Mountain Climbing

 

Carrots are a vegetable

 

Defending Democracy

 

For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today. We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it. People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint. You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.” On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man. Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.” No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to win an election. Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy. In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest. In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values. Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.” And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans. Astonishingly, John Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a member of the powerful Federalist Society, wrote a six-point plan for overturning the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Although he went to the reputable National Review to cover his tracks by saying his plan was just a thought experiment, just tonight a video appeared in which he told an apparent supporter that his ideas were right, and that it was Pence’s establishment biases that made him unwilling to implement them. His plan to overturn the election barely failed. The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate. If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own. When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said. This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations—the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color—it was an astonishing declaration. And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement. But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power. In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will. In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule. It is not an accident that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, carried the Confederate battle flag. We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery. And when our leaders talk fondly about Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro— former president Trump endorsed his reelection today—we would do well to listen.”

 Heather Cox Richardson, October 26, 2021

A Quick Thought: BLM

 A quick thought.

Black Lives Matter is just the latest chapter in the civil rights movement. We may call it something different today, but it's not much different than the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. In fact, it's just a continuation. And with it comes the very same resistance, just wrapped up in new slogans.

https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/report/segregation-forever-leaders.html

Snagged from tumblr: Antifa

 A reminder that antifacism is a thing you DO, not an organisation you JOIN.

Calling a hotel and telling them a KKK chapter rented their ballroom for a meeting is antifa action

Pulling down posters promoting hate groups is antifa action (and if you do, use your keys, not your hands. Some groups put razor blades behind their postings to hurt anyone who takes them down)

Addressing local tensions in your community by participating in food drives and supporting disempowered folks can be antifacist, as facist groups will use community fears to stir up hate and gain power.

Going to an event where a figure whom fascists tend to align with and peacefully protesting is antifa action, whether that speaker thinks they’re fascist or not.

It’s not a club, religion, or organization. You don’t pay dues. Being antifa means actively trying to prevent fascism from being built, usually in local ways that respond to immediate community needs. If you see ANYTHING that talks about officially joining a group or organization, it is SUSPECT.

First Reaction: False Equivalency Edition

I can see the headline now: 

"25 HIGH SCHOOL KIDS KILLED BY MAN WITH CELL PHONE"

Fascist Things My Friends Post On Facebook: Native Americans

Snagged from tumblr: Concentration Camps

PUA: Obviously what’s happening to these kids is horrific but should we really be calling them concentrating camps though? What do Jewish people think about this?

FSG: Hi, Jew here! They are concentration camps and any Jew worth their history will tell you that. The Trump murals, the “we’re just going to take your baby for a bath”, the photos of confiscated rosary beads, the older children taking care of younger children they have no relation to because there are no parents around.

We see this shit and it sends chills up our spines because that was the kind of shit gentiles ignored because it wasn’t “that bad”. It wasn’t “that bad” when they were just confiscating our wedding rings and throwing them into a pile because we were “prisoners”, because it wasn’t “that bad” when they were separating children from their mothers to put them into a separate barracks, because it wasn’t “that bad” when little kids were having to flee through Kindertransport without their parents.

dear straight, white men

Snagged from tumblr:

dear straight, white men:

i love you, i respect you, but some of y’all need a little reality check. you’ll probably know whether or not this applies to you.

you can refer to yourselves as oppressed when:

• you are murdered solely for being white
• you are murdered solely for loving someone
• you are murdered for saying “no”
• you are murdered by law enforcement for being white
• you can’t depend on law enforcement because you are white
• you receive unfair prison sentencing because you are white
• you are denied voting rights because you are white
• you are denied certain medical services
• you are sold as a slave
• you are deemed incapable on a daily basis
• you aren’t allowed to hear all options regarding your health
• something regarding you is illegal
• you are paid less because of your gender (it’s real, the wage gap literally exists whether you want it to or not)
• you see yourselves portrayed as weak and fragile in the media
• your children are ripped from your arms and treated like dogs because you weren’t born in a place

no, I don’t want any of this to happen to you, and I truly hope that it never does.

