middle class kids who get into the “radical scene” and start slumming it for a couple years have zero right to criticize working class people who want to become upwardly mobile
I remember I saw this photoset of resistance to gentrification and there was a pic of graffiti that said “we don’t want your yuppie flats, we are happy with our rats!” And honestly, only middle class crust punks who voluntarily move into poor urban neighborhoods could think like that. People in ghettoes and slums and inner cities hate that shit. There’s no fucking glory in living in squalor where there’s rats and cockroaches in your apartment. They WANT the city to invest in their neighborhoods. Working class people LIKE urban renewal. They just hate getting priced out of it and forced to leave a place they’ve lived in for decades.
All day I’ve been trying to think about what to say about Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night.
Obviously, I have my disagreements with the GOP platform when it comes to the rights of women, to LGBTQ individuals, to immigration, to the environment, to taxation, to separation of church and state, and a good deal more.
But beyond those disagreements, I realized as I watched that Mr. Trump was speaking to a group of people who see the world–and this country–in a fundamentally different way than I do.
He insists, and they believe, that we are desperately unsafe, that crime and violence are all around us, that our government is doing a very poor job of protecting us, and that even the police are powerless to stop the criminals who target us and them. He insists, and they believe, that vast hordes of Mexican murderers and Muslim terrorists are streaming or preparing to stream across our open borders and kill our loved ones. He insists, and they believe, that we have major economic problems and that we spend too much money on our international allies. He insists, and they believe, that America is being or has been stolen from the white Christians who made it great and that he is the only person capable of restoring America to its former glory.
This isn’t my America. This isn’t what I see when I look around.
Certainly we have a lot of work to do as a country; certainly there are many, many things we need to fix, including our politics; and certainly there are dangerous people out there. But in general things are pretty good, and certainly they are rosy when we compare things with the way they were in our not-so-distant past. Thankfully, there is actually less violent crime today than in the past; there are fewer police officers being killed in the line of duty; we are mostly shielded from terrorism, at least in part due to the governmental processes already in place to protect us.
So, as I watched thousands of people on their feet, voicing their approval for Trump as he hollered “We don’t want them in our country,” I realized it might be impossible for me to understand this. I might be in a position where all I could ever feel was fear and revulsion for this sort of thinking.
My family came to this country not so very long ago, survivors of the Nazi Holocaust who moved here from Israel for opportunities for their young children. As I listened to the full-throated approval for a presidential candidate playing on their fear of immigrants and refugees, insisting that THOSE people don’t belong in OUR country, I was reminded of Pastor Niemöller’s most famous quote:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I’m not a Mexican immigrant and I’m not a Muslim (whether a Syrian refugee or someone born in America). But I know my world history and my family’s history well enough to know that we must speak out and we must work against this notion that THOSE people make US less safe, take OUR jobs, make OUR country less safe, that THEY don’t belong HERE and that they’re taking OUR country away from US.
We must do this not only so that someone will be there to speak for us when we need them, but also because it is a moral imperative to speak out against the terrible lie that America belongs to a certain group of people and that the appropriate response to feelings of insecurity is to empower the government to lash out at anyone who isn’t part of that group.
Well I guess that’s much better than killing innocent Black people, but why on earth are they not doing their job?!
Biittch are you joking? We aint paying yall to catch em all
They’re acting human for a change, let them be.
This is actually a good thing.
1) The police are aware of this game and because they are playing they know where people may tend to congregate. Means they will be more understanding if a bunch of random people are hanging out near a place that virtually has no one there.
2) Because the news has been blasting that people are getting mugged and attacked at PokeStops, it brings up a safety issue. Well if cops decided to play Pokemon GO and hang out near some of these Stops, it will increase safety because there’s less likely hood of a mugging to occur when there are one to a few cops around.
3) This unintentionally puts cops out in multiple locations similar to how patrols work. Thus this increases public safety and gives a higher sense of security if you aren’t adverse to law enforcement.
4) It makes them happy. Gives a common ground for the populous and youth to converse to the police with rather than them walking up and asking them if they are doing something bad/staying out of trouble. Happy + Happy = A Good Thing.
Other issues on pause, we need to demilitarize our police. And that starts by deconstructing the hegemony that divides “police” and “citizens”.
I have someone staying in my hotel tonight that made me think that this would be worth sharing here.
