely be less anti-war and anti-interventionist than, say, Sanders. And maybe different questions would have yielded a bigger spread among the candidates.

That said, at least compared to economic policy (where there is a clear divide between the left and left-center Democrats on issues like Medicare for all), foreign policy is an area where the ideological fissures of the party are less pronounced.

I think the unity among the candidates is more striking — and how, as a group, they seem to be previewing a more anti-war foreign policy approach than Obama’s.

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily - Marching Backwards Into The Future

The anthropology of the future is the study of ourselves. | Claude Lévi-Strauss

2018-04-09 Beacon NY - Yesterday, I touched on David Evans' thoughts on being a futurist.

'Futurist' sounds somewhat pretentious, so I often say I am a anthropologist of the future, or a work ecologist, because ecology and anthropology, while 'soft' sciences, are not so squishy as 'futurology' is.

In the piece, yesterday I used the Marshall McLuhan quote:

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

and I noted that when we look into McLuhan’s rear-view mirror we are seeing ourselves just as much as the road behind. And that looking at ourselves in the rearview mirror, that self-study, that's the anthropology I am up to, whatever name you call it.

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On Automation, Walmart, and the World

The great debate about automation's role in decreasing work is unresolved, but new research suggests it is decreasing the proportion of money flowing to workers, even if it is not decreasing the total number of jobs:

Walmart has doubled its use of self-checkouts in stores, according to a recent investor presentation, and newly remodeled locations have fewer lanes staffed with a cashier. What’s more, inside its Store No. 8 incubator, which is experimenting with technologies such as robotics, virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence, Walmart is, according to Recode, developing Project Kepler—a store similar to Amazon Go with no checkout lines or cashiers.

In theory, automation doesn’t have to eliminate jobs, on balance, or drive down worker pay. It could free up workers to do higher value, better-paid tasks. It could generate consumer demand and create new categories of jobs.

David Autor of MIT and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University recently published a study on automation that examined data on 28 industries in 18 countries in the OECD. They find that, since 1970, automation hasn’t reduced jobs—in fact, it has slightly increased them. But since the beginning of the 2000s, automation has reduced workers’ share of national income. “This finding is consistent with automation having become in recent decades less labor-augmenting and more labor-displacing,” they write.

According to their research, workers’ employment, hours, or wages haven’t fallen. But wages have risen less rapidly than overall economic growth, with owners getting an increasingly large share. Autor suggests this trend could continue as automation increases. “No, the robots will not take all of our jobs,” he says in a Brookings video. “The concern should not be about the number of jobs, but whether those jobs are jobs that can support a reasonable standard of living.”

Walmart envisions a future of retail with far fewer workers on the floor, and while those may be better compensated, many of the people involved in the supply chain to get groceries from their point of origin to your home may be on demand freelancers, working for Uber-esque services that Walmart doesn't directly control. Or replaced by partially or fully automated steps in the supply chain, like autonomous trucks, warehouse robots, and drone delivery services.

Walmart is the brick-and-mortar retail chain who is investing the most time and effort into the game-changing revolution that Amazon is bringing online. Expect massive disruption, economically and societally.

…

Over at the MIT Technology Review, Will Knight calls the US government to wake up to the threat of other governments investing huge amounts in AI, like China, France, and others, so that we don't fall behind in basic research. He takes a few paragraphs away from his breathless techno-utopianism to mention possible negatives, but only a few:

But a government AI policy must go beyond calls for research funding.

While AI can drive economic growth, it may also accelerate the eradication of some occupations, transform the nature of work in other jobs, and exacerbate economic inequality (see "The relentless pace of automation"). It is critical that governments prepare for this transformation. This might mean exploring ways to find training and employment opportunities for those who have lost jobs to automation and AI. Academic experts and institutions have been sounding the alarm over this issue and have warned that it might have serious social consequences. Those problems will surely require government action.

"Planning for job displacement that AI will cause is best done by government," says Andrew Ng, a prominent AI researcher who was previously the chief scientist at Baidu and is now involved with several different AI projects.

The big problem with this minimal backstop to the impacts of automation is that there are functionally zero good examples of such broad retraining. As a result, the comment by Andrew Ng is useless: it doesn't matter who does the planning for job displacement if retraining doesn't work well.

