#'we need a policy' 'and who's holding them accountable' 'and what are the consequences' 'write up' and 'WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE APPRENTICE | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thisdancingheart · 3 years

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Remember YFIP?

My Year of Grief and Cancellation

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?

By Liat Kaplan Feb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/style/your-fave-is-problematic-tumblr.html

If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.

That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.

Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.

The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.

A group of students brought the blog to the attention of our school’s administrators, who threatened to take legal action if I continued to write about them. Meanwhile, other Tumblr users had begun submitting screenshots featuring statements from minor celebrities. With graduation hanging in the balance, I shifted my focus away from my peers and toward public figures. I rebranded. Money and fame had protected them since time immemorial. What harm could my little blog do?

So I posted photos of Lady Gaga in V magazine with her skin bronzed to an unnatural brown. I pulled out troubling quotes from an essay Lena Dunham had written about a trip to Japan. I noted Taylor Swift’s since-changed homophobic lyric in “Picture to Burn.” My most popular posts tended to be about women — which makes sense, because the celebrity press tends to be more critical of them.

As it turned out, I had bigger things to worry about than dissecting the careers of celebrities I’d never met. On a winter morning, I woke up to the news that my older sister, Tamar, who was studying in Bolivia, had been in a bus crash, and the outlook was not good. I pored over research to escape from what felt like an impossible situation: my sister slowly dying of treatable injuries in a rural area thousands of miles away.

We held a public memorial service for Tamar in our hometown. Some of my classmates showed up, including a few who had written nasty things about me online. I found their shows of kindness insulting now, during what was quickly becoming the worst year of my life.

I tried going back to school after a few weeks, but I found myself picking frequent arguments with classmates and teachers. The school made an arrangement with my parents: I would be placed on “medical leave” for the remainder of the semester. I would graduate on time, but I wouldn’t return to campus.

Stuck at home, I devoted myself to Tumblr. What was I trying to accomplish? Mostly, I was interested in knocking people off their pedestals. I also enjoyed being popular, controversial, discussed. When a comedian I had posted about name-checked my blog on Twitter, I was giddy.

Then I started receiving threats. Someone sent me a screenshot of a house from Google Maps, claiming to have found my IP address. It wasn’t my house, but still. I realized that for every person on Tumblr who looked up to my blog, there were many more, online and offline, who hated it — and me. I started posting less and, eventually, stopped posting at all.

In the years since, I’ve looked back on my blog with shame and regret — about my pettiness, my motivating rage, my hard-and-fast assumptions that people were either good or bad. Who was I to lump together known misogynists with people who got tattoos in languages they didn’t speak? I just wanted to see someone face consequences; no one who’d hurt me ever had.

There’s something almost quaint about it all now: teenage me, teaching myself about social justice on Tumblr while also posturing as an authority on that very subject, thinking I was making a difference while engaging in a bit of schadenfreude. Meanwhile, other movements — local, global, unified in their purposes and rooted in progressive philosophies — were organizing for actual justice. Looking back, I was more of a cop than a social justice warrior, as people on Tumblr had come to think of me.

These days, there’s no shortage of online accountability efforts, the large part of them anonymously run. Some accounts post typically anodyne but occasionally explosive celebrity gossip. Others are explicitly aimed at naming, shaming and punishing people for all kinds of actions and missteps. My own work fell somewhere in the middle, I think; the information I posted was out in the open, but I was cataloging it to make a case against the veneration of the rich and famous.

As many have noted, the coronavirus pandemic has pronounced the distance between celebrities and the rest of us. And their actions have been subject to greater scrutiny — the vacations they’ve gone on, the parties they’ve held, the access they’ve had to testing and care during a health crisis that has taken millions of lives.

But celebrity culture began to crumble long before Covid-19. Mounting accusations of many kinds, whispered between industry professionals, had become too loud to ignore. Social media, which gave celebrities more control over their images and influence over their fans, also opened them up to new kinds of criticism. People have lost jobs and entire careers because of the kinds of errors my blog cited. Others have apologized for work and behavior that, re-examined in a contemporary context, just doesn’t hold up.

For years, I’ve regretted the spotlight I put on other people’s mistakes, as if one day I wouldn’t make plenty of my own. There can be an unsparing purity to growing into one’s social conscience that is often overbroad.

My brain wasn’t ready for nuance. I was angered by hypocrisy and cruelty; what I did about it was apply a level of scrutiny that left no room for error. I’m not saying that I should be canceled for my teenage blog. (Please don't!) I just know what we all should know by now: that no one who has lived publicly, online or off, has a spotless record.

