The board’s vice president, Randy Cook, said phrases in the resolution such as “systemic racism” aren’t defined and mean different things to different people. Another board member, Jane Puszkar, said the resolution served no purpose.
“What has it really done,” she asked. “How effective has it really been?”
The new board is right. Saying some buzzwords doesn’t really help anything.
Treat students as equals, regardless of race. Provide resources to poor folk, black or white. Teach math to kids whether they’re black or white.
A “celebration of community” would have lyrics about helping each other, attending local events and supporting local businesses. It would reference knowing people’s names, watching families grow up together, pitching in to help neighbours and being able to relax & feel content.
It shouldn’t contain combative themes, othering, divisive language and threats of violence.
Something about this comment flipped a switch for me. This is how these people bond. They find common ground in fearing the same out-groups. To them, that is exactly what “community” is, sharing a common enemy.
Country music used to have themes like that, or simply be fun. “Down on the Farm” is catchy, fun, most can relate.
Reba sang… Fuck it, I’m done. There were some greats that sang about our common experiences, with a rural twist. Hell, even Garth is getting his ass beat for being inclusive.
If you leave mainstream, radio country even just a little, it becomes apparent that progressive gays are taking over country and Americana. If there are people and places in your life that need country music, bring S.G. Goodman, Melissa Carper, Orville Peck, Iris Marlowe, and none of these people have what I would call a niche sound. (I don’t expect to convert anyone to the cult of Little Mazarn, but that’s maybe my favorite country act.) And some of them are blowing up! They’re making country music for me these days, and I fucking love it. It’s all I listen to lately. Folk, country, and Americana are for everyone.
Anyone talking honestly about southern community is going to come off real anarchist/communist/leftist/whatever. A large part of rural life is mutual aid, a staple of leftist movements. Rural people vote conservative because they’re told to hate someone else though, and that’s it. Ideologically they are more leftist, though often with conservative social values regarding family and faith.
So I’m pretty far left (for an American), but I think there is a nuance that I’ve had explained at me by some non-mouth-frothing Republican types I’ve worked with.
For them, there is a difference between choosing to be part of community, helping other people, and sharing what they have, and being forced to do those things (via taxes). It always struck me as… exclusionary. It means that they can help their literal neighbor and ignore the people on the other side of town (or the other side of the country).
So it may feel like it’s leftist/communist/etc, but it’s just an extension of “fuck you, I got mine” to “fuck everyone else, me and mine got ours, and only on my terms.”
That is a really interesting take that I hadn’t fully considered until reading your comment, so thank you! I think this is very accurate for a lot of rural community members, especially those with hard R leanings. I think when we start from the other end of the spectrum it’s easy to say oh they must be compelled by emotional responses to issues like abortion/gun rights, when really it could be they want more autonomy.
Buuuutttttt… they also don’t want others to have the same autonomy regarding birth control and healthcare so we’re still at an impasse, and you’re right it’s totally a case of fuck you I got mine (extended cut).
Non-frothing conservative checking in, there is indeed a nuance not unlike what you said. However. I think some of that comes from past experiences, precedence. We know charity & people-driven initiatives are powerful! Can be effective. Government-driven (/taxpayer funded) initiatives? Incompetent. Often wasteful.
Like all the billions to Ukraine, Google says it’s “over 75 billion” and I thought I’ve heard $90B in the past. How much has actually hit the front lines, been ACCOUNTED FOR and USEFUL? I’ve heard $30B. 😔 That is (/was) our money, and we’ve got plenty of problems at home.
We do care about helping people, in a sensible & straightforward manner. A hand up, not a hand out, to bring about actual positive change. There is accountability. People help people. Governments help themselves, to your bank account & fruits of your labor.
Some might say this is…exclusionary. Biden said he’d go, idk, maybe he just forgot. Hard as that may be to believe. Even worse are the people who openly say, “East Palestine is conservative, they probably voted for Trump, they don’t deserve aid/let them die/etc”. Truly despicable talk, un-American & partisan.
Idk man, I don’t claim to know everything. But look, I brought some receipts. Just some things for you all to think about. Please know, the government is not your friend.
I don’t think anyone thinks the government is our friend. I don’t know why that matters though. A company isn’t my friend either. When the options for things getting done are between a company (who’s motivation is supposed to be profit) and the government (who’s motivation is supposed to be good), I’ll take the government.