If you are running away/trying to hide from someone that is frightening, abusing, harassing you, and you find yourself staying in a hotel to avoid being found, there’s an extra precaution you can take.
When you check in, ask the front desk clerk to put you as “Unlisted”. They’ll know what you’re talking about. What this means is that as far as anyone other than you and the front desk clerks are concerned, you’re not there. If someone tries to call for you and your room, “I’m sorry. I don’t have anyone registered under that name.” Same thing goes for it someone shows up at the desk. “Unlisted” means you’re untouchable.
Please, please, if you find yourself in trouble and seeking refuge in a hotel, do this. It’s really quick, easy, and painless for the front desk clerk to do, and they are not going to judge you for it.
Please use actual words, not just code words. I work in a hotel and have NEVER heard of “Unlisted”. If someone were to come up to me and say that I would just look at you, confused, and ask for clarification.
Just flat out tell the front desk that you’re avoiding an abuser, if you say that you’re just avoiding something or someone, we may hesitate to comply, because you may be hiding from the police or law-enforcement. Please tell the front desk what you actually want us to do. Most places sign privacy/non-disclosure type agreements and if you say: “Hey, I’m hiding from a very bad situation and there might be some abusive people following me. Can you please either put me under a different name or make sure that no one contacts me?” we’ll do it and wont speak another word. Most places would even help you look up resources and try to get you transportation.
You can make it so most phones will be no contact, put up the do-not-disturb sign, and when shift change happens, if you’re still awake, tell the next person, because sometimes shift change is chaotic and important stuff can fall through the cracks. If you’re staying for multiple days, ask to speak with the general manager about your situation and they’ll make sure everything is enforced.
I worked at a hotel for almost 3 years, and I can confirm with the second post. You can additionally tell us at the front desk that no one is allowed to phone you, but you can phone out of your room.
Please do not be vague about it, we’ll likely think you’re up to something illegal. Just be upfront about it. No one’s allowed to see the guest list (or your name on the computer) besides the people working behind the counter, it’s a part of the confidentiality agreement.
Fuck I reblogged this before… Ignore that one. This is the right one
i’ve been reading for most of the day now about howard ashman, the lyricist for the little mermaid & beauty and the beast. he was one of the biggest creative forces behind both films, helping to shape their characters, narrative arcs, and themes as well as their music; he was also a gay man who was diagnosed with aids during the production of the little mermaid and died shortly after beauty and the beast was finished. alan menken, the composer who collaborated with him on both movies, said that beauty and the beast is heavily influenced by ashman’s experiences and perspective.
and i can’t stop thinking about it. i’ve always considered beauty and the beast to be one of the darkest films in the disney canon, as well as its most beautiful. it’s entirely about monsters, about the ways that people are determined to be wrong and dangerous: there’s the beast alone in his castle in the forest, and belle mocked and sneered at by her village, and even maurice carted off to an asylum.
and that it was written and conceived of in part by a gay man who, according to his sister, trained himself out of “effeminate” physical mannerisms when he was young because he was bullied for them, and who as he wrote it was dying of an incredibly stigmatized illness— like, god.
i mean when you just listen to those songs he wrote, the mob song (“the beast is] set to sacrifice our children to his monstrous appetite / he’ll wreak havoc on our village if we let him wander free”), belle (“it’s a pity and a sin / she doesn’t quite fit in”)— and there was a cut song, human again, where the castle servants looked forward to rejoining the world.
like it’s obviously queer, but more than that, it’s the self-identification and self-validation of a man who knew this was this work was probably his last. at the end of the film, the beast is so sad, has succumbed entirely to despair and death. his society is coming to destroy him, and he can’t even be angry, because he doesn’t have anything left. but then he does. and he is still precious, and his life is still meaningful. he’s a person, and he can be loved. he can find happiness.
in the original beauty and the beast, the beast proposes marriage to belle every night and it’s her acquiescence that breaks the spell. in the disney movie, the beast only waits for belle to love him, because he cannot love himself. it’s such an unexpected blessing for both belle and the beast that they can find acceptance in each other, after both are so othered and dehumanized by their communities. their vulnerable joy in each other and themselves is so important, and their love song so wonderingly sweet. at the end, it is only when someone loves and accepts you that you stop being a monster.
john musker, one of the directors of beauty and the beast, told this story about how ashman cried at disneyland when the little mermaid’s music was integrated into a parade and said that he was glad to know that his music would outlive him. beauty and the beast was my favorite movie when i was young and trying not to be queer, when i felt very wrong and very alone. it has been unbelievably important in my life. and so i am also glad— and so grateful— that howard ashman’s music outlived him, and that he lived at all.
