Meet The Black Women Who turned Georgia Blue: “Yep, it was Stacey. But don’t forget about Nsé, Helen, Tamieka, Melanie, LaTosha and Deborah.”
Politics
I’m pretty strongly liberal — about as far left as one can go without falling into libertarianism. Posts collected under this tag will likely reflect that viewpoint.
Trifecta
I hoped, but didn’t expect, that Georgia would come through. I am so happy to have my expectations proven wrong and my hopes realized.
As I write this, Warnock has been declared the winner, and Ossoff is leading by more votes than Biden won GA’s presidential ballot by. This is momentous: GA elected a Democrat President, two Democrat Senators, and flipped one House seat blue (which GA with a 6-8 Republican majority in House seats).
Which means that, for the first time since 2011, Democrats will hold the House, Senate, and Presidency.
And Mitch McConnell will finally lose his Majority Leader position and, with it, his ability to block legislation from being passed (somewhere upwards of 400 bills passed by the House stopped at his desk).
And we need to make that count.
Democrats need to do everything they can to pass legislation that actually helps as many people as possible, to right the imbalances that have mounted over the past years, and to trumpet their successes so that we hold on to this advantage when the 2022 midterms come around.
The first two priorities that come to my mind are COVID-19 relief and expanding voting protections and accessibility, but there are many more.
There’s still a lot of work to do, of course, especially considering the number of judges that Trump has been able to seat throughout the country. But at least now, we have a good chance of actually being able to get things done.
Halfway Between the Truth and the Lie
Rebecca Solnit’s essay “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway” is excellent.
…the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?
If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to.
I Guess I Just Expected a Little More from This Country: “How could a people that had to be explicitly told not to eat Tide Pods be so short-sighted? Or are some things simply beyond explanation?”
Toolkit for Supporting GA US Senate Races – Jan 2021 (FEEL FREE TO SHARE!): “This doc is a volunteer-generated effort by Ana Diaz-Hernandez. Follow her on Twitter at @anadzhz. Ana is originally from South GA and wants to help folks from out of state plug in to help.”
U.S. election maps are wildly misleading, so this designer fixed them: A nice background piece on the viral “land doesn’t vote, people do” animation switching between a standard county-by-county electoral map and one with points sized by population.
Black People Repudiated Trump Like He Was a Piece of Used Gum: It’s time for centrist Democrats to stop whining about Black Lives Matters protests and start recognizing that Black voters literally saved the election.
2020 Should Be the Last Time We Vote Like This: “For decades, limiting who gets to vote has been a key strategy of the Republican Party — though usually people on the right have not been quite so proud of this fact. This year, as has happened often with Donald Trump, subtext became text.”
Post-Election Day Blues
Having a hard time this morning.
My usual optimism and hope is extremely shaky.
I keep reminding myself that several important states are still in play and that there’s still a decent (maybe even good) chance that Biden will win.
But even if he does, it’s far too close.
I keep reminding myself that many of the races are being heavily affected by gerrymandered districts, limited opportunities to vote, restrictions on when and how votes can be accepted, and other voter suppression tactics primarily concentrated in minority and Democract-leaning areas.
But even so, it’s far too close.
There are so many people in this country who are willingly voting for hate. For fear. For oppression. For racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, and every other -ism and -phobia out there. Against science. Against compassion. Against care for others. Against their own best interests.
McConnell, who has made a career of doing nothing, has been elected for another six-year term. We don’t know if we’ll even be able to hold the Senate to an even split, let alone take control; if the Republicans keep control, then even if Biden wins, McConnell will continue to make sure that nothing of import makes it through. The confirmation of Barrett made it clear how fast things can move when allowed to proceed, even while hundreds of bills aimed at actually helping the American people sit ignored, because they were passed by a Democrat-controlled House, and so they aren’t worthy of consideration in McConnell’s eyes.
I just, on a very fundamental, moral, and ethical level, do not understand why so many are so willing to actively support harming themselves and others.
And it’s really hard to hold on to my usual hopeful nature right now.
A New American Manifesto
From the People of the United States of America: From time to time in human societies, things get so bad with the governments that we set up that we have to take a step back, stop being citizens of that government and just be basic humans again, loyal only to the primary needs of humanity. This is one of those times and it’s only fair if we are going to take such a drastic step, that we first explain why. We owe everybody that.
This is good. And just in case it sounds a little familiar….