On Being An Ally

NPR:

White people policing black presence is not new. I think it's safe to say it had been tamped down a bit, but lately it seems to be making quite the comeback.

And I don't think it's just because we can be made aware of it more easily. SPLC documents a pretty significant rise in the incidence of "hate crimes", coinciding neatly with the growing popularity of  - oh, I dunno - Donald Fucking Trump(?)

Anyway, "If you see something, say something" is a favorite meme of the Daddy State. We can flip that script and use it to hold these authoritarian assholes accountable.

Today's Divide-N-Conquer

Christian Science Monitor:

If you search Twitter for the hashtag #FamiliesBelongTogether, a tag created by activists opposing the forcible separation of migrant children from their parents, you might be in for a pop proofreading quiz.

That’s because, in some locations in the United States, the top trending term, the one that Twitter automatically predicts as you type it, contains a small typo, like #FamiliesBelongTogther.

The misspelled hashtag, and others like it, have enjoyed unusual popularity on the social platform.

- and -

This is not an accident, say data scientists, but the result of a deliberate, automated misinformation campaign. The misspelled hashtags are decoys, aimed at diffusing the reach of the original by breaking the conversation into smaller groups. These decoys can dilute certain voices and distort public perception of beliefs and values.

“This is becoming more like a mind game,” says Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “If they can reach a good amount of activity, they are changing the conversation from one hashtag to another.”

It's a very old problem-solving metaphor: Try to eat the whole steak all at once, and you choke on it. So you cut in into bite-sized chunks - and enjoy your meal.

hat tip = Blue Gal

Show Up Or Shut Up

The Brennan Center For Justice (PDF):

On April 19, 2016, thousands of eligible Brooklyn voters dutifully showed up to cast their ballots in the presidential primary, only to find their

names missing from the voter lists. An investigation by the New York state attorney general found that New York City’s Board of Elections had improperly deleted more than 200,000 names from the voter rolls.

In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state provided a list to the state’s 75 county clerks suggesting that more than 7,700 names be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That roster was highly inac- curate; it included people who had never been convicted of a felony, as well as persons with past convictions whose voting rights had been restored.

And in Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when the state relied on a faulty database to delete voters who allegedly had moved out of the commonwealth. Error rates in some counties ran as high as 17 percent.

These voters were victims of purges — the some- times-flawed process by which election officials attempt to remove ineligible names from voter registration lists. When done correctly, purges ensure the voter rolls are accurate and up-to-date. When done incorrectly, purges disenfranchise legitimate voters (often when it is too close to an election to rectify the mistake), causing confusion and delay at the polls.

Ahead of upcoming midterm elections, a new Brennan Center investigation has examined data for more than 6,600 jurisdictions that report purge rates to the Election Assistance Commission and calculated purge rates for 49 states.

We found that between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls, and every state in the country can and should do more to protect voters from improper purges.2

Almost 4 million more names were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.3This growth in the number of removed voters represented an increase of 33 percent — far outstripping growth in both total registered voters (18 percent) and total population (6 percent).

Some of the more egregious highlights (per The Root):

• In June 2016, the Arkansas secretary of state gave a list of 7,700 names to county clerks to be removed from the rolls because of supposed felony convictions. That list included people who had never been convicted of a felony and formerly convicted persons whose voting rights had been restored.
• In 2013, Virginia deleted 39,000 names from its voting roster. In some counties, the mistakes on the list were as high as 17 percent.
• A federal court halted a purge after Hurricane Katrina after justices found that one-third of the purged names came from a majority black parish in of New Orleans.
• After the Shelby v. Holder decision, Texas purged 363,000 more voters than it did the election cycle before the case. Georgia purged 1.5 million more voters.
• Alabama, Indiana and Maine have illegally instituted the widely ridiculed Crosscheck system (on which Charles D. Ellison previously reported on for The Root) that purges voters without federally-mandated notification.
• In 1986, one Louisiana official remarked that a voter purge effort “could really keep the black vote down considerably.”
• Instead of checking out inequities, Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has been urging states to do more purging.

Making a habit of voting every chance you get is sine qua non in a democracy. Now you have to make it a habit to check to make sure some asshole Republican isn't rat-fucking you out of your right to self-government.

vote.org

"Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Tech Update

People "in the professions" - ie: Lawyers, Doctors etc - are often notoriously Ludite-ish.

It's good to see a guy like Michael Cohen keeping up with some of these fast-moving developments.

hat tip = Bob Cesca's podcast

Today's Tweet

Joe Walsh is an incompetent clown, a dead beat dad who's loudly moralized about "family values", and an all-around demagoguing schmuck, so when we find ourselves in total agreement with a guy like that - I gotta figure something's really up.

I've liked some Presidents and I've disliked some Presidents, but I've never ever been in a place where I didn't believe a single word that came out of a President's mouth. Not a single word.

Until this President. Until Trump.

What a bad place to be in.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 24, 2018

Today's Pix

click a pic to start the show

Today's Tweet

Sounded a little wacky to me too. But then somebody pointed out that there are more licensed yoga instructors in this country than there are coal miners - and the people practicing yoga outnumber the people watching NASCAR by a million or more.

Don't fuck with those namaste folk.

Sources say Rep. Tim Ryan is running for president, and that he plans to do so on the back of the “yoga vote” https://t.co/jiQ7wwMpie by @ryangrim @ZaidJilani

— Caroline Kenny (@carolinerkenny) July 23, 2018

Yeah But No

It's a nice story about doing something nice for some nice lady. I especially liked the ooky-spooky angle about spirits and ghosts and shit.

The only problem is that there's a subtext that makes it actually about responsibility.

If I give credit to a supernatural force for something good that I did, then I can blame a supernatural force when I do something shitty. I can duck having to own up to whatever I do, which tells me self-infantilization is at the heart of every sky-pixie religion.

As an adult human being, you have to develop a relationship with yourself. Being faithful to a religion means you refuse to be the grownup in that relationship.

You did a good thing. Congratulations on having figured out how to be a decent person, but I do have a question:

• You don't really need us to pat you on the back for it every fuckin' time do you?

Today's Quote

"Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don't understand, and what they don't understand is almost everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their worldviews. They don't dig for truth; they skim the media for anything that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge is not a useful tool, but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman."

--David Rothkopf

That Keke Challenge Thing

My youngest just sent me a FB link that purports to show the dangers of online viral challenges.

Here's a compilation - and think maybe half of them are flim-flammed, but I dearly love the creativity no matter what is and what ain't "real".

It always brings this to mind: