But Voting Is Illegal

I thought we were mostly done with this after 2016. I thought we’d cleaned up the lingering bits of it after the 2018 midterms. But as the push to get people registered to vote in the 2020 primaries and general election ramps up, I’m seeing it again.

“If voting made a difference, it would be illegal.”

There’s just one problem with that. Voting is illegal.

Oh, it might not be illegal for you. If you belong to a population that isn’t over-policed and over-sentenced, if you were born in and have a stable residence in a “nice” (i.e., white and relatively wealthy) neighborhood, if your appearance is unremarkable among the voters at your polling station, then yeah, it’s probably perfectly legal for you to vote.

That doesn’t mean this is true for everyone else. Continue reading “But Voting Is Illegal”

But Voting Is Illegal
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Things I Believe About Impeachment

A short list.

  • Public opinion doesn’t favor impeachment of Trump at this point.
  • If Trump is impeached, there is essentially 0% chance of the Senate voting to remove him from office.
  • Running against Pence in 2020 would be substantially harder than running against Trump.
  • The number one achievable political goal at this point, for the health of the country and the marginalized people within it, has to be Republicans losing control of as many governmental bodies as possible, starting with the executive branch but including Congress.
  • A small number of past Representatives who have voted to impeach have lost their seats at least in part because of these votes.
  • Many of Trump’s most damning crimes from an impeachment perspective involve acts that would be legal if he were a private citizen and live in an area of law few people other than specialists understand.
  • Impeachment proceedings will be viewed by some moderate/independent voters as a partisan act by Democrats.
  • Right-wing media, corporate and independent, would use impeachment proceedings to attack Democrats, often dishonestly, and there is a large segment of the voting population that only trusts these outlets.
  • The administration’s response to impeachment proceedings would provoke multiple constitutional crises of various sizes under an untested, very partisan Supreme Court.
  • Most Democrats in the House who haven’t come out in favor of impeachment are considering some or all of these factors and are right to do so carefully.
  • Even given all this, it’s critical for the survival of our constitutional system and many, many people that we move to impeach.
Things I Believe About Impeachment

Putting Sealions to Work

I’ve been gearing up to get back to more regular blogging here for a while without actually doing it. As commenting has shifted to social media, so have a lot of my observations of the world. But I don’t want to be dependent on sites that aren’t mine for retaining the things I have to say, so I’m going to try to put more of this here.

Today, I posted an anonymized snippet of conversation:

Them: If I’m wrong, why won’t you try to educate me instead of saying I’m ignorant?

Me: Have you read the article you’re commenting on yet?

I posted it because it amused me. Then a friend commented that the original sounded a lot like sealioning. Of course, that’s exactly what it is.

This person has already been arguing (read: asserting their opinion) at length. I’ve been commenting mostly short posts in return, pointing out they’ve already told me they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re frustrated because they’re working harder than I am and getting nowhere. So they’re trying to challenge me to do more.

Sealions: You can’t talk about this topic without doing a lot of work to defend yourself.

This person: You telling me I’m ignorant isn’t valid unless you do a lot of work to fix it.

Same argument, slightly different wording.

So why am I blogging this? Because my friend’s question made me realize that this is why sealioning fails so badly around me.

Even before we had a name for this kind of bad-faith arguing, we had sealions. Oh, did we have sealions. And I developed strategies back then that still serve me well dealing with them today. Namely, if someone wants me to do work, they need to demonstrate they’re willing to put in work themselves. Also, they need to do it first.

A lot of people don’t like that last part. Not just sealions, but onlookers too think it’s unfair not to go into this with the assumption people are really there for conversation. I don’t really care. It’s my labor. They’re my conditions.

At the same time, I’m already doing work. These interactions tend to start something like this: Continue reading “Putting Sealions to Work”

Putting Sealions to Work

So You Want a Positive Primary

I hear you. The unending negativity directed at Hillary Clinton over the last several decades certainly didn’t help turn her voters out in 2016. Neither did the disproportionately negative press. All the general cynicism about government made Trump’s “Drain the swamp” palatable to some where it should have been laughable. You don’t want that to happen again.

Neither do I. I’m overwhelmed and anxious about the ongoing harm that needs immediate reducing, and I’m not going to be any less ready to make that vote when I can actually do it in a year and a half.

