Thoughts tagged "extremism"

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The DOE “book banning hoax” press release claimed that challenged books are “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene”. Only 13% of banned books in 2023–24 included “on the page” sexual scenes—but 36% featured PoC characters and 25% featured LGBTQ characters.

Certain identities are being removed from library shelves en masse. During the 2023-2024 school year, 36% of all banned titles featured characters or people of color and a quarter (25%) included LGBTQ+ people or characters. Of titles with LGBTQ+ people or characters, over a quarter (28%) feature trans and/or genderqueer characters. Erasure of identities is pervasive within banned illustrated and graphic-heavy titles. For example, 73% of all graphic and illustrated titles feature visuals with LGBTQ+ representation, of people or characters of color, or that address race/racism. More specifically, 64% of banned picture books have pictures or illustrations that depict LGBTQ+ characters or stories. For all the inflammatory rhetoric about “explicit books,” only 13% of banned titles had “on the page” descriptions of sexual experiences, compared to 31% with “off the page” sexual experiences. Overall, 40% of banned titles include sexual experiences (some contained both “on” and “off the page”). Books banned during the 2023-2024 school year overwhelmingly address violence (65%), death and grief (55%), and abuse (43%); all very real human experiences.
"Cover to Cover: An Analysis of Titles Banned in the 23–24 School Year".
by PEN America.
In the 2023-2024 school year, there were more than 10,000 instances of banned books in public schools, affecting more than 4,000 unique titles. These mass book bans were often the result of targeted campaigns to remove books with characters of color, LGBTQ+ identities, and sexual content from public school classrooms and libraries. As book bans reached an unprecedented high in the last school year, PEN America sought to further understand the impacts of this censorship – the identities, content areas, genres, and types of books that are being erased from America’s public schools. In November 2024, PEN America previously reported on the content of titles that had experienced two or more bans (1,091 titles); here, we include a more comprehensive analysis of all 4,218 titles banned during the 2023-2024 school year.  What have we found?  Book bans are not a hoax.

White women are about to be the latest to learn that when you support fascists because "they'll go after other people and improve things for me", "other people" always shifts to include you eventually

(Tweet by Trump's new Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs)

Tweet by Darren J. Beattie on October 4, 2024: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

White men who think you won't be next on the chopping block: I guarantee you have a lot more in common with the "other people" than you have with the people in power.

Beattie was fired from his position as a speechwriter under Trump's previous administration when a past appearance on a white nationalist panel came to light. This time around that same thing probably strengthened his application.

The drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump’s second term in office. Litigation is costly and time-consuming. Most news organizations will look to settle rather than face months—more likely years—of discovery and depositions, plus significant legal fees.
“It is both conscious and unconscious. Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don’t want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process,” [Anne Champion] said.

Perhaps the CJR editors decided it went without saying, but it feels worth mentioning that — if Trump’s appointments go as planned — he will have the entire judicial branch to bring to bear on journalists, not just his wacky lawyer neighbor.

"Trump Threatens New York Times, Penguin Random House over Critical Coverage".
Lachlan Cartwright in Columbia Journalism Review.
Legal letter follows complaints aimed at CBS News, the Washington Post, and the Daily Beast. 

Please do not record your abortions on the blockchain

I must once again urge you: please do not record your abortions on the blockchain.

There are a lot of very worried people right now, fearful of an impending regime that may well crack down on things like reproductive care, gender-affirming care, or the ability for immigrants to even continue to remain in the US. Some have suggested people get familiar with cryptocurrencies in the event they might have to circumvent an authoritarian state.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in very bad situations, bad solutions can sometimes still be better than nothing. I make no secret of my views on the cryptocurrency industry, but I am the last to judge a person for using whatever means they have available to them to take care of themselves and others.

But please remember that most popular cryptocurrencies use public ledgers, where every transaction is visible to anyone who cares to look (no warrant required), where true anonymity is extremely challenging, and where tracing technology is getting only more sophisticated. Popular on-ramps like Coinbase and Gemini and other exchanges require customers to provide similar kinds of identification as banks, linking your future transactions to your real-life identity. (And many of these companies have thrown themselves wholeheartedly behind Trump, by the way, despite their “anti-authoritarian” claims). 

There are cryptocurrencies that are more anonymous than the bitcoins and ethereums of the world (privacycoins like Monero and Zcash for example), though there are still attempts to trace these types of tokens and you have to be knowledgeable and very cautious about how you use them so as not to inadvertently reveal your identity.

If you’re in a bad situation, do whatever it is you need to do. I’m certainly not going to judge you. But please be very cautious, and be highly skeptical of anyone who presents cryptocurrency as a magic solution to authoritarianism.

Further reading: “Abuse and harassment on the blockchain”, “Anonymous cryptocurrency wallets are not so simple”

That's the whole purpose of the post-monopausal female in theory. Did your in-laws and particularly your mother-in-law show up in some huge way? She lived with us for a year. Right. So I didn't know the answer there. Right. No. So that's this weird unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman. Yeah. It's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyperneoliberal approach to work and family. My wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California. She took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year. Okay. So it was just one of these things where it's like this is what you do. So biology professor PhD. Yes. Drops what they're doing. Yeah. To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant. Painfully economically inefficient.. Can I just propose a really- Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it? Because that is the thing that the hyper liberalized economics wants you to do. The economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is to a ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market I think it's the oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. I think that entire sort of, to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

It's always the women who are expected to stop "prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society". I wonder if anyone suggested to Vance that he should stop prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society, and take a sabbatical from his investment job to care for their newborn while his wife did her clerkship. Or his father-in-law?

Also, it's pretty wild that Vance saw the options to be: 1) MIL leaves her professorship to be a live-in nanny; 2) MIL pays for their childcare. Vance was a principal at Mithril Capital and partner at the Revolution investment firm at the time. Meanwhile, Usha Vance would have been making (ballpark) $70-100k as a SCOTUS clerk, and would safely have been able to expect several hundred thousand dollars in signing bonuses alone the following year when she joined a law firm.

"JD Vance in 2020 agreed grandmothers raising children is 'whole purpose of the postmenopausal female'".
Clare Olson in Heartland Signal.
While appearing on "The Portal" podcast in April 2020, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) agreed with host Eric Weinstein's claim that "postmenopausal females" exist just to help take care of children.