we know men are more likely to commit suicide. we know men are more likely to be homeless. and that isn’t good, and we want to fight that. we want to fight anything that makes the world more shitty and less equal. but you aren’t more likely to commit suicide because you are white or because you are straight. you aren’t more likely to be homeless because you are white or because you are straight. you may be more likely because you are men, but not because you are white or straight. this isn’t said to discourage the issues MEN as an entirety face—LGBT+ men, black men, asian men, Latino men, minority men, yes, even white men—but saying you are oppressed for being white or for being straight considering what others have gone through and continue to go through on a daily basis is incredibly ignorant. we’re not saying your problems don’t matter or that your life has been easy, we’re saying you aren’t oppressed in the way that minorities are. part of your job in helping to fight for rights and encouraging people to support you is recognizing that, despite what may negatively affect you, you don’t have it the worst of everyone. your privilege is a platform: use it to reach out to men struggling with depression and suicide. use it to do something about the level of homelessness in America. use it to actually do something about the issues you bring up in debates. don’t just use it to complain and be counterproductive. use it to benefit people that need it. that need you.

sometimes you have to be the one to spark change.

https://feministism.tumblr.com/

First Reaction: Muslims Coming To America

If Fascist ideology rests, as it has been said, on the idea that being born into a particular country and with a particular genetic heritage places certain people in a special category apart from the rest of humanity, and that the lives of certain other types of people are markedly less valuable than theirs, and that these lesser people pose an existential threat to the purity of their superior race and culture, then perhaps Muslims came here to give our local fascists someone to hate.  

Off the Cuff

A few months ago I ran into an old friend, Sandra, at an art show, and we started talking about our mutual Facebook friends and their political views.  I told her that I was planning to write a post on my blog entitled "Unvarnished, " giving my opinion on the election and the motivations of those that voted for Trump.  I have that post in the works, but, as I pointed out to my friend Mark a while back, now that I'm on Facebook my blog hasn't been the place I go to make my daily observations.  Instead, my posts are more like research projects, and it takes a lot of time to put one together.  So far, "Unvarnished" is just a list of links to articles that help explain what I want to say, but not a word of my own has actually been written.
  Today, I want to do something different. This post has no links, and no background research.  It's just what I think.  With the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, I just need to say some things.  So, this is, essentially, my visceral reaction to today's news as it is presented on my Facebook page.

One thing that keeps coming up in various forms is the ridiculous Rewriting History argument, the idea that by tearing down statues of Robert E Lee, etc., is trying to hide the past and pretend it didn't happen.  That's patently false.  In Germany (and, yes, Germany is the ONLY reasonable comparison.  As a former Atlanta mayor said, the Confederate flag is the American swastika,) they did not erect statues to Adolf Hitler and company sixty years after the fall of the Third Reich.  They do not fly the flag of the Third Reich along with the current flag of Germany to "honor the past."  In fact, tourists in Germany have been arrested this past week for performing the Nazi salute in public places.  That's how strongly they feel about the past.  What IS done is that there are several monuments to the victims of the Nazis, including the preservation of some of the places where they were tortured and killed.  There are no monuments to honor the perpetrators of horrible crimes against humanity.

A friend of a friend made a joke, saying "WWRELD (What Would Robert E Lee do?)"  If there is any truth to the article I read this week, what he did was say that it wasn't a good idea to keep remembrances of civil strife, but to do like other nations have done and put them in the past.  According to the article, he was not buried in his Confederate uniform, as his family felt that that would be treason.

One friend seems to believe that there's some kind of double standard when it comes to linking politicians to their violent supporters, and to whether said politician/party/ideology is responsible for the violence, and whether they are pressured to denounce said violence.
  I don't know how to relate this to real life.
  To begin with, left wing violence, as far as I can tell, is an aberration.  On the other hand, right wing extremism is a major concern for law enforcement across the country.  While Islamophobes worry about whether some random refugee is going to be the next unibomber, this week a right wing extremist tried to blow up a building in downtown OKC, half a block from where I work --WHILE I WAS AT WORK! 
  Furthermore, Bernie Sanders did not encourage violence the way Trump has, which means that his allies did not have to defend, re-interpret, or ignore anything he might have said.  Nor did he have to be pressured to condemn the violence committed by his supporter; he did so immediately, and without reservations.  Trump, on the other hand, first gave a statement in which he chose his words carefully, so as not to offend the white supremacists or the neo-Nazis who believed that they were in Charlottesville to accomplish his agenda, and when he did finally bow to pressure to condemn the violence and the ideologies behind it, he did so like a hostage being forced to read a statement.
 
