Are you saying you don’t think Rashida Tlaib is one of the Democratic party’s own? Or that disinformation from the Russian government is real? Because I strongly disagree with the first one but strongly agree with the latter.
Side note: rhetorical questions are frequently very unhelpful for forthright communication.
If memory serves, Shelby was just about the ability of the DOJ to require states from the former Confederacy to get DOJ’s approval before making any changes to their election laws, where this is about DOJ’s ability to monitor any state’s actual implementation of their election laws
Either way, illegitimate decision from an illegitimate court that wouldn’t have any precedential value if we lived in a decent country, but yeah, back in the one we actually live in who knows what is and isn’t legal anymore.
e; DOJs? I’m pretty sure there’s just the one, autocorrect
They have something to hide. They don’t want the feds showing up and messing up their plans to intimidate voters.
Speaking of which, lest anyone think this is just a Trump thing and that the GOP was all good before he showed up, check out what William Rehnquist and Barry Goldwater were up to on the 1960s (arc’d) (tl;dr harassing black and Mexican voters with literacy tests).
Police will surely never harass you if you’re not actually doing anything wrong /s
Doesn’t seem particularly confusing to me, Thurston Moore figured it out.
From the above article,
In a separate statement attached to the letter, Thurston Moore said: “If any concerned, humanitarian-conscious activists employ a boycott to protest brutal injustice in their country and request artists and scholars to refrain from working and/or being promoted as supportive of the normalization of that country—then I choose NOT to cross that line and suggest to all to not be complicit. It is a small sacrifice in respect to those who struggle in honourable opposition to state-sponsored fascism.”
The open letter to them that was signed by artists from Sonic Youth, TV on the Radio, and a bunch of other artists and activists says it better than I could,
We understand you’ve been approached already by Palestinian campaigners. They’ve asked you to respect their call for a cultural boycott of Israel, and you’ve turned them down. Since Radiohead campaigns for freedom for the Tibetans, we’re wondering why you’d turn down a request to stand up for another people under foreign occupation. And since Radiohead fronted a gig for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we’re wondering why you’d ignore a call to stand against the denial of those rights when it comes to the Palestinians. **
Radiohead once issued a statement saying: ‘Without the work of organisations like Amnesty International, the Universal Declaration would be mere rhetoric’. You’ve clearly read Amnesty’s reports, so you’ll know that Israel denies freedom to the Palestinians under occupation, who can’t live where they want, can’t travel as they please, who get detained (and often tortured) without charge or trial, and can’t even use Facebook without surveillance, censorship and arrest.
In asking you not to perform in Israel, Palestinians have appealed to you to take one small step to help pressure Israel to end its violation of basic rights and international law. Surely if making a stand against the politics of division, of discrimination and of hate means anything at all, it means standing against it everywhere – and that has to include what happens to Palestinians every day.
Otherwise the rest is, to use your words, ‘mere rhetoric’.
You may think that sharing the bill with Israeli musicians Dudu Tassa & the Kuwaitis, who play Jewish-Arabic music, will make everything OK. It won’t, any more than ‘mixed’ performances in South Africa brought closer the end of the apartheid regime. Please do what artists did in South Africa’s era of oppression: stay away, until apartheid is over.
I would also like to share this story in the Washington Post (arc’d) about how some Republican states are refusing to allow DOJ election monitors in even though that seems like a violation of federal law, but every time I try to post it I get an error message
That’d be a fair excuse for what they’ve done if they were totally ignorant of what Israel’s government has done, but they’ve been told by Desmond Tutu and a bunch of other people. They had a fully informed opportunity to pick their side and they picked it, so they really shouldn’t be surprised when this keeps happening to them.
Sounds like they didn’t hear he was involved until they’d already been trafficked
From the Wired article linked within,
One of the canvassers, who was flown in from outside the Midwest, tells WIRED they had no idea they would be knocking on doors in support of Trump or that the subcontractor they were working for was part of Elon Musk’s voter-turnout operation through America PAC.
“I knew nothing of the job, or much of the job description, other than going door to door and asking the voters who are they voting for,” says a door knocker who was one of the people in the back of the van and who is requesting anonymity because they signed a nondisclosure agreement. “Then, after I signed over an NDA, is when I found out we are for Republicans and with Trump.”
The door knocker adds that they had “overheard my supervisor and a few others mention Elon Musk” by name, marking the first time they had heard of the billionaire X owner’s involvement.
Do you think the department of education writes the textbooks, standardized tests (SAT, ACT, etc.), grading and student management software, learning management systems (Google Classroom, Canvas), or manufactures its own classroom tech (Chromebooks, tablets)?
Each one of those has a bunch of particular nuances, but in general - yeah, I think they could and should in a lot of those cases
The education system is full of for-profit businesses that can jack up the prices, and they do.
