Here’s your dose of “What the Fuck Is Going On” news (May 9th 2017 - May 10th 2017)
In the past 24-hours we learned that FBI Director James Comey has been fired by Donald Trump and the official reason for the firing is that he mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The White House says they are now looking into people to be the new FBI Director. (source)
Then earlier today, Trump hosted visitors at the White House, some including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Henry Kissinger, who served as Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. Kislyak is the Russian Ambassador who several of Trumps associates have said they met with during last year’s campaign. (source)
A reporter named Dan Heyman was arrested after attempting to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and White House adviser Kellyanne Conway a question. Both Price and Conway ignored Heyman’s question about the AHCA and when he followed and repeated the question, police arrested him. Heyman is being charged with “willful disruption of state government processes.” (source)
The White House was supposed to have a meeting to discuss the Paris climate change agreement but they canceled. A White House spokeswoman said the meeting will be rescheduled but gave no clue to when. (source)
Trump is considering sending in 5000 more troops to Afghanistan. Officials have said that Trump is deciding over a variety of options and this is one on the table. (source)
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing policy that would change how harsh punishments can be for low-level drug crimes. The changes could allow for more severe punishments for these low-level offenders. (source)
And breaking right now as I’m about to post this. The Senate intelligence committee has subpoenaed ex-Trump adviser Michael Flynn for documents related to Russia probe. (source)
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I meant to. I had it all written out and everything, but I balked. Even an ocean away I was too shy.
I thought I had more time. I spend most of my life with the panicked feeling that I do not have enough time, that some invisible timer is forever counting down and I cannot keep up, but that time I thought otherwise, and I was wrong.
Not that there was anything especially interesting in that letter; nothing, I am sure, that you hadn’t heard many times before. You meant a lot to me. You meant a lot to a lot of people.
You helped me come to grips with the world. Not that you explained everything about it, because no one could, but you made it seem like the kind of place that could be explained. Maybe better than that, you made it alright to not understand some things, made it less frightening to not be able to figure everything out.
Reading your books made something that had been frantic and upset in me for a long time calm down and retreat to a manageable distance.
I have carried them with me as totems in frightening places. Often simply having one nearby made me feel better. They all have stories: this one given by a friend, this one bought in the middle of that camping trip, this one sent in the mail from Finland. They are battered and cracked and sometimes stained and they are every one of them exceedingly good friends.
They have always been easy to read. I don’t mean that in the sense that they are simplistic or not challenging or anything like that. What I mean to say is that even when I am feeling my worst, when so many things that should not be hard are hard, reading your books is easy. It is a difficult thing to explain but it is an important thing.
But there are books of yours that I have not read, because I am not yet ready to face the fact that there are now and forever a finite amount of them. That someday there will be no more new journeys with you.
Dear sir, you have inspired me as a writer, but more than that, you have helped me be strong enough and well enough to write at all. To be curious and enthusiastic about the world instead of afraid of it. To challenge what is abhorrent without losing tolerance for the flaws inherent in us all. You have helped me shape beliefs strong enough that I can hold onto them even when the malfunctioning parts of my brain are clamoring to assure me otherwise.
I wish desperately that you were still here; the world seems to grow more confusing and terrible by the day. Good god, but we need you now more than ever. What a crime beyond measure, to take you so soon.
Dear sir, I am sorry I never sent you my letter, but if I am at all able I intend to make it up to you by using the gifts you gave me.
Yours sincerely,
a reader.
Dear sir,
You were the first writer I ever read who felt so honest. You showed me how people could fail. How people could be wrong. How easily absurdity could be accepted as logic. You appealed to my pessimism, when I first read your work as a teenager. I laughed because I could relate to the anger informing your humor - it was anger I shared. Anger that threatened to bury me.
Your books were air to a drowning kid.
Now that I revisit you, I find catharsis instead. Because somewhere past your anger, which Neil Gaiman has observed was an essential component of your character and your writing, there was hope.
There was optimism.
There was an unrestrained and joyful humanism.
Humanism that always concluded, no matter the depths of evil you presented, that people were okay. That people, once they’d exhausted all other possibilities, would come around to doing the right things.
It is just as the original poster said above: you would challenge abhorrence, but you would also write with love about the many flaws in people. You would say “this is wrong; here’s something better.”
Your writing, looking back on it, was so very brave; so very steadfast. It was exactly what I needed to be reading, at the time when I first started reading it.
You showed me that it’s possible to see darkness in the world without losing track of where the light’s coming from.
Pathologizing the white working class as inherently bigoted serves two functions: It discourages working-class organizing across racial lines, and it provides white liberals with a convenient scapegoat who, being white, can’t charge racism. As Malcolm X cautioned, “If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars.
When I was a student in yeshiva, I asked one of the rabbis why Jews talk so much. We were studying Talmud, and I was trying to understand the comprehensive, obsessive inquiry into questions from the minuscule and seemingly pedestrian–are the water cisterns adjacent to a house included in the price of its sale?–to the transcendent, like what is the nature of God.
“Jewish time is circular, so we work to make things perfect for the next time around,” he replied, before adding world-wearily: “Also, we don’t believe in perfection.”