For these reasons, I’ve thought about deleting my Tumblr. But doing that would mean erasing my own errors of judgment. I almost feel like I need to leave it up to punish myself for having made it in the first place. That, and I know someone could (and probably would) just pull it up on Wayback Machine. The internet, after all, never forgets.

~~~~~~~

#YFIP #fuck her and her lack of real remorse #25Feb2021 #NYT

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phroyd · 4 years

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Oh My, what terrible timing, and what a great loss! Rest In Peace Justice Ginsburg, thank you for all you have done for our country! - Phroyd

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural and feminist icon, died Friday. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

The court, in a statement, said Ginsburg died at her home in Washington surrounded by family. She was 87.

"Our nation has lost a justice of historic stature," Chief Justice John Roberts said. "We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her, a tired and resolute champion of justice."

Architect of the legal fight for women's rights in the 1970s, Ginsburg subsequently served 27 years on the nation's highest court, becoming its most prominent member. Her death will inevitably set in motion what promises to be a nasty and tumultuous political battle over who will succeed her, and it thrusts the Supreme Court vacancy into the spotlight of the presidential campaign.

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Just days before her death, as her strength waned, Ginsburg dictated this statement to her granddaughter Clara Spera: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

She knew what was to come. Ginsburg's death will have profound consequences for the court and the country. Inside the court, not only is the leader of the liberal wing gone, but with the Court about to open a new term, Chief Justice John Roberts no longer holds the controlling vote in closely contested cases.

Though he has a consistently conservative record in most cases, he has split from fellow conservatives in a few important ones, this year casting his vote with liberals, for instance, to at least temporarily protect the so-called Dreamers from deportation by the Trump administration, to uphold a major abortion precedent, and to uphold bans on large church gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. But with Ginsburg gone, there is no clear court majority for those outcomes.

Indeed, a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is for the third time scheduled to hear a challenge brought by Republicans to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. In 2012 the high court upheld the law by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote and writing the opinion for the majority. But this time the outcome may well be different.

That's because Ginsburg's death gives Republicans the chance to tighten their grip on the court with another Trump appointment that would give conservatives a 6-to-3 majority. And that would mean that even a defection on the right would leave conservatives with enough votes to prevail in the Obamacare case and many others.

At the center of the battle to achieve that will be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In 2016 he took a step unprecedented in modern times: He refused for nearly a year to allow any consideration of President Obama's supreme court nominee.

Back then, McConnell's justification was the upcoming presidential election, which he said would allow voters a chance to weigh in on what kind of justice they wanted. But now, with the tables turned, McConnell has made clear he will not follow the same course. Instead he will try immediately push through a Trump nominee so as to ensure a conservative justice to fill Ginsburg's liberal shoes, even if President Trump were to lose his re-election bid. Asked what he would do in circumstances like these, McConnell said: "Oh, we'd fill it."

So what happens in the coming weeks will be bare-knuckle politics, writ large, on the stage of a presidential election. It will be a fight Ginsburg had hoped to avoid, telling Justice Stevens shortly before his death that she hoped to serve as long as he did--until age 90.

"My dream is that I will stay on the court as long as he did," she said in an interview in 2019.

She didn't quite make it. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nonetheless an historic figure. She changed the way the world is for American women. For more than a decade, until her first judicial appointment in 1980, she led the fight in the courts for gender equality. When she began her legal crusade, women were treated, by law, differently from men. Hundreds of state and federal laws restricted what women could do, barring them from jobs, rights and even from jury service. By the time she donned judicial robes, however, Ginsburg had worked a revolution.

That was never more evident than in 1996 when, as a relatively new Supreme Court justice, Ginsburg wrote the court's 7-to-1 opinion declaring that the Virginia Military Institute could no longer remain an all-male institution. True, said Ginsburg, most women — indeed most men — would not want to meet the rigorous demands of VMI. But the state, she said, could not exclude women who could meet those demands.

"Reliance on overbroad generalizations ... estimates about the way most men or most women are, will not suffice to deny opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description," Ginsburg wrote.

She was an unlikely pioneer, a diminutive and shy woman, whose soft voice and large glasses hid an intellect and attitude that, as one colleague put it, was "tough as nails."

By the time she was in her 80s, she had become something of a rock star to women of all ages. She was the subject of a hit documentary, a biopic, an operetta, merchandise galore featuring her "Notorious RBG" moniker, a Time magazine cover, and regular Saturday Night Live sketches.

On one occasion in 2016, Ginsburg got herself into trouble and later publicly apologized for disparaging remarks she made about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

But for the most part Ginsburg enjoyed her fame and maintained a sense of humor about herself.

Asked about the fact that she had apparently fallen asleep during the 2015 State of the Union address, Ginsburg did not take the Fifth, admitting that although she had vowed not to drink at dinner with the other justices before the speech, the wine had just been too good to resist. The result, she said, was that she was perhaps not an entirely "sober judge" and kept nodding off.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Ruth Bader went to public schools, where she excelled as a student — and as a baton twirler. By all accounts, it was her mother who was the driving force in her young life, but Celia Bader died of cancer the day before the future Justice would graduate from high school.

Then 17, Ruth Bader went on to Cornell on full scholarship, where she met Martin (aka "Marty") Ginsburg. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she said.

After her graduation, they were married and went off to Fort Sill, Okla., for his military service. There Mrs. Ginsburg, despite scoring high on the civil service exam, could only get a job as a typist, and when she became pregnant, she lost even that job.