Come fall of 2020, even if Trump is impeached and not running, I’ll be all about “blue no matter who”. In every election with a moderately plausible Republican candidate, not just for the presidency. The party has shown it doesn’t believe in democratic governance. It needs to be treated as invalid.

But it’s 2019. Still spring for a couple of weeks. And during this primary season, we’re having real, important discussions about what we want our country to be. Continue reading “So You Want a Positive Primary”

So You Want a Positive Primary

On Lefty Gatekeeping

I’m really not ready for 2020 elections talk yet. There’s a lot of work to do just to get that far while remaining a democracy, and watching the hyperfocus on the presidency at the expense of all other politics is like sleeping on 100-grit sheets. With Biden and Sanders.

Still, the 2018 election is done. There are myriad implications to be talked over and contrasted and turned into feelers for this or that potential candidate. So I’ll talk about this now and again as warranted, if reluctantly.

Today’s political thoughts are brought to you by this look at Beto O’Rourke’s voting record.

But Sanders actually did not amass the most left-wing voting record in the 115th Senate. That distinction belongs to Elizabeth Warren. Kamala Harris was No. 2, Cory Booker was No. 3, and then Sanders and Tammy Baldwin are basically the same. Kirsten Gillibrand is closer to the middle of the pack but still more liberal than 76 percent of Senate Democrats.

A rough equivalent to O’Rourke’s record would be Amy Klobuchar, who in the most recent Senate was more conservative than 72 percent of Senate Democrats. She has had a voting record that’s a bit to the right of the median Democrat’s throughout her time as a senator.

What does this mean for what we want in a presidential candidate? That depends on what kind of relative importance you place on campaign contributions vs. turning out minority voters vs. turning out the undecided middle vs. blah, I’m bored now. I’m not here for making big predictions for the future. There are, however, a couple of points I want to make related to this. Continue reading “On Lefty Gatekeeping”

On Lefty Gatekeeping

On Advantages and the “Unfairness” Thereof

I woke up to a bunch of “But Clinton had an unfair advantage in the primaries because of the decisions she was able to make.” The thing is, though, I don’t care. Not one tiny little bit.

I care that Donna Brazile characterized all this so very badly. I care that she was left hanging by her publisher and Politico. Both should have done substantial fact-checking on a claim this contentious, and neither seems to have done any. Politico in particular had published accounts of the joint fundraising agreements in 2015 that at least needed to be addressed and which were the starting point of unraveling Brazile’s account of hidden skullduggery.

I care that the DNC was left in such a sorry state. I’m disturbed that I haven’t seen any outlet reporting that they reached out to Obama and Biden for comment on that. Bankrupting the DNC is not just not a small thing in itself, but it created the opportunity for an ethical quagmire that, from reports, it took the party and the candidates months to work through.

I care that fundraising is such a central part of our campaigns. I hate that two-year-long campaigns require professionalization of staff (even as I know we can’t do the short campaigns of a parliamentary system). I hate the constant message inherent in fundraising appeals that you have to have money to spare to support candidates. I hate what the need to not scare off money does to our political speech.

But I don’t remotely care that Sanders may have screwed himself by opting out of fixing the party he wanted to have back him. Continue reading “On Advantages and the “Unfairness” Thereof”

On Advantages and the “Unfairness” Thereof

Retconning Mythinformation Con

After last weekend’s debacle at Mythicist Milwaukee’s conference, which included the audience cheering on harassment of a rape victim and victim’s advocate, Mythinformation Con speaker Melissa Chen has decided she knows what really happened. It was impressive enough that I had to share. My comments are included.

Now that #MythCon is over, I see the entire tempest in a teapot that resulted in a very different light. This was more than just an attempt by a radical faction of atheist activists who are fully aligned with the political machinations of ANTIFA to deplatform speakers they didn’t want to hear.

This was presumably Chen’s original position on those objecting to having a professional harasser there. I’m half giggling over “We show up where those we believe to be fascist are engaging in organized action and disrupt or protect those who do” being rendered as “political machinations” and half wondering when the self-appointed hyperbole police are going to show up. Chen posted this several days ago. Dan Arel identifies as antifa (no capital letters required), but to the best of my knowledge, Steve Shives and Kristi Winters have mostly refuted anti-antifa nonsense. If that makes people politically dangerous in Chen’s mind, there are an awful lot of us she’s eyeing as enemies.