Joe Biden is a neo-liberal conservative old school politician. I don’t like him, and I don’t know anyone who does. He has been fairly effective for getting some good done though. I wish he’d speak out more and push for doing more good, but he’s done better than I expected from him (which is basically nothing, except not causing more damage like the last guy), because he’s got some progressive support behind him pushing for more leftist things.
We don’t need the government to be our friend. We need it to do what’s needed for the most good per dollar. I don’t think that should just be internal either, because humans are humans no matter where they live. I don’t really value “American”. I don’t think being born on this piece of dirt makes you any more important than someone born on some other piece of dirt.
Also, the military spending in Ukraine is mostly not money, it’s value. It’s the value of weapons that were already built and built for the purpose of fighting Russia and China at the same time potentially. Them being used to fight Russia is literally the most effective thing they could do, and what they were designed for. Russia being weaker means we need to have less stockpiled. If they weren’t sent over, they’d just be sitting in storage somewhere not being used. We aren’t sending cash for the most part.
The price of bottled water went up 50% in prison commissaries across Texas last month. The controversial move has two state agencies pointing the finger at each other as inmates struggle to endure an entrenched and deadly heatwave in facilities without air conditioning. The state raised the price from $4.80 per case (24 bottles) to $7.20 per case on June 27. Commissary vendor Royal Pacific Tea Company requested to raise the prices in March even though it contract was incomplete. The prices were negotiated by the state comptroller’s office and appear to be approved by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“I actually begged him not to [drink the tap water],” said Amy Aguilar, whose loved one is at TDCJ’s Ferguson Unit. Her significant other — whose name she asked TPR to not use — has described the water as “rancid” smelling. And she said she was concerned about the quality. “Do you smell the sewer?” Aguilar said she asked him, “And he goes, ‘you kind of just smell it all. It’s just this big ole rich mix of rancid smell.’ ” Water quality in prisons nationwide have been characterized as very low, due to the age of the facilities and the often remote locations.
Of course, for them, prisoners are subhumans, sigh.
Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve read any British history but let’s just say this is far from the first time an organization with the words “Royal” and “Tea Company” in their name made a pile of money from the suffering of captive people
Perhaps it’s time for the US air force to do some kind of intelligence review on its generals. You know, perhaps they should make sure that they have some.
“Matt Healy undoubtedly just made it worse for queer Malaysians who actually live here, and have to face the consequences because we all know our politicians are gonna use this to further their agenda,” Carmen Rose, a Malaysian drag queen and performer, said on Twitter.
No, he didn’t make it worse. The government is making it worse
Because keeping a low profile is how they can manage to survive in a homophobic society. Everyone is grandstanding while living in liberal western societies, ignoring how hard things are for less fortunate people.
As if events like Stonewall never happened in the west. How did those western societies became liberal? Because people fought back, blood has been spilled to reach where those societies are now. Unfortunately keeping a low profile will not progress society and will keep the community at risk. Jews kept a low profile in Europe for centuries and then were exterminated.
Muslim is not a static or homogenous thing. The majority Muslim bit doesn’t need to change - the majority of Muslims need to become more understanding.
They aren’t but they are the majority if the religious population by such a considerable margin that whether Christians supported equality or not it would not matter.
There are about ten times as many Muslims as there are Christians in Malaysia so in this case it is the homophobia of the Islamic population that needs to change to make the culture shift.
EhList said Malaysia can never be decent for LGBTQI+ as long as they are majority Muslim. Why can a majority Christian Country have decent LGBTQI+ rights but not a Muslim one?
This is about Malaysia though. Indonesia doesn’t have sharia law except for one region, called Aceh. Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia though the LGBT do face intolerance from the state.
The west used to be all hardcore Christians and hated LGBT just as much as Muslims do today. Like homosexuality wasn’t legalized until 1967 in the UK. Before that time gay people, like Alan Turing, were chemically castrated. Change came because people stood up and fought for their rights and put their lives on the line. Not because everyone became atheist.
the rise in acceptance of LGBT rights is mirrored by less frequent church attendance in the USA. IIRC that was true fir the UK as well. In most societies the dominant religion is typically anti-LGBT.
Change takes time, decades, often centuries. You are asking a society that has norms similar to 100years ago in Europe to accelerate to where the West currently is. I dont think you understand how slow things improved for lgbtq in the West and how recent that change is.
Despite things not being perfect, lgbtq acceptance is 50%+ in most western countries. That means it usually isnt socially acceptable to go against lgbtq, neither for the people, nor for the politicians.
