hey remember when people said we gotta keep talking about this and then two days passed and it just went quiet. anyways
due to recent (and frankly ongoing as far as this website is concerned) events
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@hatshepsutprevails
hey remember when people said we gotta keep talking about this and then two days passed and it just went quiet. anyways
due to recent (and frankly ongoing as far as this website is concerned) events
To my Asian, European, African, and Canadian friends...do y'all wanna know how the United States found itself under a fascist, Hitler-loving dictator named Donald Trump?
In another post, I started my timeline in 1980. The year I was born. But, it was also a turning point in US politics.
First, let me share my credentials.
- Bachelors of Arts - History
- Juris Doctor - Public Interest Law (Critical Race Theory)
- Masters of Philosophy (research degree) - Sociology (Race, Ethnicity, Conflict)
Just recently, we buried President Jimmy Carter, who was the president, when I was born. Jimmy was from Georgia, like my grandmother, and he came from a Southern Baptist background. Southern Baptists are known for being very conservative Christians who did not support abortion.
Jimmy, despite that background, actually supported LGBTQ rights by lifting a federal ban. He supported Roe v. Wade which protected access to abortion. And, he established the federal Department of Education.
However, Jimmy had an antagonistic relationship with Congress, and that alienated several Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, who was the brother of John F. Kennedy, a president who was assassinated.
The Kennedy family has an established name brand due to JFK and Robert F Kennedy (another brother and JFK's attorney general who was also assassinated). Ted was the younger, drunken brother who caused the accidental death of a college friend.
In 1980, Ted challenged Jimmy for the presidency even though they were both Democrats. Jimmy has the incumbent shouldn't have faced a challenge from his own party, but he had just been that bad.
So, this internal strife weakened the Democratic Party entering the 1980 election. In that same year, Jimmy boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Russia due to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. Furthermore, there was a recession.
The Republican Party nominee was a former Hollywood actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan. Ronald was the governor of California and was trailing Jimmy in the polls until a presidential debate in which Ronald used his acting skills to make Jimmy seem incompetent.
Ronald believed in "trickle down economics." He believed that if the wealthiest people were taxed less, then they would spend more, thus boosting the economy and allowing prosperity to "trickle down" to the working & Middle class.
He also believed in increased military spending as this was the height of the Cold War with Russia. My own parents voted for Reagan because my dad was in the military.
Instead of trickling down, the wealthy just grew wealthier. Republicans continued to lower taxes for these individuals and businesses, so the money never trickled down. Social services were underfunded & unemployment increased. Reagan's response was to blame Black "welfare mothers" for abusing the system.
Republicans latch onto this. They implement work requirements for government assistance and make it harder for folks to pull out of poverty. As a result, a wealth gap separated white folk from the rest. White folk felt their hard earned money was supporting lazy white & Black folk, so they continued to constrict welfare programs.
[Section added] During Reagan's term, an unknown illness is killing young, gay Black & Latino men. It's AIDs. Reagan deemed it a gay disease that only affects gay people, so no funding is allocated to study this disease. It's viewed as retribution for their homosexua lifestyle. However, overtime, they learn about HIV once non-gay men were infected. Children die from the disease because blood is not tested for it, so some are born from it through their mothers while others were given transfusions.
Under Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine ends. Under this doctrine, news agencies had to report both sides of an issue. Because of this, television stations can now present one side. Fox News opens as a conservative network.
Ronald is well-loved by white folk. He gets elected to two terms. By the end of his term, the economy has recovered, and white folk are prospering. Then, his VP, George H.W. Bush, is elected.
Under George I, the Cold War ends, but we have the Gulf War in Kuwait. He signs trade agreements that result in several American companies, namely the auto industry, to shutter their doors and build factories overseas. This is due to a change in tariffs!
Millions of Americans lose their jobs as factories close. Detroit, as the leading auto manufacturer city, is devastated. Back in the 90s, Detroit was the 4th largest US city after Chicago. These factory closures hit the Midwest, especially hard.
This makes Bush unpopular. He is challenged by a young, charismatic Democrat named Bill Clinton.
Bill was a southerner like Jimmy, but Bill was a very well-known ladies' man. Bill appeals to Black Americans, though, and that allows him to defeat George.
Bill continues expanding trade agreements. He's a fiscal conservative despite being a Democrat, and under Bill, military spending is reduced.
[Section added] The rise of AIDs leads to further hate directed at the LGBTQ. During the 90s, several queer people are murdered. One such kid was Matthew Shepard. A college kid in Wyoming, he is beaten by a gang of white men. His family was terrorized so much, that they couldn't bury him because of fears his grave would be desecrated.
[A white woman Bishop in DC invites Shepard's parents to bury him in their graveyard. That Bishop is Marian Edgar Budde, the same Bishop who gave Trump his inaugural sermon this past week. She pleaded for Trump to have mercy on the queer community because she was the Bishop who buried Shepard!]