Yeah, it’s a big problem with a lot of little parts to be tackled
The DOE simply doesn’t have the resources to create these things themselves
Then government should give them the resources (actually, I think a whole separate agency that develops open source software for any government agency or anyone else who wants to use them should be established, but that’s kind of besides the point).
and would cost them far more if they tried
I don’t think that’s true, and even if it were I think we should be willing to pay premium to make sure essential systems that support the public good are being administered in democratic ways (e.g. by public agencies that are required to give public reports to elected lawmakers and be subject to citizens’ FOIA requests).
the business model has existed forever
A lot of stupid ideas hang on for a really long time. Like, we still have monarchies in the 21st century world.
Personally, I’m more concerned with the use of Google products in schools. A company that’s sole business is harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers should have no place in schools or children’s products. But they’ve embedded themselves into everything so people just accept it at the cost of privacy
I 100% agree this is a significant problem too, I just haven’t come across any good articles about it recently
I’d be fine with a conviction for armed robbery in either of those first two scenarios (and would excuse the store clerk from any charges because they didn’t know the weapon was unloaded so it’s reasonable self defense), but not murder. If we make everything a murder charge it just increases the incentive for robbers not to leave any witnesses.
(On the other hand, if you rob someone with a loaded gun and just say you never intended to actually hurt anyone I could probably be persuaded to call it attempted murder).
Meanwhile, because she’s black in Texas prosecutors are still trying to throw Crystal Mason in prison for an actual innocent mistake from all the way back in 2016 - https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/civil-rights-attorneys-urge-court-to-uphold-crystal-masons-acquittal-in-fraud-case/3684918/
Meanwhile, because she’s black in Texas prosecutors are still trying to throw Crystal Mason in prison for an actual innocent mistake all the way back in 2016 - https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/civil-rights-attorneys-urge-court-to-uphold-crystal-masons-acquittal-in-fraud-case/3684918/
Rob a liquor store with an unloaded gun but someone present has a heart attack? Murder.
Rob a liquor store with an unloaded gun but the guy behind the counter pulls out a loaded one and kills your accomplise? Also murder.
Buy some heroin for you and your partner to use, leading you both to overdose, but you survive? Believe it or not, also murder.
e; Whether or not you think these make sense is beside the point, it’s an obvious double standard when the lack of intent doesn’t matter for these crimes but it gets this guy a walk
Exactly, they’re a captive audience, and moreover they are legally incompetent to consent to a contracted business relationship like this
If this was a department of education AI or even some kind of transparently administered non-profit organization I’d be fine with this, but the fact that this is being developed for some for profit company that can just jack their rates and cut off public schools whenever they want to is bullshit. Like, I’m not opposed to the technology of LLMs at all, I think they’re actually pretty neat, but our social and economic systems have a lot of exploitative trash in them that cool technologies can inadvertently exacerbate.
I’m honestly not sure how that contradicts what I was trying to say there, but yeah as for my source the next paragraph of the same article
The [supreme court] justices acted on Virginia’s appeal after a federal judge found that the state illegally purged more than 1,600 voter registrations in the past two months [and told Virginia to put them back and allow them to vote like they would have been in the first place]. A federal appeals court had previously allowed the judge’s order to remain in effect.
So to recap, these voters were registered, Virginia tried to purge them less than 90 days before an election, a federal court told them to stop that and return things to normal, and the supreme court said “no, don’t stop,” so the AP headline that basically says “supreme court stops stop” seems overly convoluted to me and like it’s kind of burying the lede here
Yeah, that’s exactly what I meant and tbh I’m not sure how people didn’t get that. Also, the state of Virginia is being active here by purging these voters in the first place. Status quo bias is a real thing and the AP seems to be bending over backwards to use it to make Republicans in Virginia and on the supreme court seem more reasonable than they’re being.
If she honestly believes that she’s an idiot, and if she doesn’t she’s way too comfortable with lying to the American people about important issues. The truth of the matter is that if a person has supported the Republican party in the last five decades they are dangerous garbage, and unless they’re willing to put in the work to recycle themselves into something more positive we need to contain them and have their toxicity diluted to the point where it can’t hurt anyone, just like we would with any other waste. Elected Dems ignoring this difficult but painfully obvious truth is why our politics have kept getting worse as the Republicans have gotten crazier and faced no consequences for it.
Ok, if I’m interpreting you correctly, you’re saying it would be absurd to call Tlaib a Russian asset, but no one has actually done that, and OP’s preemptive accusation that Democratic party spokespeople and/or us dumbdumbs will say that is a concealed and unfounded accusation? Because that I think I agree with (at least the unfounded part, I don’t know if there was intent to conceal or if this was just a clumsy but good faith effort at expressing an opinion you and I disagree with).
On the other hand, if you’re calling a Palestinian American lawmaker a Russian asset (e.g. unAmerican, fifth columnist, etc., which is all xenophobic John Bircher crap I’ve got no patience for) I’ve got a really strong disagreement with you, but it seems like that is the opposite of what you’re saying.