Two years later, the couple returned to the East Coast to attend Harvard Law School. She was one of only nine women in a class of over 500 and found the dean asking her why she was taking up a place that "should go to a man."

At Harvard, she was the academic star, not Marty. The couple was busy juggling schedules, and their toddler when Marty was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Surgeries and aggressive radiation followed.

"So that left Ruth with a 3-year-old child, a fairly sick husband, the law review, classes to attend and feeding me," said Marty Ginsburg in a 1993 interview with NPR.

The experience also taught the future justice that sleep was a luxury. During the year of Marty's illness, he was only able to eat late at night; after that he would dictate his senior class paper to Ruth. At about 2 a.m., he would go back to sleep, Ginsburg recalled in an NPR interview. "Then I'd take out the books and start reading what I needed to be prepared for classes the next day."

Marty Ginsburg survived, graduated, and got a job in New York; his wife, a year behind him in school, transferred to Columbia, where she graduated at the top of her law school class. Despite her academic achievements, the doors to law firms were closed to women, and though recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship, she wasn't even interviewed.

It was bad enough that she was a woman, she recalled later, but she was also a mother, and male judges worried that she would be diverted by her "familial obligations."

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pictured in the justice's chambers in Washington, D.C., during an interview with NPR's Nina Totenberg in September 2016.

A mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, finally got her a clerkship in New York by promising Judge Edmund Palmieri that if she couldn't do the work, he would provide someone who could. That was "the carrot," Ginsburg would say later. "The stick" was that Gunther, who regularly fed his best students to Palmieri, told the judge that if he didn't take Ginsburg, Gunther would never send him a clerk again. The Ginsburg clerkship apparently was a success; Palmieri kept her not for the usual one year, but two, from 1959-61.

Ginsburg's next path is rarely talked about, mainly because it doesn't fit the narrative. She learned Swedish so she could work with Anders Berzelius, a Swedish civil procedure scholar. Through the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, Ginsburg and Berzelius co-authored a book.

In 1963, Ginsburg finally landed a teaching job at Rutgers law school, where she at one point hid her second pregnancy by wearing her mother-in-law's clothes. The ruse worked; her contract was renewed before her new baby was born.

While at Rutgers, she began her work fighting gender discrimination.

The 'Mother Brief'

Her first big case was a challenge to a law that barred a Colorado man named Charles Moritz from taking a tax deduction for the care of his 89-year-old mother. The IRS said the deduction, by statute, could only be claimed by women, or widowed or divorced men. But Moritz had never married.

The tax court concluded that the internal revenue code was immune to constitutional challenge, a notion that tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg viewed as "preposterous." The two Ginsburgs took on the case, he from the tax perspective, she from the constitutional perspective.

According to Marty Ginsburg, for his wife, this was the "mother brief." She had to think through all the issues and how to fix the inequity. The solution was to ask the court not to invalidate the statute but to apply it equally to both sexes. She won in the lower courts.

"Amazingly," he recalled in a 1993 NPR interview, the government petitioned the United States Supreme Court, stating that the decision "cast a cloud of unconstitutionality" over literally hundreds of federal statutes, and it attached a list of those statutes, which it compiled with Defense Department computers.

Those laws, Marty Ginsburg added, "were the statutes that my wife then litigated ... to overturn over the next decade."

In 1971, she would write her first Supreme Court brief in the case of Reed v. Reed. Ginsburg represented Sally Reed, who thought she should be the executor of her son's estate instead of her ex-husband.

The constitutional issue was whether a state could automatically prefer men over women as executors of estates. The answer from the all-male supreme court: no.

It was the first time the court had ever struck down a state law because it discriminated based on gender.

And that was just the beginning.

By then Ginsburg was earning quite a reputation. She would become the first female tenured professor at Columbia Law School, and she would found the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

As the chief architect of the battle for women's legal rights, Ginsburg devised a strategy that was characteristically cautious, precise and single-mindedly aimed at one goal: winning.

Knowing that she had to persuade male, establishment-oriented judges, she often picked male plaintiffs, and she liked Social Security cases because they illustrated how discrimination against women can harm men. For example, in Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, she represented a man whose wife, the principal breadwinner, died in childbirth. The husband sought survivor's benefits to care for his child, but under the then-existing Social Security law, only widows, not widowers, were entitled to such benefits.

"This absolute exclusion, based on gender per se, operates to the disadvantage of female workers, their surviving spouses, and their children," Ginsburg told the justices at oral argument. The Supreme Court would ultimately agree, as it did in five of the six cases she argued.

Over the ensuing years, Ginsburg would file dozens of briefs seeking to persuade the courts that the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection applies not just to racial and ethnic minorities, but to women as well.

In an interview with NPR, she explained the legal theory that she eventually sold to the Supreme Court.

"The words of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause — 'nor shall any state deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.' Well that word, 'any person,' covers women as well as men. And the Supreme Court woke up to that reality in 1971," Ginsburg said.

During these pioneering years, Ginsburg would often work through the night as she had during law school. But by this time, she had two children, and she later liked to tell a story about the lesson she learned when her son, in grade school, seemed to have a proclivity for getting into trouble.

The scrapes were hardly major, and Ginsburg grew exasperated by demands from school administrators that she come in to discuss her son's alleged misbehavior. Finally, there came a day when she had had enough. "I had stayed up all night the night before, and I said to the principal, 'This child has two parents. Please alternate calls.'"

After that, she found, the calls were few and far between. It seemed, she said, that most infractions were not worth calling a busy husband about.

The Supreme Court's Second Woman

In 1980 then-President Jimmy Carter named Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Over the next 13 years, she would amass a record as something of a centrist liberal, and in 1993 then-President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court, the second woman appointed to the position.