   I'll probably get some reaction to the last two paragraphs from people who've been convinced that Black Lives Matter is a leftist terrorist organization for whom violence is the go to tactic.  I was privy to a conversation between a hotel guest from Australia and one of our weekend policemen.  The guest asked something (I wish I could remember what, exactly) about policing the black community, and the policeman's response was, "They're the ones committing all the crimes."  I wish that I had been bold enough to interject that "they" were just the ones getting caught (and killed in inexcusable numbers,) and that there is a long and complicated history concerning institutionalized racism, white privilege, segregation, poverty, deprivation, and crime.  I did make a mental note that this guy, this one policeman guy, is why Black Lives Matters exists.  And I work with him periodically.

And finally...

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People
Kayla Chadwick

Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue.

I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.

Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.

I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.

If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.

I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see (do you make anywhere close to the median American salary? Less? Congrats, this tax break is not for you).

I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters.

There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage (fairly compensated workers typically do better work), fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).

But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you.

I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.

The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling.

Perhaps it was always like this. I’m (relatively) young, so maybe I’m just waking up to this unimaginable callousness. Maybe the emergence of social media has just made this heinous tendency more visible; seeing hundreds of accounts spring to the defense of policies that will almost certainly make their lives more difficult is incredible to behold.

I don’t know if what’s changed ― or indeed, if anything has ― and I don’t have any easy answers. But I do know I’m done trying to convince these hordes of selfish, cruel people to look beyond themselves.

Futility can’t be good for my blood pressure, and the way things are going, I won’t have health insurance for long.

Bakers, Freedom, and the Law

Inalienable Rights

The Washington state supreme court ruled unanimously last week that a florist could not refuse to sell flowers for a same-sex wedding on religious grounds. While this is a state court decision and not binding on other states, the case has nonetheless been closely watched by civil rights and LGBT rights advocates because of possible national implications.

The florist's attorney has said they will now appeal to the United States Supreme Court. There is no guarantee, however, that the high court justices will take the case.

The state supreme court asserted some powerful arguments in its ruling. Per the court, this case "is no more about access to flowers than civil rights cases in the 1960s were about access to sandwiches,"

The court also said "public accommodations laws do not simply guarantee access to goods or services. Instead, they serve a broader societal purpose: eradicating barriers to the equal treatment of all citizens."

While discrimination cases are not new, this decision is important because it equates same-sex couples' rights with other persecuted individuals like interracial couples in the era of segregation.

The state's attorney general later said this month's case was a landmark because it established "sexual orientation is a protected class — just like race, just like religion."

If you'd like to read the Washington supreme court decision, it's available online free here in its entirety on the state's webpage.

This court ruling comes at an important time because of two related issues in the news.

First is the deceptively titled "First Amendment Defense Act" (FADA), a pending bill in Congress that Donald Trump has promised to sign. As I've written here before, FADA would allow anyone to discriminate against LGBT persons and others by simply claiming a religious basis.

Don't want gays in your restaurant or your medical office? With FADA passed, all you have to say is that it offends your religious beliefs.

Second is the potential seating of Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated by Trump recently to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy. Gorsuch has ruled in favor of discriminatory "religious exemption" cases in the past and could do so again if this florist case, or a similar one, came before the high court.

Here is where the rubber meets the road with Trump. It doesn't matter that he says he's pro-LGBT and once waved a rainbow flag upside down for two seconds. What matters is, as President, he has acted and will act to ensure that LGBT Americans are an inferior class who can be discriminated against at will on "religious" grounds for decades to come.

It's not what he says that makes him dangerous. It's what he's done and plans to do. Any LGBT person who continues to support him is only fooling him or herself about the dangers we all face.

echoing back to the days more than a half century earlier when businesses refused to serve African-Americans and other minorities.

-Manhandler