Of course, that sentiment could just be a smokescreen, allowing that enormous and increaingly profitable tech multinationals to externalize the costs of social disruption by automation, while increasingly poor governments, starved of capital by endless austerity budgets and low corporate tax rates, struggle or completely fail to accomplish the retraining.

On Network Publicy Governance

I was mentioned in a tweet today, thanking me for inspiration for a 2018 Digital Society book, Network Publicy Governance. My contribution was the term 'publicy' and the concept behind it.

I have not read the book in its entirety, just scanned it, but the authors, Andreá Belliger and David Krieger, are motivated by this goal:

The occasion for this book is the growing conflict between the call for a “data-driven” society on the one side and the demand for ensuring individual freedom, autonomy, and dignity by means of protecting privacy on the other. Gathering and exploiting data of all kinds in ever greater quantities promises to create value and efficiency in business, education, healthcare, social services, energy, transportation, and almost all other areas of society. But at the same time, fears of loss of privacy lead to ever more prohibitive regulations.

The Facebook Follies show up again.

They go on:

It would seem that we are entering the 21st Century with society divided into those who believe that as much information as possible should be integrated into decision-making in all areas and at all levels and those who believe that human freedom, autonomy, and even dignity depend on secrecy and the withholding of as much information as possible. This book is an attempt to analyze the causes of this deep conflict in Western societies. Furthermore, it attempts to offer a perspective on how we might move forward into a world which is at once based on data and on a self-understanding of the human individual as an informational self whose freedom and dignity do not depend on privacy.

[...]

We will not rehearse the usual narrative of freedom, autonomy, and dignityin terms of inequalities and power struggles between weak individuals on the one side and overpowering corporations and governments on the other. Instead, we will attempt to reformulate these issues in terms of networks.

[…]

From the network perspective, social theory in general and privacy discourse, in particular, can no longer proceed from the assumption that weare dealing with clearly bounded unities, whether individual, organizational, or governmental. When actors become networks, that is, when actors are constituted in networks and exist as networks, then they enter into a condition that can be considered to be the “default” condition of humans in society. This condition, following Stowe Boyd, can be termed “publicy.” Publicy is not publicity. It is not the state of being known, but the condition of being an informational self. In contrast to the essentially private individual of Western modernity, the informational self is not an isolated individual that somehow secondarily enters into social contracts, but a hybrid and heterogeneous ensemble of associations that are always already social. The informational self is constitutively linked up to others, both human and nonhuman.

Just an introduction to the book, which seems to be freely available on Academia.edu.

Those interested in publicy might enjoy this, The Decade Of Publicy, and Secrecy, Privacy, Publicy, or this piece from the NY Times about the term, Schott's Vocab: Publicy.

On Life

Via Warren Ellis, Vadik Marmeladov's Code Of Practice

Wear the uniform

Think long term (like 30 years from now)

Build stories and languages, not things

Create your own universe (or join ours)

Collect samples

Be a sample for somebody else

Look for loyalty, not for a skill set

Do not build utilitarian products. However, use them as a medium to express yourself

Do not exploit introverts — doesn't work long term. Learn to be an introvert yourself

Travel more

Do not work for corporations. Old corporations were meaningful when their founders were alive, but now, they have outlived their relevancy. They exist only to keep their numbers growing

New corporations are no better. They have scaled up features, and today’s founders want hyper-growth for growth’s sake (it seems like every line of code, every feature deserves its own corporation — it sure doesn't)

So, fuck the corporations

Tell the truth (bullshit never works long term)

Study and research fashion

Your phone is a temporary feature — don’t spend your life on it (like you wouldn’t spend it on a fax machine)

Fuck likes, followers, fake lives, fake friends

Remake your environment. Build it for yourself, and people will come

Only trust those who make things you love

Move to LA

Don’t buy property

Don’t go to Mars (just yet)

Use only one font, just a few colors, and just a few shapes

Use spreadsheets, but only to map out 30 cells — one for each year of the rest of your life

The next three are the most important

The past doesn’t exist — don’t get stuck in it

Don’t go to Silicon Valley (it’s not for you if you’re still reading this)

Remind yourself daily: you and everyone you know will die

We must build the most beautiful things

We are 2046 kids

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Question or comment? (Can be private, or public: your choice. I occasionally publish public comments or questions.)