I’ve missed Jon Stewart so dang much. The daily Show just isn’t the same without him.
I’m glad he once again called out Fox News for their BS and those “I’m from Real America” people who act like they are the only “real” Americans. #Love it!
صحفي بريطاني يعمل على مشروع تصوير العائلات السورية اللاجئه ويترك مكان الشخص المفقود
- British journalist working on a project photographing Syrian refugee families and leave the place of the missing person
Hostile reminder that “I was actually aiming for the autistic guy” being seen as a viable excuse for deadly force stems in part from a culture that brings up “improving mental health care” at every mass shooting, reinforcing the stereotype of neurodivergent people as inherently violent.
“Although part of the incident was captured on cell phone video, it does not appear that the actual shooting was captured, which allowed Rivera to create his own scenario. [But] the video that we did see shows the autistic man making no such movement.”
So they can’t even kill the wrong person correctly?
“We didn’t MEAN to shoot you, we are incompetent at our evil goal of murdering a different innocent person.”
In what universe is that a reasonable justification for a failure this colossal)
Do they actually think this makes them look BETTER?
“Yeah, sorry about shooting that innocent man. We actually wanted to flat-out kill this other innocent man.”
Original photo by Gage Skidmore, used under Creative Commons license. See original by clicking on image.
Some thoughts on Trump, and the GOP convention:
1. The convention, generally, was the worst-run major political convention in a generation, and that should scare you. How is Trump going to manage an entire country when he can’t even put on a four-day show? (The answer, as we found out this week, is that he has no intention of managing the country at all; he plans to foist the actual work onto his poor VP while he struts about as bloviating figurehead.) Trump lost control of his convention and his message twice, once with Melania Trump’s clumsy plagiarism of Michelle Obama, which ate up two days of news cycles before Trump’s people found someone to be their chump for it, and then second with Ted Cruz, that oleaginous lump of hungering self-interest, who rather breathtakingly took to the stage of a nominating convention in order not to endorse Trump, in the most public way possible. That bit of low-rent Machiavellianism ate up another day of news cycles.
In the end, all the GOP convention has coming out of it are two massive failures of message control and Trump’s cataclysmic nomination speech. With regard to that hot mess of a speech, Trump was always going to be Trump, and there was no way of avoiding that, but the other two mishaps were eminently avoidable — vet all your speeches for previously-used phrases (which is a thing that is commonly done in politics anyway), and don’t give your previous political opponent whose family you’ve insulted a primetime speaking slot when you know he’s not going to endorse your candidate, as Cruz never intended to, and which was a fact the Trump campaign knew. That’s the part that boggles my mind. Two unforced errors on the Trump campaign’s part, and they blew up his convention.
2. Not that there was much to blow up; the Trump GOP convention line-up was closer to that of a struggling MLM company sales rally hosted in Tulsa or Des Moines than that of a major political organization, and the messages offered to the faithful there were almost insultingly simple:
We’re all doomed by crime, immigrants and minorities;
It’s all Hillary Clinton’s fault, let’s jail and/or kill her;
Trump is great, Trump is the supreme leader, all hail Trump, details to come.
i.e., your basic fact-free racist appeal to authority, and at any point you might like to suggest a fact-based counter-argument (crime is near historical lows, immigrants are not major engines of crime, Hillary Clinton is largely not corrupt, as 30 years of intense scrutiny has shown, and Trump is mostly a scammy bungler who likes to screw over the people who go into business with him, etc), the rebuttal from the Trump folks is to just yell louder. YES HILLARY IS A CRIMINAL YES CRIME IS OUTSIDE MY DOOR RIGHT NOW YES THE IMMIGRANTS ARE COMING TO EAT OUR BABIES WITH CRUEL TINY SPOONS
Well, no —
CRUEL TINY SPOOOOOOOOOOOONS
And honestly there’s nothing much one can do to convince them otherwise.
Which means that even if Trump’s convention had gone off without a hitch (which is to say, to be clear, without the hitches that he and his people should have known better than to allow), it still would have been a factless embarrassment of bigotry and fear. The GOP convention this year was going to be a shitshow even without the unforced errors; the unforced errors just added farce to the tragedy.
