#vox.com

[uboat53]

As he takes office, it can feel like Trump’s movement has the cultural and political upper hand. Republicans won the popular vote in both the presidential and congressional races. Trump’s popularity has never been higher. Broligarchs, celebrities, and big business are lining up behind him. But another way of looking at it is that Trump’s popularity is probably at its peak — and modern presidents tend to start off their terms with high support before the public gets disillusioned. He did, after all, barely win the election. Republicans only control Congress by tiny majorities. And most of his high-profile policy proposals aren’t as popular as he claims. Most of the American public isn’t outright rejecting everything Trump is offering (at least, not yet). On at least three different issues, Trump’s position is significantly popular. But there’s a difference between what the public supports and the mandate Trump claims.

Source

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[docgold13]

Whiteness is at the core of the insurrection

The answer to how the Capitol riots happened is right in front of us.

[midnightfunk]

Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained

He has fought to undermine voting rights his entire career.

“Preclearance — requiring states to get federal permission before changing their own voting laws — was an “extraordinary” measure adopted to “address an extraordinary problem,” Roberts claimed. Yet, nearly a half-century after the Voting Rights Act first became law, “the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” Black voter turnout “has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six States originally covered by” Section 5, Roberts claimed. 

Preclearance worked. So there was no longer any need for it.

There are a number of fairly obvious criticisms of this argument. One of the most famous was raised by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Never underestimate what an intellectual genius Justice Ginsburg was. There are many reasons why she IS a hero.

[friendraichu]

MacKenzie Scott is donating her billions much faster than her ex Jeff Bezos

In the past year, she’s given away $1.7 billion.

This article gives a really good explanation of how the mega-rich should be disbursing their money if they wanna stop being part of the problem and instead be apart of the solution.

I especially liked this:

"If you have $35 billion, that fact does not in itself make you qualified to figure out how to fix the world — and if you think that other people are more qualified, you might decide the best plan is to just shovel the money out the door so they can run with it."

[scientificphilosopher]

Why old people will always complain about young people

Prediction: Today’s "OK boomer" Gen Z will complain about the youth one day. Blame human memory.

Quote from more nearly 700 years ago: “Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased … The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say ‘raise the carriage shafts’ or ‘trim the lamp wick,’ but people today say ‘raise it’ or ‘trim it.’ When they should say, ‘Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!’ they say, ‘Torches! Let’s have some light!’”

–Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness), Yoshida Kenkō, 1330 – 1332

[writernotwaiting]

4.7 million fanfics are now Hugo nominees, thanks to the Archive of Our Own

The Hugos have honored AO3 and its transformative fandom culture with a ‘Best Related Work’ nomination.

“The OTW evolved into five distinct projects:

The Archive of Our Own, which launched in an invite-only beta form on November 14, 2009, formally pledges “to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms. We believe that fanworks are transformative and that transformative works are legitimate.” Fanlore, an open source wiki focused on preserving fandom history and collective knowledge Transformative Works and Cultures, a peer-edited academic journal devoted to advancing fandom scholarship Open Doors, a fanworks preservation project that identifies older fanfiction archives in danger of shuttering and being lost to time, then rescuing them by transferring their contents to AO3 Formalized legal advocacy for fanworks and other transformative works through the organization’s legal committee, which does things like filing and joining amicus briefs in cases impacting the fan community. The committee also educates fans on important laws and alerts them about changes to laws throughout the world that could impact fanwork practices.

A lot of this might seem needlessly trumped up — you might wonder, for example, why it would be so important to keep a tiny online fanfiction collection from disappearing. But these projects illustrate that the OTW’s ultimate goal isn’t just to combat specific exploitative corporate practices — it’s to empower fans.”

[darkmattersproj]

Mr. Robot’s 3rd Season Was Its Best One Yet Read at Vox.com.