Now imagine a society whose people oppose lgbtq by 95%. Who is going to stick their neck out? Their neck will simply be chopped off. Change will take time. Slowly those lgbtq people will make lgbtq acceptable within their inner circle and then their inner circle will make lgbtq acceptable in a wider but small part of society(ie liberals) and that small part of society will slowly be able to make lgbtq acceptable as a societal norm by “converting” more and more people.
The structure does not exist in these societies for lgbtq people to fight for their rights. Their best hope is that their inner circle can accept them and they can live a normal life while keeping a low profile, they are still at stage 1.
Or to put it in a different perspective, what will happen to you if you go to a plaza in Pyongyang and demand democracy/human rights? Do you think that would be smart? Or productive? You will just get arrested and be sent to a prison camp. And it is even worse with lgbtq rights, because a lot of north koreans can get on board with democracy and human rights but in these societies, 95% of the people are actively against lgbtq.
PS I am not interested in debating about homosexuality in 1920s Germany or whatever because that is a niche that completely ignores actual societal historical facts.
True but they are still not at the pushing point. They are on “maybe i can get friends who accept me for who i am without anyone betraying my trust” stage. Once they can somewhat reliably do that, ie once there is a small part of non lgbtq allies, then with those allies they can start pushing.
10% is a when an idea is becoming mainstream and mass adoption is greatly accelerating.
“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”
It’s not like things are sunshines and roses for gay people in liberal western societies. Pride parades started in the US from a riot when they couldn’t take it anymore. The UK chemically castrated Alan Turing. Hiding is a good way for the individual to survive, but to forward progress for the group in the future, attention needs to be brought to these issues.
Attention is only beneficial when you have the correct political conditions to do it. Drawing attention at the wrong time gets you cracked down upon or worse, killed.
An absolutist position on this is how western liberals continually contribute to worsening matters for lgbt people in the global south. Stick to your fucking lane and let people from that country handle their local issues, they understand the local culture and the conditions better than you do.
As someone who lives in SE Asia, I agree. The west have no idea, they think they know it all, judging everybody from that ivory tower they call moral high ground.
It’s such a difficult topic. As an lgbt person I want the lgbt people in those countries leading the strategy to get change. Not a bunch of people that want to do regime change for the sake of US interests while weaponising marginalised peoples as a tool to create consent for it among the US home population.
All this does is make people in the global south see lgbt issues as a tool of US oppression. It actively harms efforts of local lgbt people in achieving the necessary cultural change in views because people see it as necessary to oppose it in order to protect their economic interests from becoming a US colony or vassal.
Alan Turing was castrated in the 1950s and has been posthumously pardoned at this point. The first pride parade in the US after Stonewall was in the 1970s.
Using examples half a century or more old as a comparison to what’s happening today is incredibly disengenuious.
Yes, stay hidden, try to curate and open up to your inner circle. They are still at step 1. They need to cultivate lgbtq acceptance slowly at this stage or they will be crashed.
Surprised Carmen Rose is able to tweet while licking authoritarian bigoted boots at the same time, impressive. They’d be stoked if Nazis came back I’m sure, they have some great boots.
Try reading the article. Homophobia is on the rise in Indonesia and bullshit performative activism is not going to positively impact that. Rose without question has a more informed perspective than a British “rockstar” douchebag who has done this performative shit in other nations and seen similar criticism.
As someone who was gay in the USA before it was safe to be out I get why Rose is concerned and Im flabbergasted at those who cannot see how incredibly fucking stupid Healy’s acts are.
Do… do you really think Hunter Biden, the president’s adult son, just hangs out at the white house, one of the most heavily surveiled places on earth, just doing coke?
It also matters because people still believe the Russian narrative that’s been debunked, and have been shown to be paid for by Hillary Clinton and carried out by the FBI.
She can act within that laws, which some will favor Trump. However, if she blatantly skirts the laws to favor Trump then she will be removed and possibly face charges. It would not only guarantee a Biden second term but possibly a Democrat super majority in the House and Senate. With that, they could impeach and have her removed.
I love your optimism, but half the country has bought into the fact that this is all a partisan witch hunt and that Biden has “weaponized” the DoJ to go after a ”completely innocent” Trump. There‘s no way that any bullshit ruling by Cannon will somehow swing public opinion massively in favor of the Democrats.