She was not first on his list. For months Clinton flirted with other potential nominees, and some women's rights activists withheld their active support because they were worried about Ginsburg's views on abortion. She had been publicly critical of the legal reasoning in Roe v. Wade.

But in the background, Marty Ginsburg was lobbying hard for his wife. And finally Ruth Ginsburg was invited for a meeting with the president. As one White House official put it afterward, Clinton "fell for her--hook, line and sinker." So did the Senate. She was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.

Once on the court, Ginsburg was an example of a woman who defied stereotypes. Though she looked tiny and frail, she rode horses well into her 70s and even went parasailing. At home, it was her husband who was the chef, indeed a master chef, while the justice cheerfully acknowledged that she was an awful cook.

Though a liberal, she and the court's conservative icon, Antonin Scalia, now deceased, were the closest of friends. Indeed, an opera called Scalia/Ginsburg is based on their legal disagreements, and their affection for each other.

Over the years, as Ginsburg's place on the court grew in seniority, so did her role. In 2006, as the court veered right after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg dissented more often and more assertively, her most passionate dissents coming in women's rights cases.

Dissenting in Ledbetter v. Goodyear in 2007, she called on Congress to pass legislation that would override a court decision that drastically limited back-pay available for victims of employment discrimination. The resulting legislation was the first bill passed in 2009 after President Barack Obama took office.

In 2014, she dissented fiercely from the court's decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, a decision that allowed some for-profit companies to refuse, on religious grounds, to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in health care plans. Such an exemption, she said, would "deny legions of women who do not hold their employers' beliefs, access to contraceptive coverage."

Where, she asked, "is the stopping point?" Suppose it offends an employer's religious belief "to pay the minimum wage" or "to accord women equal pay?"

And in 2013, when the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, contending that times had changed and the law was no longer needed, Ginsburg dissented. She said that throwing out the provision "when it has worked and is continuing to work ... is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

She viewed her dissents as a chance to persuade a future court.

"Some of my favorite opinions are dissenting opinions," Ginsburg told NPR. "I will not live to see what becomes of them, but I remain hopeful."

And yet, Ginsburg still managed some unexpected victories by winning over one or two of the conservative justices in important cases. In 2015, for example, she authored the court's decision upholding independent redistricting commissions established by voter referenda as a way of removing some of the partisanship in drawing legislative district lines.

Ginsburg always kept a backbreaking schedule of public appearances both at home and abroad, even after five bouts with cancer: colon cancer in 1999, pancreatic cancer 10 years later, lung cancer in 2018, and then pancreatic cancer again in 2019 and liver lesions in 2020. During that time, she endured chemotherapy, radiation, and in the last years of her life, terrible pain from shingles that never went away completely. All who knew her admired her grit. In 2009, three weeks after major cancer surgery, she surprised everyone when she showed up for the State of the Union address.

Shortly after that, she was back on the bench; it was her husband Marty who told her she could do it, even when she thought she could not, she told NPR.

A year later her psychological toughness was on full display when her beloved husband of 56 years was mortally ill. As she packed up his things at the hospital before taking him home to die, she found a note he had written to her. "My Dearest Ruth," it began, "You are the only person I have ever loved," setting aside children and family. "I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell....The time has come for me to ... take leave of life because the loss of quality simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less."

Shortly after that, Marty Ginsburg died at home. The next day, his wife, the justice, was on the bench, reading an important opinion she had authored for the court. She was there, she said, because "Marty would have wanted it."

Years later, she would read the letter aloud in an NPR interview, and at the end, choke down the tears.

In the years after Marty's death, she would persevere without him, maintaining a jam-packed schedule when she was not on the bench or working on opinions.

Some liberals criticized her for not retiring while Obama was president, but she was at the top of her game, enjoyed her work enormously, and feared that Republicans might not confirm a successor. She was an avid consumer of opera, literature, and modern art. But in the end, it was her work, she said, that sustained her.

"I do think that I was born under a very bright star," she said in an NPR interview. "Because if you think about my life, I get out of law school. I have top grades. No law firm in the city of New York will hire me. I end up teaching; it gave me time to devote to the movement for evening out the rights of women and men. "

And it was that legal crusade for women's rights that ultimately led to her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

To the end of her tenure, she remained a special kind of feminist, both decorous and dogged.

Phroyd

#scotus #ruth bader ginsburg #rip

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ruminativerabbi · 3 years

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Looking Forward/Looking Back

And so a new era begins in our nation! Will the Biden years, whether four or eight of them, lead to healing in a nation so riven that many of the chasms that divide us—some racial, others political, still others ethnic or economic—feel truly unbridgeable? Will they feature an end to the COVID-era that has so radically altered the way we live and do business in our land? Will they bring a rededication to the kind of environmentally sound public policy that could possibly head off the crises that will otherwise visit the planet with increasingly frequency and ferocity if we choose to put blinders on and then recklessly to barrel ahead into uncharted waters without any clear sense of how to address even the issues that threaten us the least overtly, let alone those that are the most prominent? Will the recent hopeful developments in the Middle East serve as the prelude to the kind of complex reconfiguration that will, at long last, make Israel into a nation tied at least as profoundly to neighbors and local friends as to distant allies in North America and, when the wind blows in the right direction, Europe? (And will such a rebalancing of alliances lead finally to a just resolution of the Palestinians’ plight in a way that both serves their own best interests and Israel’s?) All of these questions are in the air as we pass from the Trump era to the Biden years, definitely from the past to the future and ideally from a period characterized by unprecedented (that word again!) incivility and fractiousness to one more reminiscent of the nation in which people my age and older remember growing up.