3. So, let’s talk about that speech of Trump’s for a second, shall we. I didn’t watch it live (I decided instead to go see a Thursday night showing of Star Trek Beyond, which, trust me, from an entertainment point of view was the right call), but I caught it afterwards. I think if you were already in the tank for Trump, it was a fine piece of theater. If you weren’t already in the tank for Trump, though, it scanned as You’re going to die we’re all going to die you need me to save you you need me to save us all. And, well, no. I’m really not, and I really don’t. I don’t know that it will scan effectively for anyone else not in the tank, either. Things just aren’t that bad.
But that’s the Trump shtick: He doesn’t have policies or positions or plans (details to come!), but what he does have is the ability to yell and to confirm your opinion there’s something wrong. To paraphrase Aaron Sorkin (See! Look! Attribution! It’s not difficult!), whatever your particular problem is, Trump is not the least bit interested in solving it, he is interested in making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. In this case that’s Clinton, who it’s evident that he doesn’t actually hate (or didn’t prior to this campaign), but when he pressed the “Hillary” button his voters spun up into an excited froth, so why not. It’s also immigrants, which I also suspect he doesn’t hate or care about either, except as a lever, and it works because there are a lot of racists, overt and latent, in his voting pool.
Trump knows what got him this far, and like the unimaginative businessman he is, he sees no need to “pivot” away from it, to try to bring in other people not already in the tank for him. I know this works, he says, why fuck with it? Which, actually, maybe isn’t a bad argument! His recent predecessors as the GOP candidate didn’t benefit from all from trying to pivot, did they? They didn’t win! Like the proverbial boy who keeps digging because there’s got to be a pony down there, Trump is betting there are even more white people he can scare into voting for him. He and the GOP are all in on the idea that there are still enough white people out there to win an election. All he has to do is scare ’em hard enough and make Hillary Clinton look crooked, which has been a GOP hobby for a quarter century running.
So, that was his speech: Scare the white folk.
4. Now, a brief interlude with the Trump voters, aka the scared and angry white people of America.
We’re not scared! Hillary’s crooked!
Guys, no. She might be good at getting out of scrapes, but no one’s that good, and not at the highest levels of scrutiny that she operates on, and has for decades.
Benghazi! E-Mail! Vince Foster! Whitewater!
Dudes. They spent millions and decades trying to pin something on her, and the best that they got out of it was that she was stupidly careless with her email. Which is not good! But it’s not a thing she should be jailed for. Or hanged from a tree for, which was a thing when spoken that Trump’s people only rather half-heartedly distanced themselves from. I could have told you she was stupidly careless with her email and wouldn’t have charged nearly as much, or taken that much time with it.
It’s conspiracy!
It’s really not.
Well, I just don’t trust her.
Of course you don’t. The GOP, as noted, has spent the better part of three decades trying to make her look crooked and evil; concurrently the GOP’s modus operandi, thanks to Newt Gingrich and his followers in Congress, has been to demonize and hate their political opponents. You can’t just disagree with anyone anymore — you have to despise them, and fear them, and scream for them at your political convention to be thrown in jail. You’ve had decades of indoctrination and now you think that’s normal, and that’s kind of fucked up.
Oh, so you can’t criticize Hillary! I see how it is, commie!
Sure you can criticize her, and disagree with her policies and positions and even dislike her as a person. Maybe try to do it without visualizing her as That Horrible Bitch Queen What Belongs in Jail, and while you’re at it, maybe stop visualizing Barack Obama as That Terrifying Kenyan Muslim Socialist Who is Coming For Our Guns, which is not accurate, either. Both of them, as it turns out, are pretty much bog-standard liberalish Democrats. You don’t like that? Okay, fine! You don’t need to go the extra step of demanding to salt the very earth upon which they walk, so nothing ever grows there again.
And while you’re at it, think about why it is that the GOP’s m.o. since Gingrich has been to hate and fear its political opponents, and how it’s come down to this election. Folks, as a candidate for President, Trump has no ruling principles other than hate and fear. He wants you to hate and fear minorities. He wants you to hate and fear immigrants. And most of all he wants you to hate and fear Hillary Clinton. Why? Because those are the buttons he can press to get to the presidency and that is all. If there were other buttons to be pressed, he’d press those. If it were Bernie Sanders in there instead of Clinton, he’d make you hate and fear him instead. It’s all he’s got, but then again, it’s all he’s needed.