Bill is a popular president. The economy is booming, but he's still a lady's man, and he gets in trouble with a college intern.
This scandal adversely impacts the last few years in office so much so that his VP, Al Gore, loses the presidency to George W. Bush.
George Bush won the Electoral College while Al Gore won the popular vote. There was such a tiny margin that there were numerous recounts because of faulty ballots (hanging chads). Eventually, the Supreme Court intervenes and tells them to stop the count and certify George as president.
George II is the son of George I.
George II is a popular Texan with swagger. He wants to build up the military once again.
Clinton left a surplus of money, so what did George II do? He implemented tax cuts for the wealthy. That damned "trickle down economics" again. The wealthy get wealthier, increasing the wealth gap between white folks and everybody else.
They cut taxes while cutting social services. One of his biggest "achievements" was a restructuring of our educational system called "No Child Left Behind."
NCLB emphasizes test scores. School administrations are penalized if they don't meet these standards. They lost funding, so electives such as home economics, art, Music, etc are trimmed to make room for these test standards. By this time, my dad has retired from the military and is a school principal, and I remember the stress of trying to meet these standards.
These standards emphasize STEM at the expense of liberal arts. This is happening just as the internet becomes available to all.
Amazon opens as an online used book store. Facebook is started as a college message board. There's a tech boom, so everyone is being pushed into tech fields. Liberal arts education was devalued.
During his term, 9-11 happens. We declare war on Afghanistan. Islamophobia spikes. Fox News helps drive this narrative. Christianity is now being pushed into schools, whereas schools were previously secular.
[Section added] In 2004, the assault rifle ban was lifted. Now we are seeing a dramatic spike in school shootings. The Far Right embraces the expansion of the 2nd Amendment.
Then, we go to war in Iraq.
We aren't quite sure why we're at war with Iraq. We overthrow Suddam Hussein (from the Gulf War). George declares victory, then terminates the Iraqi Army.
This triggers an insurrection. Massive casualties are coming out of Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is overshadowed.
George serves two terms, but his VP is so unpopular that he doesn't run for president. Instead, the Republican nominee is John McCain.
Two Democrats fight for the nomination. Hillary Clinton, the wife of Bill, and Barack Obama.
Barack was a young, biracial Senator from Illinois. I attended law school in Illinois, and one of my classmates had been his legislative aide. I met Barack twice while a student. The first time, he had come to campus to propose a college-savings account. After his press conference, I latched onto his arm and refused to let go until he heard me, and I explained that his proposal was unrealistic because it assumed that a single mother would have the resources to save for an education when it was more likely her money would go towards groceries & rent or other immediate needs. (Fast forward two-three years, and the dude is repeating my line during the State of the Union! I had changed his mind!)
Barack beats Hillary for the nomination. He defeats McCain and is sworn in as the 1st black (not Black) president.
Obama is popular and well-loved by most Americans. Under his tenure, gay marriage is legalized.
Fox News triples down on their hatred.
Their network booms. They push Islamophobia 24/7. Highlight the fact that Obama's father was Muslim and that his middle name was Hussein.
Older Americans are watching program after program of this negativity. A movement starts called the Tea Party movement, which positions itself as a fiscally conservative movement. A bankrupt slumlord with a reality TV show gains popularity with these folks.
I wrote my master's dissertation on the Tea Party movement. It's called "Jesus and the White Man."
Donald Trump
Donald latches onto the Islamaphobia. He calls Barack by his middle name and questions his birth certificate. Donald grows popular with older Americans.
At the end of Obama's term, the son of VP Biden dies. This devastated Biden. He had lost his infant daughter & first wife in a car accident. He decides not to run for president.
Obama supports Hillary.
It is now Hillary v. Trump.
Trump pushes misogyny and Islamaphobia. Hillary is Bill's wife and a woman. She is the most qualified presidential candidate to ever run (at that time).
During Obama's last year in office, Justice Antonin Scalia* dies. Obama has the privilege to nominate that next Justice, but Mitch McConnell stalls through the election.
But older white Americans were barely okay with a black president. They were not about to let a woman serve as President. At the same time, an organization called Cambridge Analytica began to fine-tune an ultra conservative agenda.
With the help of Russian intelligence, they use Facebook ads to try to persuade voters to support Trump. They succeeded with white folk, but they did not succeed with the Black vote.
Russians used African bot farms in order to try to persuade Black Americans to support Trump. We rejected him at 90%.
Donald wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote.
Donald is a corrupt and ineffectual president. He tried to bribe foreign leaders and shared US intelligence with Russia.