To none of the above questions do I have a clear answer to offer. But I do feel hopeful—and that hope is born not merely of wishful thinking (or not solely of it), but also of a sense that we have come to a point in our nation’s history at which the task of re-dedicating ourselves to the bedrock notions that underlay the founding of the American republic in the eighteenth century is crucial. But no less crucial is ridding ourselves of some of the fantasies we have been taught since childhood to accept as basic American truths.

There are lots to choose from, but today I would like to write about one of my favorite American fantasies, the one according to which Americans have always treated dissent graciously, enjoying national debate without acrimony and finding in principled dialogue the most basic of American paths forward. According to that fantasy, Congress exists basically to house friendly co-workers whose disagreements can and do yield the kind of dignified compromise that in turn serves as a path forward that all their constituents can gratefully travel into a bipartisan future built on our collective will to live in peace and learn from each other. Hah!

We have had in our past instances of violent altercation, including some in the very halls of Congress that were besieged by insurrectionists on January 6. Forgetting them won’t necessarily condemn us to reliving them. But keeping them in mind will surely help us find the resolve to avoid them. As we enter the Biden years, we need to look with clear eyes on that part of our history and, instead of ignoring it, allow it to guide us forward into a different kind of future.

First up, I think, would have to be the 1838 murder of Congressman Jonathan Cilley (D-Maine) by Congressman William Graves (Whig-Kentucky). This one did not take place in the Capitol, although that’s where the party got started. The backstory is so petty as almost to be silly, yet a man died because of that pettiness. Cilley said something on the floor of the House that irritated a prominent Whig journalist, who responded by asking Graves to hand deliver a note demanding an apology. Cilley declined, to which principled decision Graves responded by challenging Cilley to a duel, which then actually took place on February 24, 1838 in nearby Maryland. Neither was apparently much of a marksman. Both men shot twice and missed. But then Congressman Graves aimed more carefully and shot and killed Congressman Cilley.

To their credit, Congress responded by passing anti-dueling legislation. But that only kept our elected representatives from murdering each other, not from behaving violently. For example, when Representative Preston Brooks (D-South Carolina) wanted to express his disapproval of the abolitionist stance of Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts), he brought a walking cane with him into the Capitol on May 22, 1856, and beat Sumner almost to death. The account of the beating on the website of the United States Senate reads as follows: “Moving quickly, Brooks slammed his metal-topped cane onto the unsuspecting Sumner's head. As Brooks struck again and again, Sumner rose and lurched blindly about the chamber, futilely attempting to protect himself. After a very long minute, it ended. Bleeding profusely, Sumner was carried away. Brooks walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained by the stunned onlookers.” The rest of the story is also instructive: Congress voted to censure Congressman Brooks, whereupon the latter resigned and was almost immediately re-elected to the House by his constituents in South Carolina. He died soon after that (and at age 37), but his place in history was secured! Sumner himself survived and spent another eighteen years in the Senate.

I’d like to suggest that all my readers who felt totally shocked by the events of January 6 to read The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history at Yale University, that was published in 2018 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I read the book when it came out and thought then (and still do think) that it should be required reading for all who imagine that, as I keep hearing, the use of violence and, even more so, the threat of violence “just isn’t us.” It’s us, all right. And Freeman’s book proves it a dozen different ways. As readers of my letters know, I read a lot of American history. But I can hardly recall reading a book that so thoroughly changed the way I thought of our government and its history.

And then there was the brawl in the House in 1858 that broke out when Laurence M. Keitt (D-South Carolina) attempted to strangle Galusha Grow (R-Pennsylvania) in the wake the latter speaking disparagingly about of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford to the effect that Black people were by virtue of their race excluded from American citizenship regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. The House was, to say the least, riven when Keitt went for Grow’s throat. And what happened next, Freeman writes, “was a free-for-all right in the open space in front of the Speaker’s platform featuring roughly thirty, sweaty, disheveled, mostly middle-aged congressman in a no-holds-barred brawl, North against South.” Keitt, who threw the first punch, was already known as a violent man: it was he, in fact, who took out his gun and threatened to kill any member of Congress who was part of the effort to save Charles Sumner’s life in the attack on him by Preston Brooks mentioned above.

These are the thoughts I have in my heart as the nation enters the Biden years. We have a history of violence, incivility, and public rage. What happened on January 6 was, yes, an aberration in that no one supports—or, at least, supports openly—the use of violence to make a point in the Congress. But that was not something new and shocking as much as it was a return to an earlier stage of our nation’s history, a kind of regression to the days in which violence was the language of discourse, an age in which it was possible for one member of the House openly to attempt to strangle another and then to suffer no real consequences at all. And just to wrap up the story, Representative Keitt later joined the Confederate Army and was killed on June 1, 1864 at the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia.

That we can renounce violence, embrace civility, listen to opposing viewpoints carefully and thoughtfully, debate with courage and respect for others’ opinions, and behave like grown-ups even when we are unlikely to have our way in some matter of public policy—I know in my heart that we can do that. Last week, I wrote about three different instances of armed insurrection against the federal government. This week, I’ve written about the use of threats of violence, and violence itself, at the highest level of government. I could go on to note that, of our first forty-five American presidents, there have been either successful or unsuccessful assassination attempts against a full twenty of them…and that that list includes every president of my own lifetime except for Dwight Eisenhower. We cannot renounce our American propensity to settle things with our fists by making believe that violence is not part of our culture. Just the opposite is true: it was part of our past and it certainly part of our present. Whether it will be part of our future—that is the question on the table. The insurrectionists who entered the Capitol on January 6 were convinced they were acting in accordance with American tradition. There’s something to that argument too…and that is why it is so crucial now that we all join together to renounce that part of our past and then to move ahead into a future characterized by mutual respect, respectful debate, and a deep sense of national unity born of pride in the best parts of our past, confidence in the present, and hope in the future.

