VerdantSporeSeasoning

There have been a lot of good books in the last few years about how Christian came to be so culturally interchangable with Republican. One I read and got a lot out of was "Jesus & John Wayne", and the author does a good job tracking the rightward shift from a lot of different organizations and how they were able to permeate through multiple denominations. Just sharing in case anyone wants to go look at some of these connections themselves.

And who have just relocated their best hostages to within Putin's power. Yes, bring your nine children and wife along to Russia--now stay in rank on the front line, or maybe your oldest gets to come serve in your place (earlier than they would have anyway)!

The B girls went on by their own street names, 671 was the dancers chosen moniker. She was the first athlete to complete without an alphabetical name, I think I heard? The other Chinese dancer in finals went by a name.

A Japanese woman, Ami maybe, won the gold. I really liked the Lithuanian kid who came in second, she was fun to watch. And I liked the girl from the Netherlands who came in 4th. Bronze went to China's 671, but her dancing struck me as a power performance more than an art or a form of play.

I didn't see Raygun till now because I only watched finals. Just didn't have the time to watch it all. Stupid music licencing rules causing things to disappear.

Another method: tax is often about 8%, so double that as a baseline and adjust from there.

I mean, there are folks trying, but I don't really like what they're trying for.

I commented this elsewhere too, but dude took this expertise with a tough subject and shared it well with the high schoolers he taught: Tim Walz’s Class Project on the Holocaust Draws New Attention Online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/us/politics/tim-walz-holocaust-class-rwanda-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.FpW4.05czkX9J5r9u

And back in the real world, he went on to use that critical thinking in classroom assignments, helping students understand actions and attitudes that lead to genocide: Tim Walz’s Class Project on the Holocaust Draws New Attention Online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/us/politics/tim-walz-holocaust-class-rwanda-genocide.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.FpW4.05czkX9J5r9u

Tldr, in one of his geography classes, Walz taught his class about how violence rises, class voted on what country they thought likely to deal with that kind of violence, like a year later the Rwanda genocide began.

I think you're totally right about the permanent underclass thing. And it has been for a long time. This week I was looking into the history of education migrants' kids in the US. Our current stance of educating kids came from Texas passing a law in the 70s to strip state funding for schools which chose to enroll the children of undocumented people. (Another case of Texas using its state power to bully people; it's always fucking Texas). That law was challenged and in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled against it; Judge Brennan wrote an opinion specifically citing the creation of a permanent underclass of illiterate people not fit to contribute to any country. He called it "bad public policy." It was crazy to see like, reasonable ideas about society come through in a supreme court ruling, that's a long time past.

I think it could be viable to lock up/fine into oblivion employers hiring migrant labor specifically to be abusive/cheap. But of course a lot of monied interests would be against it. America always seems terrified about scaring corporations off. And it's so much easier to blame individuals and have them internalize the pain than to deal with the systems which set the situations.

God I would totally believe that. This summer, my workplace bought institutional access to the NYT, so for the first time in way too long, I check a single publications' headlines most days, and it was stark how every day they were calling on Biden not to run. Those were consistently top of page more than any other issue until he did step down. I was surprised.

But I also don't want to lock up the person employing another one out of goodness. Hiring 1-2 people shouldn't be the thing to punish.I want the people and the industries who make a habit of using and abusing undocumented labor to deal with a rule like this. Agriculture and meat processing, especially.

Thank you for putting this into words. I got called weird all the time as a kid, made the choice to take it as a compliment. It getting used right now the way it is to offend bad people doesn't bother me, but I am worried about the knock on effects of weird being more heavily perceived as negative over time.