However, as a populist, he latches onto the Christian Right. He nominates 3 Supreme Court Justices who lie during their confirmation hearings. These Justices will ultimately vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The Christian Right love this. But then COVID hits and the incompetence of Donald leads to millions of deaths. These Christian folk refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks.
Donald is an unpopular president and ranks as the worst president of all time.
Biden challenges him and wins.
Donald refuses to accept that he lost, so he organized an attempted coup. January 6th.
He's impeached. Twice.
McConnell refuses to take the step to have him permanently barred from office.
Biden takes office when COVID is still rampant. The Christian Right continue to push their agenda, seeking to remove protections for the LGBTQI.
Right wing media generates a lot of money. Podcasters jump on the bandwagon. Red pill content spills into the mainstream.
Kids who were isolated during COVID are now at home watching Joe Rogan & Theo Von. They spend hours upon hours on TikTok.
But unbeknownst to these kids is the history of Russian interference.
Schools emphasize STEM. They don't emphasize liberal arts or social sciences such as history or literature. The literacy rate plummeted to an all-time low. The average white American's reading level is at the 4th grade. They aren't able to engage in critical thinking.
They don't know the history of the Spanish Influenza. They don't know the history of a trade war that triggered the Great Depression. They don't know that our government has imprisoned citizens in internment camps. They don't know Hitler's rise to power.
In fact, Fox News frequently features individuals who deny the Holocaust.
Russia move their troll farms from Facebook to TikTok, where the algorithm serves as an echo chamber. Uneducated, illiterate folks gobble up 30-second videos but can't be arsed to watch anything over 5 minutes so complex issues are stripped down to sound bites.
The algorithm pushed right-wing fascist talking points. They rehabbed Donald while shifting Gen Z to the far right. They do not know how to verify information for themselves, so they gobble up misinformation and disinformation.
If a TikTok creator has millions of followers with thousands of views and likes, these kids assume that that info is factual. They do not vet shit for themselves.
Russia pushed anti-American propaganda that posed as pro-American talking points. Pushed isolationism. Pushed anti-democratic rhetoric. In fact, one of their greatest accomplishments is convincing Gen Z and uneducated, white Millennials into thinking we aren't a democracy.
We are a fucking Democratic Republic. Our constitution begins with: "We the people".
So, because of TikTok, Trump won.
That's why Biden was pushing for it to be banned before the election. The algorithm was being corrupted. But folks couldn't part from their addiction.
Folks who had been anti-Trump just 5 years ago are suddenly Trump supporters. They were brainwashed.
So, how did we get here?
We got here because most Americans are fucking STUPID.
It’s Greedflation.
[“The English were obsessed with waste, which was why America was first and foremost a “wasteland” in their eyes. Wasteland meant undeveloped land, land that was outside the circulation of commercial exchange and apart from the understood rules of agricultural production. To lie in waste, in biblical language, meant to exist desolate and unattended; in agrarian terms, it was to be left fallow and unimproved.
Wasteland was idle land. Arable tracts of desirable property could only be associated with furrowed fields, rows of crops and fruit trees, golden waves of grain, and pasture for cattle and sheep. John Smith embraced the same ideological premise with a precise (if crude) allusion: the Englishman’s right to the land was ensured by his commitment to carpeting the soil with manure. An English elixir of animal waste would magically transform the Virginia wilderness, making untilled wasteland into valuable English territory. Waste was there to be treated, and then exploited. Waste was wealth as yet unrealized.
In his “Discourse of Western Planting,” Hakluyt confidently described the entire continent as that “waste firm of America.” Not terra firma, but waste firm. He saw natural resources as raw materials that could be converted into valuable commodities. Like other Englishmen of his day, he equated wastelands with commons, forests, and fens—those lands that sixteenth-century agrarian improvers eyed for prospective profits. Wasteland served the interest of private owners in the commercial marketplace, when the commons was enclosed and sheep and cattle grazed there; forests could be cut down for timber and cleared for settlements; fens or marshes could be drained and reconstituted as rich, arable farmland.
It was not just land that could be waste. People could be waste too. And this brings us to our most important point of embarkation: Hakluyt’s America required what he classified as “waste people,” the corps of laborers needed to cut down the trees, beat the hemp (for making rope), gather honey, salt and dry fish, dress raw animal hides, dig the earth for minerals, raise olives and silk, and sort and pack bird feathers.
He pictured paupers, vagabonds, convicts, debtors, and lusty young men without employment doing all such work. The “fry [young children] of wandering beggars that grow up idly and hurtfully and burdenous to the Realm, might be unladen and better bred up.” Merchants would be sent to trade with the Indians, selling trinkets, venting cloth goods, and gathering more information about the interior of the continent. Artisans were needed: millwrights to process the timber; carpenters, brick makers, and plasterers to build the settlement; cooks, launderers, bakers, tailors, and cobblers to service the infant colony.