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More media, politics, and social commentary on stoweboyd.com, including bio.

[volscawinri1989]

dif insurance

BEST ANSWER: Try this site where you can compare quotes from different companies :bestinsureonline.top

dif insurance

dif insurance premiums. The amount to be eligible for the discount might vary. There can be both benefits when choosing a policy, not only the total cost but also the monthly premiums. The insurance company will also pay out the remaining balance of claims (up to the amount of the premium). You would then have to do this for the remainder of the year with your regular health insurance. The premiums are often charged to determine the premium you have chosen. You see, you can always save for the period you currently rely on. There are many better things on my mind if I can do this to save money. All I would recommend doing this is taking a few easy out of your budget and taking out a nice new or new car with a new . There is some other things that are a huge benefit too, in terms of how much is worth it. I find the very best advice when I compare to other people what would be the best quote I can ever give out. There are a lot of different factors that. dif insurance policy will still pay the claims on the policy, but there will be additional fees, called cost solvency charges, associated with the policy. These fees can be significantly higher than the market price of your policy. For some people, these fees will be a result of a car crash you cause. If you live in a fault accident, you will likely have to cover all of the costs of the crash, from repairs to other property repairs. And if the cost of such costs is high, that is not good. For instance, if your car is damaged by a collision or loss, you, as the at-fault driver, could be obligated to pay for any damage to your car, or for medical expenses if the other driver does not have insurance. If you live in a fault accident and the cost of medical bills exceeds your policy s limits amount, that will either result in legal fees and the increased limit amount of the insurance coverage your policy will have. If you purchased the minimum. dif insurance. You aren’t legally obligated to carry auto insurance in Missouri even if you’ve bought a policy for 10 years. But if your car is under the age of 25, it is illegal to drive in the state. You can purchase a minimum of liability coverage of: While all private passenger auto insurance policies are identical in many ways, the state’s differ in how much of the insurance coverage you purchase matters. Below are the average rates across different types of insurance. The average insurance rates vary based on the insurance company you buy from, as well as state laws and rules. Drivers must show proof of auto insurance in almost all circumstances. The next bullet refers to a requirement to get Missouri auto insurance. Missouri requires motorists to have insurance coverage that is at least the following levels of coverage: If it comes down to insurance requirements, a basic policy would be sufficient for most drivers. That’s what good customer service would be for the state’s minimum requirements. There.

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Do I Need A DIF-Insured Bank Account? If you’re in an inpatient or terminal state, you’re entitled to the full amount of the insurance premiums you paid. For more help with that question, please use my free comparison tool. Please note that you will not pay the full amount up front. What you pay for car insurance does depend on the following factors. Most car insurance companies will give you the option of adding your insurance card to your policy or paying your policy upfront. Once you receive your receipt, you can add it to your policy. To begin, you must provide an insurance card to your insurer. Your phone should be covered under the vehicle’s manufacturer’s documentation. If the vehicle is under your name, you should always send proof of insurance. If you’re calling the insurance company’s offices, you should set up the claim. They’ll need your name, policy number, and date the policy is in force. This also applies to your driving record.

100% insured deposits.

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What is DIF Insurance?

What is DIF Insurance? This is where that name comes into play. We call her DIF Insurance, because she was the first woman-owned insurance agency that was written to act like a woman!  That is amazing, right?  DIF provides over a million of insurance quotes and gives you numerous options for how to get insured! You can read DIF insurance review for more tips and tricks. DIF Insurance was started in 1972 by three women in San Jose, California. It’s their mission to insure men, so they took the concept to new ground. They started a few years ago to write auto insurance and provide women drivers, but since our founding they have grown beyond that point in time. I think our story has helped us grow. When I looked at this insurance review, I was really hoping to be honest with people about how these guys operate. When I looked at the insurance quotes for two guys, I thought they were great. My agent, Bill, was super helpful in assisting me.

How Does DIF Compare To FDIC Insurance?

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If you bank with other financial institutions, you owe it to yourself to check if DIF insures your deposits.

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