everyone on twitter like “dont let THIS EVIL THING TRUMP DID distract you from THAT EVIL THING” as though i didn’t spend a billion blighted years of my life tracking the actions of every single member of one direction and how each permutation should kiss, if they had kissed and if they were no longer kissing; in addition to the actions of their hunk friends, dj friends, dog friends, stylists, evil music video director boyfriend, distant cousins and the children of all of the above.
GOOD MORNING chiclets. As you may have heard, today Congressional Republicans will try to ram through their irresponsible slapdash garbage “healthcare” bill, which will make it even more difficult for poor people to afford getting sick, but on the bright side*, will BIGLY cut taxes for people making over $200k!!! (*I’m being sarcastic. This is not a bright side.)
So guess what! This is a good morning to take two minutes to call your representative to register your opposition to this toxic nonsense bill and affirm your support for your friends, neighbors and countrypeople on Obamacare. The Indivisible Guide has some great scripts with sample dialogue depending on your rep’s stated position. You could also just take the paragraph approach:
Hi, my name is [your name] and I’m a constituent from [your town]. I’m calling to register my opposition to repealing the ACA and replacing it with this slapdash Republican health care bill, which will strip millions of people of lifesaving coverage. The ACA is important to me personally because [I am on Obamacare, I have family/friends/neighbors/students/patients/coworkers on Obamacare; a short personal anecdote is always effective].
If Congress[wo]man [Rep’s name] votes in favor of this bill, it will be a disaster for American healthcare and her/his constituents will remember that in the next election. Could you pass that on to the Congress[wo]man? [wait for them to say yes.] Thanks for your time.
Here’s me and my roommate calling our congressman.
see? its so easy even this idiot can do it. great job everybody. way to save america.
1. YOU DID IT, 2. Is there any sweeter phrase in the English language than “humiliating defeat for President Trump?” I can’t think of one.
u know what … i changed my mind… all u scientists out there who worked ur butts off just to have your research purposefully ignored by the government… do your science thing and bring back the dinosaurs… catch them ignoring you when a velociraptor is our next president…. like ding dong what’s that? it’s science, it doesn’t care about your silly ignorant opinion… it’s back with a vengeance… and it’s hungry, bitch
I hadn’t considered Jurassic Park as a solution to the Dump Truck presidency but I’ll take it
good job giving them all that money suckers. its almost like this could have be forseen by looking at how the ACLU has approached nazism and white supremacy for the entire history of the organization but that might involve a single critical thought
they also protect rapists. My city was/is threatened with a lawsuit from them cause the city has stricter rules about where rapists/sex offenders can live than the norm and apparently ACLU considers it a violation of the rapists’ rights since effectively they can’t live in the city cause there are so many schools and the school zones overlap.
The funny thing about constitutional rights is that they still apply to terrible people.
Believe me, when constitutional rights are not protected, nazis and rapists are not the ones that suffer the most, its religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people and left wing activists.
But hey, rally against your own rights to punish rapists and nazis, and watch how quickly they’re forgiven and we’re the ones pursued. Happens every single time.
The ACLU isn’t perfect but they’re vital to the US and that this can’t be understood means they either don’t get law or don’t get how law interacts with society.
Legally we need ALL speech free, on a governmental level.
Sorry. It would probably delight Milo Yappyweinerdog to NO end to get some kinda ruling against free speech so the people he is playing troll for could immediate turn around and use it against those they hated. You know…us? At what point do you think “The Government had the right to control what a person can talk about.” is going to work out in the favor of minorities? You know, the Government currently run by Trump? You wanna give him that power so you don’t have to deal with Milo Yappyweinerdog showing up on your facebook feed?
It’s not like that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t tell him where to shove it.
Re: the ACLU and the rapists, I’m assuming you live in San Diego and you’re talking about the In Re Taylor case.
Here’s the thing: under Megan’s Law, registrants on the 290 registry (”sex offenders”) were barred from 97% of available housing, and the remaining 3% was often not available to them because, understandably, not many private landlords want to rent to people with sex offenses. What that effectively meant is that registrants, including people who were registered for sex work, public indecency or Romeo-and-Juliet violations, were being forced into homelessness by the government. Because if you are on parole and on the registry, you can’t just decide not to live in San Diego. You’re ordered, by the government, to live in the county you’re assigned to until you’re transferred or off parole. If not, you go back to prison.
