Appalling to see confirmation of Trump’s reckless endangerment of others with his shouty first-debate performance — but also, to say it with a GIF in AAVE …
Old enough to remember when Republicans sought laws to punish people for knowingly spreading a pandemic viral disease.
What we already knew then was also true: those laws were written to stigmatize certain communities, not out of care for public health. vox.com/the-highlight/…
The philosophy, as I wrote this week in the context of today’s scheduled oral argument at SCOTUS over the fate of Roe: their bodies, their choice. Everybody else’s bodies: also their choice. nytimes.com/2021/11/29/opi…
Not to get all high and mighty, but “the job of [a] brother, sister, mother, father, daughter, [or] son” is to hold immediate kin accountable when they do harm — preferably before that harm has public, never mind legal, consequences.
There’s a difference between love and blind loyalty. When it works right, familial love requires an effort to save our relatives from screwing up — and to guard others from the consequences of said screw-ups.
Pulling out all the stops to shield family from consequences for ongoing wrongs isn’t “love,” it’s tribalism. It’s a pure state-of-nature vision of “love,” in which the banishment of moral concern for the welfare of becomes a familial virtue — “the job,” so to speak.
One of the worst annoyances I’ve encountered in progressive politics is how some people and institutions, when push comes to shove, eschew the values they preach in public.
If progressive leaders say they want paid family leave—or want workers to have the freedom to organize for good pay & working conditions—it undermines the movement to say, when people in progressive institutions ask for those things, “maybe this isn’t the line of work for you.”
Maybe, to be charitable, such leaders forget that they got into this work to show that a better world is possible. Maybe.
Still, it’s incumbent on our institutions to _demonstrate_ that a better world, that a better way of working, is possible.
The U.S. has the worst maternal mortality rate among wealthy countries, as the NYT has documented (nytimes.com/2018/04/11/mag…) — and outcomes are worse for Black and Latina people, thanks in part to implicit bias among health providers.
The average new car price in the U.S. is ≥ $40K (wsj.com/articles/car-m…). For many in the working class, such prices are unaffordable — but they still need a way to commute to work. Ebikes can provide these workers a lifeline.
But sure, let’s write their needs off as ‘niche.’
By labeling as ‘niche’ trees for lower-income neighborhoods that have disproportionately bare tree canopies, doulas for people of color, and bikes for commuters—while sparing hulking subsidies for electric SUVs—NYT editors subtly indicate what audience they shape the paper for.
This thread is correct. The Texas blackout — the result of derelict regulations — not only claimed dozens of lives. It also made the global chip shortage, currently inflating prices in sectors from cars to appliances, dramatically worse.
A story can be told about how Republican policies — such as the decade of negligence that led to the Texas blackout — contributed to the price surges now afflicting Americans’ budgets. But Democrats have to tell it.
If the 5th Circuit gives a flying fig about “the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions,” a few million people of child-bearing age in Texas would like a word — okay, several — with its judges.
If expansion of the Supreme Court goes too far for some, will lawmakers just consider dismembering the 5th Circuit and reapportioning each of its three states to entirely different circuits?
I mean, hell: throw Republicans a bone by tinkering with the 9th Circuit, too. Just make that division on north/south lines, with Hawaii, California, and Arizona on one hand — and Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and Nevada on the other. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Some critics,” in my view, should:
a) know that “thé” in French is pronounced “tay” — as in “whew, Tay just dissed the bejesus out of Jake Gyllenhaal”;
b) be told “nique tes mères” — in which “tes” is also pronounced “tay.”
If she wanted to affect a French air, she could’ve said “le” instead of “the,” or rolled her “r” and used a short ‘a’ in “conversation.” But the supposition of “some critics” here is absolute horse manure.