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thepeoplebehindsustainability · 4 years

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Piet Colruyt, impact investor - June 2019

“I believe the biggest problem today is our mindset: we still accept people being selfish or companies destroying nature or presidents denying climate change, on the excuse of being the natural condition of humans: we still accept people will always go for the short term benefit for their own just because “it is natural”.”

“I see myself as a social investor, which means that I want to invest in people, organisations, companies with solutions to the big societal challenges we are facing: it can be on climate change, social cohesion, inclusion, integration, poverty,… My focus is on inspiring innovations in impact investing. Which means (1) it will always be “investing” (which can be time, energy, people, money, for profit or not-for-profit) (2) where the first goal is to have positive societal impact (it can be social or environmental). (3) Innovations mean that I will not invest in existing solutions where enough money is already going to. If other people already invest in such things, I can spend my capital on other solutions. (4) And last but not least: it must be inspiring. If accountants give a certificate that the impact is great and the financial returns are ok, but it is too boring to be inspirational, I will not invest, because my ultimate goal is to change how people look at investing. Therefor it must be also fun & inspiring. People should want to change their investment strategies into impact investing not only because they have to, but because they want to.

Sustainability in my sector, the impact investing space, means a combination of positive societal impact and a fair financial return. It should be noticed that the financial return is not always for the investor: sometimes a project can have huge financial returns for the common good. These can also become sustainable if the system (the government, the foundations) provide funding because they see the return is bigger than the cost. Sustainability also means agility to react properly if the situation changes.

Coming from a family business (Colruyt, founded by my grandfather, is today in the top 3 of Belgian foodretailers) long term sustainability is in our DNA. When my grandfather started to sell coffee, wine, chocolate in the bakery of his father in 1928, he wanted to become rich (the first P of the 3P model is Profit): he had 9 children to feed and wanted a big house and a big car. The second generation added the people aspect: a company can only grow if the people grow. My uncle decided to spent 5% of the turnover in time and money in trainings. Since 1991, the third generation launched the Greenline program (the third P of the 3P’s, Planet) : as foodretailers we also have to take care about the planet to leave this in better conditions for our children. I became architect of the supermarkets in 2000 and became board member in 2001 and it was only than that we decided to diversify: we started investing in venture capital, funds and equity besides our main investment Colruyt Group. 10 years later I decided to become full time investor, after I discovered Ashoka and the world of social entrepreneurship and impact investing. We had long debates about the vision, mission, values and strategy of the family holding and I discovered the difference between social first or finance first impact investing. Although both are impact investors who want to combine doing good & doing well, the difference is in their theory of change. Finance first impact investors believe you can have the most impact if you reach market conform returns: in that case, you will find new investors, you can grow the company and the impact. Social first impact investors believe we should change our capitalistic system: if we don’t accept lower returns or higher risks, we are not able to find the new innovations needed to solve all societal challenges. To maximize the impact, they believe investors should lower their financial return expectations or increase their risk appetite. In 2010 I decided to do both: the family holding and the Colruyt Group are more finance first, but Impact Capital, my own holding, is able to promote and invest in “social first” impact investing. In 2012 I co-founded SI² Fund which was the first private social impact first fund in Belgium and merged with Shaerpa Fund in 2015 to become one of the leading social impact funds in the Benelux. SI² Fund can only survive if it is embedded in a broader ecosystem, where the right funding, coaching and network is provided at the different stages of a companies life. Therefore I started also investing in a foundation, a seed capital fund, an accelerator, a crowdfunding platform… all focused on impact. The Impact House, founded in 2018 is the materialization of this ecosystem view.

It seems that many people want change but no one wants to change. In strategy discussions on what will work best, for example, to tackle climate change, we always see the two positions: some people are convinced that awareness of the scientific facts and predictions of the consequences will people help to change habits. Other strategists are convinced that the only thing that works, is if there is a “what’s in it for me” and you’d better not talk about responsibility or negative consequences, but only positive nudging will change the mindset. Some people, arguing for the green economy, explain that we all should reduce our comfort levels and live differently, take public transport, eat less meat, pay more for fair trade, organic, local,... Others, arguing for the blue economy, are convinced that the green mantra will only convince the 10 to 15% of the people already converted, but if you want to reach the other 85%, sustainability must simply be the easiest or cheapest alternative. That’s why I am convinced that the role of the government is crucial: it is up to politics to change the rules, to raise taxes or give subsidies to steer consumption in a more sustainable, circular way. We need both sides: the green preachers who want us to change habits & the blue optimists who believe technology will finally solve most issues with no loose of comfort. I wanted to make this parallel with green or blue economy because the same discussion is going on in the impact investing space: some people strongly believe there is no trade-off between financial and social return. They look for companies with market conform returns and believe that’s the only way to grow. Others believe we should accept lower financial returns or higher risks, to discover the innovations and help them to grow before they are mature and eventually reach market conformity. We need both sides of the spectrum and that’s what I try to support since 10 years. In my opinion it is all about changing the mindset of investing, which is in essence about changing the human condition: can we be more empathic and more altruist for the common good even when in the short term it is less attractive for the person him/herself ? I strongly believe we are evolving on our planet towards a situation with polluted air, oceans full of plastic, global warming, where it is in our own personal interest to do more for the common good. We have to change mindsets and this takes time. The time we don’t have in case of the climate challenge.