Where would these workers come from? The artisans, he felt, could be spared without weakening the English economy. But the bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless. They were, in Hakluyt’s disturbing allusion, “ready to eat up one another,” already cannibalizing the British economy. Idle and unused, they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land to be better (albeit no more humanely) put to use.”]
Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History Of Class In America
Watch: Carl Sagan schooled B.o.B. on his flat Earth theory more than 30 years ago
Follow @the-future-now
🐸☕️
bipch erastosthenes schooled b.o.b. 2,230 years ago
Ok so this is cool but I always wondered how they knew the shadows were different at the same instant. I mean it is not like they had phones. How did they sync up that instant. I feel like that would be interesting to know but no one ever says.
^^^Does anybody know this one? How, that far apart, the time at which the shadows were observed was synced up? I am genuinely curious, not a goddamn moron asking a gotcha question. High/Low tide? (I live in the middle of the country I do not know for the precise habits of tidal activity.) The appearance of a star (or planet) in the sky? Something as utterly mundane as sunrise?
Well, first of all, it wasn’t actually pillars! Eratosthenes was told about a well in Syene that, in the summer solstice every year (June 21st) would be illuminated at the bottom entirely and without any cast shadows. This indicated that the sun was directly overhead. Going off that well known curiosity and an intelligent hunch, our dude Eratosthenes waited until high noon of the summer solstice to measure the angle of a shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria. (Sidenote: Eratosthenes was a librarian of the infamous Library of Alexandria.)
His next course of action was to hire bematists, surveyors of the time whose professional specialty was to measure distance by walking with equal length steps. They measured a distance between Alexandria and Syene of about 5000 stadia. (Guess where the word stadium comes from.) Once he had that measurement, Eratosthenes did his math-y thing, and there you have it.
ANSWER EVEN COOLER THAN I HOPED!!
Eratosthenes’ work was thorough enough that by the time he finished revising his calculations, he ended up only 66 km off of the actual polar circumference of the Earth, or an error margin of 0.16%. [wiki]
mu_mashu on Instagram
New Crow Time 🐦⬛🦊🌟
what made them think it was always right?
they are stupid
orrrrr they just grew up in this tech focused privacy lacking world
current university students, assuming they went to university at 18 (which would be most of the first years) were maybe 4 when smartphones got popular? the world they have grown up with is one where apps are the only way one interacts with technology, where social media increasingly demands personal information, where someone who refuses to go along with those norms automatically has something to hide, which means everyone polices themselves as if their every fashion choice or sentence structure is subject to judge and jury, because it is
we live in an age which discourages asking questions, where every question is met with offense and "just google it", while google itself fills its entire first page with ads and misinformation
and tumblr is the only place i've seen critique chatgpt. i've had windows 11 (which every laptop comes with these days) advertise chatgpt to me as a search engine
it's not a search engine. frankly, google hardly counts as one either these days. but if you're not surrounded by people telling you chatgpt is bad and fake, how are you supposed to know? when your computer and your phone and your relatives who don't know much more about technology than you all think it's a search engine with a voice, it wouldn't occur to you that all of them are wrong
and they're clearly not stupid! that's the point of this as an exercise - their teacher is telling them for the first time that chatgpt might be wrong. your job is to find out if chatgpt is wrong. and they did the assignment! they had a reason for the first time to question chatgpt, and all of them came to the conclusion that yeah, it is lying to us, and so is everyone else who said it was always right
and they'll go forward now not only knowing they can't blindly trust what computers tell them, but they'll spread that message around, which will decrease misinformation on a bunch of levels
this was a win for the students and a win for the teacher, i think an exercise like this should be mandatory in all schools if we ever hope to combat where technology's going these days
How is TUMBLR the only place that seems to be critical of the PLAGIARISM AND MISINFORMATION MACHINE?!?!
Because we don't have an algorithm that hides posts that are critical of AI from us.
Any system set up to show you "our top picks for your interests!" is a system with a setup in place to never show you "our picks for what we don't want you interested in!"
From the Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously 🥺❤ (you can watch it here in US or with US vpn :) <3) (or just this bit on youtube here :))
Neil Gaiman: I miss him most when I get stuck. You know, I'll just be working on something and I'll go, "Oh, this isn't quite it," and all I want to do is just call Terry, tell him what's going on and have him say, "Ah, grasshopper, the answer is there in the question." And I'd go, "Oh, for fuck's sake, Terry, just tell me."
[Terry Pratchett laughing]
One of the most dangerous things in the world is not being able to say no to people because you don't want to upset them or dissapoint them. This will completely ruin your life in every way possible, at work, in your private life, your sex life and your friendships. It's a way of removing your own consent in your own decisions and go against your wishes, it is always a crime against yourself. Let yourself have a say. Upsetting people is better than traumatizing yourself.
-Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
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