There are two Justices that I think never should have been put on the Supreme Court, and whose behavior once on the court in my view constitutes unacceptable ideological hackery. This essay make the case on one of them.
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made what UC Berkeley law professor Dan Farber called ‘a cringeworthy error” last week: he got the meaning of an opinion he cited exactly backward. Worse still – the opinion he misread was his own. As Farber explained:
In an FCC ruling last week, they completely decimated the idea of internet freedom or net neutrality. They basically said that the corporations that can pay more can get faster internet service – this opens the floodgates for corporate rule online.
This is extraordinary legislation, and the latest in the Theocratic Right's war on women. If I were a fertile woman I am not sure I would live in Tennessee now that this is the law. This is what the world would look like if the Theocratic Right had its way.
It's Official: Tennessee Becomes First State to Jail Women for Pregnancy Outcomes
KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor – AlterNet (U.S.)
Tennessee has become the first state in the nation to pass a law criminalizing women for their pregnancy outcomes. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam took the 10 days allotted to him to consider the advice of doctors, addiction experts and reproductive health groups urging him to veto the punitive and dangerous measure that allows prosecutors to charge a woman with criminal assault if she uses illegal drugs during her pregnancy and her fetus or newborn is considered harmed as a result. Haslam ignored these recommendations – and the recommendations of nearly every major medical association, including the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy – and signed the measure anyway.
Some of the founding members of the occupy movement are launching a new political party — THE AFTER Party.
Carl Gibson is among them. He says, ” What sets The After Party apart that 364 days out of the year is a humanitarian organization. The way we organize politically, what sets us apart is that finding needs within the community, and then working to meet them using the communities assets.”
And, so is Radio Rahim, yes the real life persona behind the character in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing.
“There is a little bit of Radio Rahim in everybody (…) we all love our music and we have outrage about different things.”
How will After Party be different than other 3rd party alternatives? Why start a political party at all? And should Mookie have thrown that garbage can through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria?
All of those questions asked and answered this week on Acronym TV.
The growing popularity of “check your privilege” and “white privilege” at Universities and in political debates is interesting.
Why is it interesting? It's not a force for progress or positive change, it's a form of moral warfare. That means it's not a constructive remark that improves the debate, rather, it's an attack that does damage the target. However, it doesn't damage the target directly. Instead, the damage is done by weakening or breaking the moral bonds that allow the target to function in a social context.
In other words, the attack disconnects the target from the moral support of others. You can see that disconnection at work in how groups within the target group “white privilege” are fleeing from it, rather than rejecting the concept outright. For example, I've seen “white male privilege” as a form of attack now. I've also seen “white straight male privilege” being used. This divisibility of the attack makes it the neutron bomb of moral warfare. The kind of attack that's meant to surgically remove a specific target group from the debate without doing damage to your own group.
Click on Image to Enlarge
It's also interesting from the perspective of crowdsourcing social disruption, of the type we saw with Terry Jones and his “burn the Koran” campaign. “Privilege” as a form of attack is going to generate an aggressive, non-violent counter response from those on the right, in the not too distant future. A response that will only serve to increase divisions and make the possibility of any meaningful debate impossible.
Hope this was interesting,
JR
PS: Here's “privilege” taken to an extreme. It's a spoof, but it gives you an idea on how perniscious it can be (imagine your facebook profile being used to build your “privilege” score based on this nonsense).
It is impossible to have a rational conversation about climate change in the U.S. Congress or in Red value state legislatures, but in Blue value coastal states the implications of climate change and sea level rise are becoming a major issue, as this report explains.
As New Jersey residents loft their rebuilt homes onto five foot pilings along the shore and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio promises to get work started on 500 storm-demolished homes before Hurricane Sandy’s two year anniversary, a new sea level rise analysis has found that $32 billion in property and 84,000 people are at risk of extreme coastal flooding in five New England states.
As part of its Surging Seas initiative, Climate Central is using data from federal agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey, among many others, to map sea level rise by zip code in an interactive tool that also shows the number of people and the value of the property at risk.
The mapping tool was launched in 2012 for New York, New Jersey and Florida. Now, data on Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut is also available. Of the states just added to the map, Connecticut has the highest value of property at risk from coastal flooding – $14.9 billion. For its part, Massachusetts has about 47,888 people who would be endangered by a four-foot flood. The odds of such a flood occurring in Boston in the next 15 years is 67 percent. Most at risk are the 17,662 people who are highly vulnerable to flooding because of their social and economic situations.
Brazil is set to host the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2016. In preparation Brazil is evicting 200,000 people from their homes, eliminating poor neighborhoods, defunding public services, investing in a militarized police and surveillance state, using slave and prison labor to build outrageous stadiums unlikely to be filled more than once, and “improving” a famous old stadium (the world's largest for 50 years) by removing over half the capacity in favor of luxury seats. Meanwhile, popular protests and graffiti carry the message: “We want ‘FIFA standard' hospitals and schools!” not to mention this one ((FIFA = Fédération Internationale de Football Association, aka Soccer Profiteers International):