I believe the biggest problem today is our mindset: we still accept people being selfish or companies destroying nature or presidents denying climate change, on the excuse of being the natural condition of humans: we still accept people will always go for the short term benefit for their own just because “it is natural”. But what is natural ? What is the nature of humans ? I dream of a world where every human being strives for the common good and no one is accepting egoism. We are the only species on earth able to fly to the moon, to use our brains and collaborate to invent treatments for diseases, to write and perform art works,… let’s become the only species in the world able to at least save the planet. Humans are the only animal species who can read and write, who can watch movies and understand literature. We are the only animal who can scientifically proof there is a climate crisis which will affect us all. We are the only species who can become angry or sad, just by reading letters in a newspaper about something terribly going wrong in the Amazone Forest. We cannot do nothing and pretend we didn’t know. We cannot keep quiet and continue our business as usual. This shift in the mindset is needed and I see my role in promoting it in the field of investing: by showing good examples of innovative social entrepreneurs who succeed in tackling a problem in a sustainable, healthy, inspiring way. Changing mindsets is a gentle evolution but the examples are often system changing or disruptive. We need both disruptions and gentle evolution, united around one common goal: positive impact for all.

In our book (“Allemaal Sociaal 3.0”) we described the interaction between exact these 3 major players. Social organisations and everyday citizens must become more entrepreneurial: everyone can become a changemaker. Corporates and companies should become more social. And we need a stronger policy level, not to solve everything on their own but to draft the boundaries, set the conditions, embody the rules with a long term vision and for the common good. Today we are in a crisis: politics seem not to work with more extremism, polarization, Brexit, populism… Governments complain, corporates complain and citizens complain. Every player in his/her corner, shooting on the others. While the only solution consists in more collaboration between those major players. And therefore we believe social entrepreneurs and inclusive businesses are best placed to show these new alliances.

I’m convinced we need to re-think the way our democracy is organized. Elections every 4 year and referenda with a simple yes/no question are not the best way to take the decisions for the long term in the common intrest. I would like to see a government of national unity where every party is represented and politicians are forced to find compromises without spindoctors, tweets or polls polarizing our society. If people see the positive effects and personal benefits of being more social and altruist, mindset will change.

Never give up when you see injustice: everyone can be a changemaker. As a consumer, you can inform yourself to vote everyday with your wallet. Choose those products and services who are better for planet & people. But inform yourself, be critical, because marketeers are smart and there is a lot of greenwashing, social washing, window dressing. And don’t be afraid to change your mind. Share what you have learnt to help people to make conscious consumption choices. And ask your bank for ethical investment products. Ask your bank about their fossil fuels policy. Choose a green energy provider. Eat less meat. But don’t blame others, but help them to change their minds. Optimism is a moral duty.

For me the urgency and dimensions of the climate crisis, explained in the alarming IPCC reports, was so obvious, that we simply cannot deny it anymore. It is about people, about ourselves, our children. Of course also about animals & nature. But the global warming above 2°C is not a problem for the planet itself. The globe will keep on turning, animals will adapt like they always did: some will die, others will come. The effects of global warming will be most extreme for the poorest people in the south, the ones who don’t have any responsibility in the current carbon levels, which were caused mainly by the Western countries. Those people in the South will migrate and look for better conditions. The current refugee numbers will only go up. It is not only our responsibility but also in our own intrest to tackle climate change. The costs of doing nothing are much higher than the investments needed to keep the warming below 2°C. We should act massively NOW: consumers, investors, companies, politicians,… Wake up !”

#impact investing #positive impact #sustainability #thepeoplebehindsustainability

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eliteprepsat · 3 years

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This article was originally published on May 23, 2020 and has been modified to reflect recent developments. It was revised on September 2, 2020 and again on October 27, 2020.

Elite Prep is committed to keeping you up-to-date with the ongoing, ever-fluid situation regarding the lawsuit against the University of California and its use of SAT/ACT scores in its admissions policies. Below is the executive summary followed by a detailed list of frequently asked questions with the latest changes.

Executive Summary

Thursday, May 21, 2020, was a momentous day in the history of the University of California. On that day, the University of California Board of Regents (the governing and policy-making body for the entire UC system) unanimously passed UC President Janet Napolitano's proposal to eliminate the SAT and ACT as a requirement on the UC application. Under President Napolitano's plan, UC was to adopt a test-optional admissions policy for the graduating high school classes of 2021 and 2022, then go test-blind for the classes of 2023 and 2024.

On Tuesday, September 1, 2020, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman added another plot twist to an already convoluted situation. In this decision, Judge Seligman ruled that UC's test-optional policy unfairly disadvantaged disabled applicants because they lacked access to testing centers with accommodations during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though the ruling only took into account the perceived harm to disabled applicants to UC, the effect of the ruling impacted all applicants to UC. UC was prohibited from using SAT/ACT scores for admissions and scholarship consideration, effective immediately. UC promptly appealed the decision.