So what this meant is that San Diego had a huge homeless population of people with sex offense convictions. People who were living on boats – not yachts, but literal canoes – tied to random docks because it was the only place they could live without being thrown back in prison. And you know who suffers from this? Not just the registrants, but the public. Public safety is not enhanced by making people homeless.
People who cannot live anywhere legally will drop off the grid and dodge their supervision. They won’t check in with their parole officers. They won’t bother to follow the law. They’ll commit more crime just to go back to jail so they have a roof over their head and shitty bare-bones medical care. They’ll steal and lie and beg so they can get enough food to fill their stomachs and they’ll get involved in trafficking and drug-dealing and worse just so they’ll be able to rest their head at night.
What the court found in In Re Taylor, which decided the California registration requirements were unconstitutional, was that those registration were putting more people at risk. It put registrants at risk of homelessness and it put the public at risk of registrants breaking supervision and committing survival crime. The ACLU understood that treating everyone with human dignity and freeing people from oppressive government action – even convicted rapists – was in the internet of public safety.
Human rights apply to everyone, even nazis and people convicted of sex offenses. The question should never be “does this person deserve to have their rights taken away?”. The question should be “do we trust the government to take those rights?”. A government with a history of racism, classism and transphobia, with documented history of suppressing leftist voices?
Right now I don’t trust the government with a plastic fork, and neither does the ACLU.
i am sitting here thinking about how “former sex workers should be allowed to live indoors” got turned into “the ACLU loves rapists and thinks they’re great” and i suspect some right-wing spin control happened in the middle of that process
when the people trying hardest to protect your rights somehow turn out to be Ultra Super Problematic and you’re being encouraged to throw them under the bus, you need to stop and think real hard about why that’s happening and who’s trying to make it happen
the Angry Young Activist tendency to demonize anything that isn’t a perfect snowy shrine of absolute purity ultimately works in favor of the bad guys, because absolutely no one who does real work out in the world is completely unproblematic – LIFE is not unproblematic – so they get you to reject everything genuine and embrace useless symbols, or just get disillusioned and give up
you need to be able to see the value in things like “protecting the constitutional rights of everyone, even assholes” and “supporting candidates who, while not perfect, are better than their opponents” because boy howdy did rejecting clinton because she wasn’t flawless not work out for us
nasa: ok so we found 7 new earth sized planets, 3 of which are habitable
As thousands blockade airports and fill up city streets, a new generation of amateur Kremlinologists is coming forward with its hastily assembled theories, assembled from bureaucratic signifiers, to say that by trying to stop the harm he’s actually doing, all we’ve done is play into his tiny, tiny hands. […] What looks like the beginnings of a breakdown in effective government, or an opportunity, is nothing of the sort. They planned everything, and everything fell into place.
The left is no stranger to this kind of defeatism, and it’s not hard to see why. Capitalism is omnivorous and polymorphously perverse; today’s revolutionary slogans are found on tomorrow’s Coke cans. […] If you look backward from the state of the world today at all the heroic resistance movements that have failed throughout history, it’s easy to think that this was all part of the plan.
Much of this is true, but its effects can be paralyzing. We’ve fucked up so much that it’s made us afraid of victory; faced with an enormous and implacable enemy, there are people who are now convinced that its power is infinite. Whenever it looks like the reactionaries have massively over-reached themselves it’s just part of a larger plan, one that we can’t see. If Steve Bannon’s pants fell down tomorrow and he tottered crying into a muddy pond, there would be someone ready to announce that actually, this made him even more omnipotent than he was before.
[…] It’s almost comforting, in a way, to imagine yourself as a pawn. There’s no moral duty involved: The evil plan is grand and inscrutable; it gives a sense of order in what looks like disintegration, and tells you what your place is in it. But there is a moral duty, and we need to face up to it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes the people in charge are just as blinkered as we are.
posting to emphasize the point that although what’s happening is really, really bad, it is harmful to let ourselves believe that the administration is all-knowing and all-powerful, ingenious masters of strategy. they are not. they have weaknesses and they can be fought. do not give up.
326 Miles 