tingilinde

it's not tribalism

It's racism  (via The Atlantic)

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I am not arguing that the Democratic Party or its members are particularly virtuous. A little more than a century ago, it was the Republican Party that was reliant on a diverse coalition of voters, and the Democratic Party that rode white rage to power. Rather, I am saying that when a party’s viability is dependent on a diverse coalition of voters, that party will necessarily stand for pluralism and equal rights, because its survival depends on it. And when a party is not diverse, it will rely on demonizing those who are different, because no constituency exists within that party to prevent it from doing so, or to show its members that they have nothing to fear..

In the Trump era, America finds itself with two political parties: one that’s growing more reliant on the nation’s diversity, and one that sees its path to power in stoking fear and rage toward those who are different. America doesn’t have a “tribalism” problem. It has a racism problem. And the parties are not equally responsible.

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don't blame the young

Why young people don't vote. 

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Our system has adopted universal suffrage, which points toward open and easy access to the ballot, but our heritage in political exclusivity—where voting was once a privilege reserved for property-owning white men—continues to influence our handling of elections. Voter identification laws are tied to a sordid history of discrimination and vote suppression, but even procedures as uncontroversial as voter registration contain assumptions about who should participate. (Indeed, voter registration was first developed as a method to keep recent immigrants and the poor from the ballot box in Northern cities and was used similarly against black Americans in the Jim Crow South.) Our voting system is tilted toward people with stable, conventional lives. And that, overwhelmingly, is who participates, producing a conservative bias in the status quo.

Our government is less representative than it could be because of our voter-unfriendly policies. So even if you disdain young people who can’t find the will or time to vote—even if you’re unsympathetic toward the uninspired or the uninterested—you should want to fix this problem.

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a tip of the hat to Helen

 

 

on the demise of the moderate republican

The New Yorker on a nearly extinct species.

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The Tuesday Group is about the same size as the Freedom Caucus, but it is far less cohesive, which allows the Republican leadership to isolate each of its members. “People like me—you can pick us off one at a time,” Costello said. “We might all be centrists, but we’re centrists for different reasons. Some might be more pro-environment, some are more pro-labor.” The Freedom Caucus holds the real power in Congress. Voting discipline, once imposed by whips and committee chairmen, is now enforced by the most extreme conservatives in the House, and by the activist base and the right-wing media, which can intimidate members of Congress with primary challenges and orchestrated attacks. The deadliest threat of all comes from the President, who ended the career of Representative Mark Sanford, a critical-minded conservative from South Carolina, with a single contemptuous tweet a few hours before the polls closed on primary night in June: “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to maga. He is mia and nothing but trouble.” I asked Dent why more Republican members of Congress hadn’t raised their voices against Trump. “I can answer in one word,” he said. “Fear.”

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the voter response to the republican war on education

 

 

                                                                

                                                                                                                    (via 538)

 

autistic boys and trains

An attraction .. oddly it is predominately male.   What do autistic girls like?

 

 

 

carl sagan's birthday

He would have been 88

 

from A Demon Haunted World

 

the acting attorney general

an evangelical Christian version of Sharia law.

what if the uk were more like the us?

What if the House of Lords was modeling on the US Senate and the House of Commons on the House of Representatives?

what could possibly go wrong:-)

 

 

how law enforcement overlooked white extremism

Terry Gross interviewing Janet Reitman of The New York Times Magazine on the failure of law enforcement to address white extremism - audio and transcript. 

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And that's, like - that gets to the core of actually in some ways who we are as a society. A society based around institutions that have built by and to benefit white people has a very hard time looking at itself and seeing language and offensive ideology as dangerous, whereas, you know, you could see, for example, a kid putting the black flag of jihad on his Twitter feed. That's actually almost an act of war. That's something that could earn you an investigation. You know, there were kids who were investigated by the federal government. And, you know, there were material support cases opened on kids based on what they - initially based on what they were talking about on their social media pages.

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racism, sexism and the republican party

an interesting analysis

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Thus, the data here suggest that after two years as president, Trump’s sexism has begun to become part of the Republican Party’s branding for GOP House candidates. As such, in 2018 it became yet another identity-based line of division between Republican and Democratic voters. But, importantly, it also appears to be a branding problem for the Republican Party. Specifically, the evidence here suggests that Republican House candidates did not gain votes among sexist voters, but they lost support among those with less sexist attitudes. This is a pattern that helps to explain the dramatic increase in Democratic voting among college-educated women in 2018. It’s a natural reaction not only to how Republican lawmakers have increasingly embraced Trump’s sexist rhetoric since 2016 (most notably on display during the divisive debate over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh), but also due to the successful mobilization of women’s rights groups during the past two years. As a result, Republicans appear to have paid a price for their party’s sexism in 2018 and the consequences for them may persist well beyond this election.

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