Category Archives: Politics
The 2020 GOP Platform, or Lack Thereof
I’m not sure how to introduce this thing, so I guess I’ll just lay this out. The GOP has announced that they’re not releasing a platform this year, and basically just reusing the 2016 one with heaping sides of “Yay Trump” and “Boo Media”. I just don’t know how else to summarize this.
I’m going to go thru this whole document line by line, (It’s only one page, don’t panic), but first here’s a link to it straight from the GOP website. Just in case that gets moved later on, I’ll archive a copy of it here. If you’d rather not download a pdf, I’ll be copying the entire substance of the thing into this post so feel free to skip that part.
Read the rest of this entryIf you skip the paperwork, we’ll take your children.
Decades from now, there will be a true story. It might be a book or a movie, or both, or maybe something new that doesn’t even exist yet. But it will be a famous, powerful story about someone’s search for their birth parents, whom they haven’t seen since they were taken away as a child by the United State Government in 2018.
Mark my words, this will absolutely happen. The only uncertainty is how famous it will actually be. If I am still alive, I will do my best to make it more famous.
This policy is going to be remembered by history as evil. When it is remembered at all, of course; Americans have a knack for forgetting the uglier parts of our history. I don’t really have the energy to say much about this, it’s a painful subject to think about and also while I was preparing this post I learn that Attorney General Jeff Sessions it going to deny, or at least limit, asylum to people escaping domestic violence. I can only assume he’s trying to set a precedent to make it harder for his victims to escape. But a few things are worth saying.
First, this is evil, and cruel, and illegal in the eyes of any sensible court, and despite the repeated use of the passive “separating families”, I can’t see it as anything but kidnapping. But what really frightens me isn’t that a few sadistic assholes in power set this policy, it’s that so many Americans are willing to support it.
A significant number of Americans seem to honestly think that taking children away is an appropriate, proportionate response to people traveling without proper documentation.
That’s like evil witch in the dark fairytale forest level shit right there. Read the rest of this entry
Inauguration
So today’s the day. Today President Obama hands over the office to Donald Trump.
My first plan for this day was to get a pizza and head to the bar after work, but more and more I’m thinking I’ll just head home with a bottle of rum. I might still order pizza, but I definitely need to drink tonight.
I’ve been saying for a while now that I think we’re really getting President Pence, and I may as well explain my thinking. The way I see it, Trump will have to either be a good little puppet for the GOP; or just be a loud, attention-grabbing figurehead while Pence does all the work of being President. If he tries to do his own thing, the Republican-controlled Congress will impeach him and remove him from office, making Pence the actual President.
He’s provided plenty of justifications for impeachment, they won’t have to work very hard to make it believable. Assuming, of course, that they even bother maintaining the illusion of legitimacy rather than just outright declaring that they’re removing him because he won’t do what they want. The veneer of government feels awfully thin these days.
Trump’s general lack of interest in actually doing the job of the President suggests that he’s going for “loud, attention-grabbing figurehead”. The rumor that Trump’s campaign approached Kasich for Vice-President and said the deal would be for Kasich to handle all domestic and foreign policy while Trump was off “making America great again” doesn’t help with this assessment. Well, getting attention is what he does best, I suppose.
Of course if I’m right about that, it means that for all the rhetoric about going against the establishment, the Trump Administration may well be the most establishment presidency we’ve ever seen.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens in the next few years. But I’m not going to be watching the inauguration.
Take care, everybody.
Participation
Hello everyone,
I hadn’t meant to be silent this long. I’ve written several partial posts, and early this month I wrote a complete post on third-party voting and protest votes that got swallowed by the great null, and I’m still upset about that because it was some of my best writing in the past few years.
Then the election happened. To be honest, I think that broke me a bit.
So here we are. We’ve elected a know-nothing huckster and a theocratic nightmare to executive office, we’ve handed both houses of Congress to the party of human suffering, and because the Democrats didn’t bother to fight over the Supreme Court appointment we can expect a conservative activist judge to replace the last conservative activist judge.
The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 701 incidents of hate in the week after the election. The “Alt-Right”, which I’ll remind you is just a re-branding of white nationalism, (yes, including actual fucking nazis) has been celebrating, and here in San Francisco there has been a palpable chill in daily life, punctuated by demonstrations.
I’ve heard several reports of young trans people committing suicide. I’ve not bothered to try confirming those, because I’m depressed enough already, but it’s worth mentioning that nobody found that hard to believe.
So what can we do about it?
First, find out which elected officials represent you. There’s an excellent tool for that here. There’s also some really good resources here, which is in general a site worth bookmarking for all the handy information on it. Get the contact information for everyone representing you, both the U.S. Congress and your state legislature, and make a handy list for yourself.
Then contact them. It’s actually pretty easy to make an appointment and see them in person, which probably has the best impact on them. Next is a phone call, and then writing a letter, and finally an email is still better than nothing.
I don’t know what your life is like, what resources you have and what challenges you face, so I won’t tell you how much to invest in this. But do something. Even if it’s just a form letter email that you change the names on and send out to everyone, that’s a hell of a lot better than griping on facebook.
I’m also going to echo the words of P. Andrew Torrez, from the Opening Arguments podcast, that if you only have health insurance because Obamacare forced insurance companies to provide coverage even for those with pre-existing conditions, you can make a big impact by making an appointment and looking them in the eyes and telling them how repealing the Affordable Care Act will affect you. Even Ted Cruz is not so reptilian that he’d be unmoved by looking at someone’s actual face while they explain that if the ACA is repealed they will die.
On a side note, if you’re not listening to Opening Arguments, you should be.
Get involved. Talk to your reps, even if you didn’t vote for them, even if their platform is everything you abhor. We have a representative government and it is literally their job to care what you think. Don’t be rude to them, don’t be defensive, there’s no need to even get confrontational; just make it clear where you stand.
Somehow we’ve forgotten that this is how our government is supposed to work. We get caught up in protests and big dramatic demonstrations, and those certainly have their place, but they mean nothing if people don’t participate in the government. It does no good to raise awareness if people, once aware of the problem, do nothing about it.
I’ll try to be back with more soon. I’m long overdue for a Constitution post, and also I’ve been falling out of the habit of writing, which must be maintained.
As always, thank you for reading, share your thoughts in the comments, and please take care of each other.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 