Scarily enough, it’s far more likely that this galvanizes the right and Trump ends up winning in 2024.
The 2022 election would say that most of the country has turned against Trump. With the majority of his picks losing. The political environment is changing. Another 2 years add a larger Democrat base in gen z voters that heavily lean left. Plus the extra 2 years kill off heavily leaning right voters. It’s a lose-lose for the Republicans, that’s why they want to raise the voting age.
Trump has a major problem. He’s not gaining any new voters. Nobody is coming along saying, “Ya know, I took a second look at this guy and he ain’t that bad!” Many of the ones he has are as hardcore as they come, not going anywhere. The rest were just ignorant “anything but a Dem” voters. At worst, those sorts will stay home.
He simply can’t win another election without unprecedented voter suppression, to the tune of millions and millions of ballots. And remember, he pulled out all the stops last time and failed.
I think he’s got too much baggage to win in 2024. I think Republicans will circle the wagons around DeSantis this time. Our best hope is that Trump loses the primaries and then runs 3rd party to split the conservative vote.
Yeah it’s a bit funny to fall back on the ‘rule of law saving the day’ in terms of this high-ranking government official when the hypothetical we’re discussing here is the judge letting off a separate high-ranking government official after he blatantly broke the law.
The people involved in the prosecution know that they are more or less ending their careers with this. They won’t survive the next republican administration (and that may not be referring to just their careers…). That is why it has taken so long to build up these cases. Every single “i” is dotted and every single “t” is crossed and then some.
They know how stacked the courts are and they aren’t going to let this be swept away without using every single legal trick they have.
I am still not optimistic that any form of justice will be served. But it won’t be for lack of trying and this “revelation” that a corrupt judge can throw the case out has already been planned for.
The chief justice of the district court can reassign the case to another judge. This would be the easiest way and save face for Judge Cannon.
Slate goes through the different ways this could be accomplished legally.
The other thing to think about is what she would accomplish by interfering with the proceeding. Trump will be indicted for the racketeering in Georgia. So she stand to gain nothing by showboating and could lose everything instead.
Was the chief justice of the district court involved with the overruling that occured with her previous decision? The language in the ruling seemed pretty harsh towards her, but I’m not clear if the opinions of higher courts have any affect on her career. I don’t know much about the legal system, but it seems like Federal judges don’t have anything to worry about other than impeachment, which is next to impossible.
No, the Chief Justice is part of the state. The 11th circuit is Federal Judges.
As for the impact on her career, it would take a Trump type to nominate her for the Supreme Court. Her nomination would be a firestorm. Mainly to her very liberal interpretation of the law used in this case.
And, in a development that should come as zero surprise to anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for like a decade, Texas immediately threw this sternly worded letter back in DOJ’s face and kept on doing exactly as they have been doing.
Can we just skip to filing the lawsuits the next time Abbot or DeSantis or whichever fascist in this country feels like pulling a campaign stunt with taxpayer dollars?
Imprison the cops who do this. Maybe that’ll get them to start acting right. Luckily most cops aren’t like this. But the minority doing shit like this piss me off so much.
Ice is under the DHS which is part of the ‘fourth branch’ of government. These bloated organizations actively fight against peoples civil rights and most of them should be dismantled and defunded. They’re essentially able to get funding and make their own rules thanks to the Chevron Deference, luckily the SC is reviewing that court case and will hopefully overturn it.
This would cause legislators to actually legislate, and ensure that their policies are what any part of the executive branch is able to enforce, nothing more. Overturning the Chevron Deference is necessary for proper checks and balances between our branches of government
I need more information about your username. Is it the trebuchet that acts as a taxi, as in you sit on it and drives along, or is a trebuchet service, where it uses its primary function to yeet you to your destination?
It’s a shame, aside from all the racism, Newbern actually seems like a lovely little southern small town.
To clarify, this came in response to looking up Newbern on Google maps and seeing the only photo attached to the town is a group of smiling black women celebrating the 4th of July. If that’s the representation of the town, it seems like a nice place.
I probably should have said more specifically ‘aside from the racist white minority leadership it seems like it could be a really nice place.’ Nice places can have shit leaders. Was happy to see the town hall already has some one star reviews in response to this story. Hopefully more attention will help them toss the bigots to the curb.
Pretty sure the more than %70 black/African American town population might disagree with you. Seems pretty unkind and disingenuous to paint a whole town as a shithole because some assholes are in charge.
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