“
—
Alana Newhouse, NYT Book Review of Stranger in a Strange Land by George Prochnik (via kuttithevangu)
i am trying to find normal employment and some means of housing myself within the state of north carolina. i have been staying in hotels and with family in order to prevent my son and i living in my nearly unsalvageable car.
i got into this position by attempting to escape a really abusive living situation with family in another part of north carolina. i have since been denied housing multiple times and have applied for nearly 200 jobs since mid-march to no avail.
i have post traumatic stress disorder and major depressive disorder and i have done all that i can to get wake county to help me, but the resources simply do not exist for me. i have contacted two therapists in hopes of getting on disability through medical necessity, but neither of them have contacted me back.
my car can’t go more than five miles to and from a destination without reaching a coolant near or over 260 degrees (at which point the engine shuts off) so i am trying really hard to find something close to rdu if possible.
please help me. i am really at the point of just placing my son for adoption and killing myself because i cannot take care of him and i feel no need to go on existing without him
i’m not asking for money. i’m asking for help with a job or a home in this state, preferably wake county. if you are in a position to help me, please contact me on here. i am literally, literally at my wit’s end.
PLEASE HELP MY WONDERFUL BEAUTIFUL FRIEND IF YOU ARE IN THE WAKE COUNTY AREA OF NC!!!!
She is beautiful, smart, wonderful, and a hell of a mother. Her son is adorable and sweet. PLEASE HELP HER AND SPREAD THE WORD!!!!
Okay, so. The problem with Tumblr is that even though it’s a great place to talk about social justice concepts it isn’t a great place to mobilize or organize political change. That means that social justice on here mostly ends up being performative rather than active.
Unfortunately the easiest way to perform your ideological purity within an online community is to point the finger at those who are less pure (see: callout posts, blacklists, smackdowns, receipt pulling, reductive black-and-white mantras/statements, ‘10 Reasons Why So-and-So Isn’t a Real Feminist’, and so on). I see this happening more and more and it makes me really uncomfortable because a) it discourages necessary discussion and learning within social movements by framing all differences/disagreements as moral battles where one person is right and the other person is terrible and b) it reduces social justice to a passive, self-congratulatory performance of personal identity rather than an active, organized pursuit of political change.
Look: Tumblr is many great things, but it is not a safe space. The safe space (a concept originating in the women’s liberation movement) is designed to allow members of a community to speak freely and compare personal experiences with the assurance of respect and the intention of expanding ideas while also finding common ground. Tumblr doesn’t work that way. It’s a vast online forum where likes, reblogs, and followers determine whether or not a particular voice is heard, and it’s just too fast, too big, too diverse, and too anonymous to assume good-will and common interest from all participants. Therefore, many people’s chief priority becomes loudly proving their loyalty to a particular group, as group members who say the wrong thing risk being cast out, blacklisted, harassed, and even threatened.
The result is that Tumblr communities become more polarized, beliefs become more entrenched, thought-terminating cliches abound, common interests are overlooked, and participants are hesitant to ask questions or do anything that might open them to criticism or condemnation (which naturally includes most meaningful political action).
And the problem with this Revenge of the Sith post-9/11 ‘you’re either with us 100% or you’re the enemy’ attitude (where we refuse to work with or even listen to people whose beliefs differ from ours in any way) isn’t just that it’s a little cultish and scary, it’s that it’s totally unsustainable in politics. It’s worth remembering that constantly culling a movement to get rid of less-than-perfect members doesn’t just make the movement purer and purer, it makes it smaller and weaker.
I find Bill Nye’s new show just a little obnoxious. I say this as a fan. I appreciate what he’s trying to do, but the execution just isn’t doing it for me.
I’m fairly certain that the people who make the “batman could make himself obsolete by using his money to solve the economic strain that drives many people to crime” posts are only familiar with Batman through Will Arnett’s spoof performance in the Lego movie, since that’s the only version of Batman I know where he isn’t hiring so many ex-convicts at his company so they have a legitimate source of income and using so much money to fund social programs that all the other bigwigs at Wayne Enterprises hate him and want him gone
Literally every version of his origin story I can remember involves him realizing that he can’t just treat the symptoms as Batman, he has to treat the root cause as Bruce Wayne. A huge part of the plot of “The Dark Knight Rises” is that his company is on the verge of bankruptcy because Bruce keeps spending all their profits on things like “clean energy” and “food and shelter for orphans.”
The opening of “Arkham City” shows him campaigning against mass incarceration because the majority of the inmates in Arkham City are not public menaces like the Joker, they’re desperate people with no other options, and Gotham should be providing them with legitimate means of stability rather than punishing them for having none.
Especially since the majority of his villains are independently wealthy people (doctors, lawyers, business executives) who are exploiting people’s desperation in order to get themselves henchmen, and the henchmen almost always have jobs with a living wage waiting for them on the other side of their sentence, and Bruce has a standing offer to pay out-of-pocket for the therapy of any of his villains whose crimes are the result of a mental illness (which Bruce is sympathetic to since he is mentally ill himself)
But what’s really damning about these posts is that a lot of them suggest Bruce should use his money to give the police the resources they need to deal with crime on their own, which makes it clear they’ve never actually consumed a piece of Batman media, since the issue with the Gotham Police is not that they’re underfunded. They have a bloated budget, they’re almost militant, and they’re so corrupt that they actually encourage crime, both violent and economic, because they’re on the payroll of the richest criminals.
Also, some of them refer to Batman as a “old rich white man’s wet dream” and I really disagree here. A story that says the only rich dude in the world who’s not a criminal drain on society is the one who spends the majority of his hefty inheritance and all his corporate profits trying to correct the imbalance that allowed him his wealth in the first place, whose staunch belief is that the best crime control policy is building a world where no one feels crime is necessary, as well as refusing to support mass incarceration or police corruption, systems which stand to benefit him financially? Batman is an old rich white man’s worst nightmare.