@EdSanders@mekkaokereke I gave up about 1/4 way through reading the study, for just that reason. It seemed to be trying REALLY hard to equate black folks not trusting American institutions with QANON style craziness. Sure there are some nutty anti-vaxing POC, just like white folks. But almost all POC know about Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Experiment. Did I somehow miss actual history of democrats keeping adolescent sex slaves/adrenochrome donors in the basement of pizza joints?
Covid spread most quickly in cities before we knew how to handle it. Once we knew, things reversed and deaths were overwhelmingly in GOP parts of the country. If you believe otherwise, feel free to educate me. I particularly want to hear about "disinformation amplified through state apparatus"
Congress members who wanted to keep supporting Ukraine had to tie that funding, to border security and Israel funding to get it passed. Who's fault?
@mekkaokereke@noyes@EdSanders@beadsland Cuomo's early response was horrific. But it was the hottest hotspot in the country, which kind of amplified mistakes that were pretty universal as we learned more about the virus. Of course what some places did worked better than others - the nature of real time experimentation with a global public health emergency. African culture has dealt with emerging viral threats for millenia - traditional solutions require sacrifice westerners don't like.
@mekkaokereke@noyes@EdSanders@beadsland I agree 100%. Cuomo did a LOT wrong with covid. It didn't make a lot of national news because news was everywhere and NY's disaster was an outlier and watched most closely by New Yorkers. But ignoring CDC recommendations was overwhelmingly something happening in GOP areas and not Democrat one. My black, Democrat mayor TRIED to execute those policies and was overruled by the white, Republican governor. That wasn't unique to Atlanta.
@mekkaokereke@noyes@EdSanders@beadsland The white, Republican president was pushing states and federal agencies to ignore best practices to save lives to reopen the economy and try to save his reelection campaign.
IMO - Democrats are a lot like Churchill's quote about Democracy being the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.
But in a world where state level propaganda attacks on reality and attempts to influence politics are a reality, blame without alternatives seems pointless.
@mekkaokereke@noyes@EdSanders@beadsland No question. The US failure to invest in sound public health, use of a pandemic as a political wedge issue and cultural resistance to minimal sacrifice, lack of science education, etc was a systemic and cultural failure. Sitting on the porch hearing car horns honking and people cheering at healthcare shift change o'clock was amazing. Pretty much everything else showed me that my country is horrifically and maybe terminally flawed.
@inthehands@justafrog@mekkaokereke The power of government exists to protect people like me from "others". Donald Trump is "like me", hence government (especially when embodied by DAs, prosecutors and jury members who are "others") is out of control and to be resisted.
@inthehands To be fair, Trump is just saying the quiet part out loud. It's not like oil companies don't know which party is happy to let them spill oil across the Gulf of Mexico, Alaskan wilderness and native american reservations, while boiling the oceans with global warming in the quest to keep giant pedestrian crushing trucks red state america loves to drive supplied with cheap gas.
@lesley@inthehands@mekkaokereke ARE there "weed out" intro courses though? It's been a long time since my undergrad days, but weed stuff was usually late 2nd year, when there were gateways to move to adjacent disciplines.
Tennessee's version of conservative Christian sharia is somehow even worse than The Handmaid's Tale. At least in Gilead the state was responsible enough to take care of the children.
@inthehands I have a muslim high school friend, whose parents moved to the US in the late 70s (to a faculty position at Mississippi State University). She was really terrified of Trump's rhetoric and election and I rather naively felt that opening up the racism to sunlight would get us to a better place. I still feel that way on a good day. But Trump's SCOTUS nominations and the GOP's fear of the backlash of his bigot base make me feel she may have been right all along.
@inthehands The City too Busy to Hate, has always been the city that lets big corporations sway it's policies. In 1964, Coca-Cola, pushed conservative, white political leaders into honoring Martin Luther King when he won the Nobel Prize. These days, however, the monied power types are doing exactly what MLK warned about in favoring stability over justice and allowing a giant, corporate-funded non-profit, with conservative ties and donations to twist the arms of our black politicians.
@inthehands You could move to Atlanta, where our APD responded to BLM protests awfully aggressively for the "City too busy to hate", and to the firing and arrest of APD officers who killed Rayshard Brooks with a massive blue flu. In reward the privately funded Atlanta Police Foundation (the largest in the country) has secured commitments from the city for $60M in construction costs and rent to build Cop City. And the city will need to add another $30 or so million to fully fund.
@inthehands@clayrivers@StillIRise1963 I have the complete Calvin and Hobbes in hardcover I got on 1/2 price sale a few years ago, and knew there was a Calvin and Hobbes that was an absolutely artful example of lying to your kid to deal with questions, but had lost the details of how that bit worked to the halls of memory. Thanks!
Professional - Product Manager specializing in B2C, Media, Advertising and Marketing TechnologyPersonal - Old school C-list blogger, hoping to undo the damage surveillance tech has done to the Cluetrain future we envisioned. Listening to minority/underserved communities and amplifying them is the path forward.Alter Identity - Jonny Spins: enthusiastic dance music DJ. Let's do something cool together