Also, this has never been about not wanting to hear people. Winters spearheaded the effort to get Mythicist Milwaukee to remove Sargon as a speaker. She’s listened to more nonsense from Sargon than anyone but his most undying fans. She documented his behavior. She debated him. If Chen ever believed this was about anyone objecting to hearing him personally, she might want to spend more time checking her assumptions about people with differing politics.

It was more than just a campaign to be a thorn in the side of organizers (Mythicist Milwaukee) by driving up security costs with audacious claims to local police and media with no basis in truth.

You can tell me the fans of Gamergater shitlords aren’t dangerous when their targets stop being doxxed and swatted. When their targets’ events stop being cancelled because of shooting threats. When their “ironazi” flags stop showing up at rallies where people die. Then I’ll listen.

Until then, you’re just telling me you’re either not paying attention or not being honest.

This was ultimately about keeping atheism activism within the bounds of “Atheism Plus.”

2012 YouTube called. It wants its authoritarian bogeyman back. Continue reading “Retconning Mythinformation Con”

Retconning Mythinformation Con

Property Damage as Violence

There’s a lot of good analysis out there right now deconstructing media and other attempts to paint antifa protests as the mirror image of white supremacist rallies featuring Nazis and KKK members. I like this one in particular, because it breaks down how it’s done.

So. It wasn’t too long before “alt-right” meant something negative again (as it should). Which is why calling antifa its antithesis, “alt-left,” is notable. Without the racially critical lens that white supremacy tries to avoid, “alt-right” can be reduced to meaning that one is way too conservative, to the point that it is impolite and problematic. And because white people have shown historically that they are bad with definitions (coincidence? unlikely), most would opt to assume that “alt-left” simply means being way too liberal.

Most of them I don’t share, though, because they’ll be rolling along just fine then pop out with something like “And stop saying property damage is violence!” Oops. Continue reading “Property Damage as Violence”

Property Damage as Violence

Policing Self-Defense

[CN: on top of all the Nazi stuff, talk about the threat of sexual assault]

Black-and-white photo of a large monument consisting of a stone fist atop a stone pedestal. An unreadable sign is taped to the fist.
“Fist of Freedom” (a monument to Nelson Mandela) by sacks08, CC BY 2.0

Yesterday I asked whether the people still telling me not to punch Nazis after Charlottesville were telling me to be martyred or to stand aside while someone else is.

Mostly I didn’t get any answers. I expected that. That’s what happens when “Just say ‘no’ to violence!” runs into situations where violence is inherent and inevitable. Ironically, the act of making an option unspeakable makes the pro-rational discussion with Nazis crowd unable to discuss current events rationally. Weird. (Not at all weird.)

I also ran into a couple of people yesterday who would prefer martyrdom to enacting any violence. That’s fine. I can’t relate to it in any way, but I don’t have to. It’s a personal choice. But it being a personal choice means you don’t get to impose it on me or anyone else. You don’t get to choose that someone else dies in the name of nonviolence.

I did get one response that boiled down to “Well, it’s okay in self-defense. No, I mean immediate self-defense.” Continue reading “Policing Self-Defense”

Policing Self-Defense

The Power—and Danger—of Story in Activism

It didn’t take long after Trump’s initial attempt at putting his promised Muslim ban in place by executive order for the stories to come rolling in.

There were people who disembarked from their planes, only to find they were no longer welcome in what was to be their new country. There were families, some with children, trapped and neglected in the limbo that is an airport on the wrong side of Customs and Immigration. There were heroic young attorneys sitting on hard floors, clustered around the outlets usually monopolized by business travelers.

There were Iraqi military translators who had risked their lives for our soldiers, sent back to a less-than-united country where their service was viewed by some as treason. There were students whose studies and research came to an abrupt halt when they couldn’t re-enter the country. There were doctors stretched thin across rural populations who faced the choice of never seeing their families again or abandoning their already underserved patients.

There were workers coerced into signing away the documents that make them “legal” immigrants instead of the faceless horrors of our national imagination. There were children awaiting live-saving medical coverage. There were athletes turned away trying to compete. There was a photogenic prime minister next door, always ready for slivers of positive coverage.

There were tears and patience and hunger and dashed hopes and confusion and righteous protests against blatantly unnecessary cruelties. There were stories. There were so many stories. Continue reading “The Power—and Danger—of Story in Activism”

The Power—and Danger—of Story in Activism