5. Which is entirely on the GOP. Make no mistake about two things: One, Trump is where he is today precisely because the GOP has for decades worked on a principle of “demonize and obstruct” rather than working across the aisle to get things done, making it possible for someone with no recognizable Republican principles to bully his way to being the nominee; Two, no matter what happens with the 2016 election, the GOP is pretty much fucked. If Trump wins, there will be a dangerous occupant in the White House, one that has no guiding philosophy beyond his own narcissism and whose own personal inclinations lead him to admire autocrats, and if the GOP thinks they can manage that, I invite them to think on the primaries and the convention. The GOP doesn’t have managers in its ranks anymore; the last one, John Boehner, flipped Congress the bird and went home, and now there’s just hapless Paul Ryan, aka Hangdog Reardon, Ayn Rand’s saddest acolyte, minding the store. They’re not going to control Trump; they can’t even control themselves. They don’t see the value of it.
And if Trump loses? Then you can rely on the GOP to do what it did in 2008 and 2012: To figure the problem was that they weren’t “conservative” enough — “conservative” in these cases means “even whiter and older and scareder.” I mean, shit. The reason Ted Cruz did his Wednesday Night Knifework on Trump was to set himself up for 2020 when Trump loses, and let’s just think about that, shall we. First, Cruz is such a howling vortex of personal regard that he sees someone else’s party as the perfect place to launch his next campaign; second, Cruz — smug, grasping Ted Cruz — actually is likely to be where the GOP goes next. That should genuinely terrify any GOPer who still has sense, or who wants have a Republican in the White House this side of 2024.
6. Trump is still not likely to win — after everything, he’s still trailing Clinton, even if that margin is as slim as its ever been, and in the next few days we’ll see what, if any, convention bounce he gets — and now it’s Clinton’s turn at bat, with her VP pick and the Democratic convention. But let’s not pretend he can’t win, or that he might not be correct that there are still more white people to scare into voting for him. Ultimately it doesn’t matter to the GOP that their nominee is manifestly unfit to be in the White House, because Trump wins them a Supreme Court seat and (if they keep both houses) legislative repeals of all sorts of policies they hate. Whatever mischief Trump gets into as President, they figure he’s not going to veto anything they send his way. They’re probably right about that; all that is detail work, and Trump doesn’t care about that stuff. That’s the silver lining to the upcoming GOP disaster.
Now, I suppose we could try to appeal to true conservatives or GOP folks not to vote for Trump — look! Gary Johnson is there and has actual positions! — but let’s not bullshit about this. Trump wins if everyone else who is not an anguished conservative flirting with Johnson does not show up at the voting booth in November, and, bluntly, does not vote for Hillary Clinton for President. And yes, you few remaining diehard Sandernistas, that means getting the fuck over yourselves for once in your lives, realizing that this is not an ordinary election, and acknowledging you pretty much owe the entire world not to consign it to the flames over your entitled fit of pique.
(But I’m in a safely blue state! Can’t I vote for the Greens/Peace and Freedom Party/Wavy Gravy/etc? Ugh, fine, but only after you’ve extracted a promise from at least three swing state pals that they’ll vote for Clinton. It’s important, y’all.)
7.But not everyone who’ll vote for Trump is scared and/or angry and/or white, you say. Sure. Some people just won’t be able to countenance Clinton in the Oval Office for perfectly principled political reasons, and figure that Trump is the only one with a chance to stop her. I understand that. I am sorry for them, who I suspect are largely GOPers, that their choice against Clinton this year is Trump, and that the GOP right now is in a place where Trump was able to become the nominee, because most of the rest of the candidates for the 2016 GOP nomination were an appalling clown car of Dunning-Kruggerands. Whether or not that’s on them as party members, it’s still a tragedy for the country.
All I can say to them is what I have been saying: Look at Trump. Look how he got where he is. Look how he plans to get to the White House. It’s not through policy or positions. It’s through anger and blame and fear, and screaming that those who oppose you are going to pay. Look how he’s run his campaign. Look how his convention went down.
You can’t vote for that and say you didn’t know that was what you were voting for. And if he gets into the White House, you won’t be able to say you weren’t responsible for what happened next. You knew, and you will be.