Then, on September 24, 2020, the First Appellate District Court of Appeal in California ruled in favor of UC's appeal. Consequently, UC is once again permitted to use SAT/ACT scores in their admissions decisions, effective immediately. However, four UC schools—Berkeley, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz—had already opted to be test-blind for SAT/ACT scores, meaning they will not consider SAT/ACT scores even if an applicant reports them. The other five UC schools have decided to be test-optional. These test-optional and test-blind policies are in effect for the fall 2021 application cycle (affecting current high school seniors).

Read on if you would like more details.

As of this writing, for the graduating high school class of 2021, UC will be test-blind for four UC campuses and test-optional for five.

Test-blind means that even if you report an SAT/ACT score on your UC application, the score will not be used as a data point when deciding your admissibility. Currently, four UC campuses have a test-blind admission policy:

UC Berkeley

UC Irvine

UC Santa Barbara

UC Santa Cruz

Test-optional means that if you report a score on the UC application, and the score is favorable, it will enhance your academic profile and therefore possibly enhance your chances of admission. If the score is average or below average, the score will be neutral, not negative, on your application since colleges will not punish you for not doing well on an optional test. Test-optional is the ideal situation for the applicant. Five UC schools are test-optional for the high school graduating class of 2021:

UC Davis

UC Los Angeles

UC Merced

UC Riverside

UC San Diego

Why are some UC schools test-optional while others are test-blind? Doesn't the UC Board of Regents' decision in May affect all UC campuses?

Each UC school has its own admissions office, and even though all UC schools adhere to some form of comprehensive review, each UC admissions office gets to decide how to admit its own students. Some of the UC schools felt that a test-optional policy would disadvantage students who did not report SAT/ACT scores (or, conversely, advantage students who did), so they opted to be test-blind immediately. Other UC schools felt they wanted to give students a chance to show off academic ability through an SAT/ACT score. Also, not for nothing, the two most popular colleges in the US for fall 2020—UCLA (109,000 applications received) and UC San Diego (100,000 applications received)—are both test-optional. Schools with that many applicants will probably want more data points, not fewer, to inform their admissions decisions. The UC Regents' decision is a recommended course of action, not a mandate.

The ruling is most likely NOT the final word.

The First Appellate Court stayed the case, thereby reinstituting the possible use of SAT/ACT in UC admissions, but the trial that will determine whether use of the SAT/ACT in UC admissions harms students has yet to take place. So the status quo might change yet again after the trial takes place, or perhaps when the next legal motion is filed.

But for current high school seniors (class of 2021), the status quo is, for all intents and purposes, most likely the final word.

It is highly unlikely the lawsuit will be settled before the UC application deadline of November 30, 2020. So for current high school seniors, the status quo (four UC schools test-blind, five test-optional) is the law of the land. But should the wheels of justice spin faster than usual, or if the case is settled out of court, then perhaps a decision will be made before the end of November. But we doubt it.

What about SAT/ACT scores for the California State University (CSU) application?

CSU will not be using SAT/ACT scores in their admissions decisions for the freshman class of fall 2021 (current high school seniors).

So should I report my SAT/ACT score on my UC application?

Absolutely. As noted above, your score on one or more sections of the SAT/ACT could pass you out of certain general education requirements or qualify you for scholarships, so yes, go ahead and submit your scores. You have nothing to lose and potentially something to gain. And the test-optional UC campuses won't know about your SAT/ACT score unless you report it on the UC application.

Where do I report my SAT/ACT score on the UC application?

The UC application for Fall 2021 is available now. Go to apply.universityofcalifornia.edu and create your account (if you're a senior). On the right-hand menu on the website, you will see a section for Test Scores. That's the section where you report your scores. If a UC campus you're applying to is test-blind, then the scores you report on the application website will not be forwarded to that UC admissions office for inclusion in your file. However, your scores would be made available to the test-optional UC campuses, and to the UC school where you enroll in fall 2021 (for the purposes of passing you out of certain entry-level requirements.)

Should I pay for an official SAT/ACT score report to be sent to the UC schools I apply to?

We recommend holding off on sending SAT/ACT official score reports to UC campuses during the application season and only sending the official score report to the UC campus where you matriculate in the fall. So just pay for an official test score report once you know where you will be attending in the fall, if you do decide to attend a UC school.

If I'm a senior and haven't taken the SAT/ACT yet, should I still try to take it?

For high school seniors, Elite recommends taking the test if you can, and not taking it if you have to go way out of your way to find a testing center that is open. This is ultimately your family's decision to make, but in the cost-benefit analysis of "driving time to testing center" versus "what the scores will be used for at this moment" (admissions for test-optional schools and placement purposes), we view taking the SAT/ACT in the fall of 2020 as advisable, not mandatory.

Should I take the SAT/ACT if I'm a high school junior?

For high school juniors, the admissions test policies might change for you, depending on the outcome of this lawsuit. But if you are a junior and have a test date lined up for fall 2020, great. Go ahead and take it, especially if you've been preparing for it this summer. If your test date this fall gets cancelled, don't worry about it. You can try again in spring 2021. The next SAT test dates after the November test are December, March, May, and June. And remember, you'll still have fall of 2021 (August, October, November) available to you for last-minute retakes when you're a senior. So plenty of time to take the SAT/ACT. What remains to be seen is whether UC campuses will adjust their test-blind/test-optional policies when you are seniors.

The preliminary injunction points out that disabled students don't have access to testing centers with accommodations because of the Covid-19 pandemic. If or when Covid-19 quarantines, lockdowns, and shelter-in-place orders are lifted, doesn't that mean that the playing field is once again level for disabled and non-disabled test takers?

Maybe. This is one of the most open of the open questions in this whole affair.

If I take the SAT or ACT, do I need to sit for the SAT Essay or the ACT Writing section?

UC Regents also voted on May 21st to eliminate the SAT Essay and ACT Writing section as a requirement on the UC application, beginning with the class of '21. Currently, the only selective or highly selective college in the US that requires the SAT Essay or ACT Writing is West Point. No other college or university—not even Stanford, MIT, and the Ivy League colleges—requires the SAT Essay or ACT Writing. If you are in the class of '21 or '22 and plan on submitting an SAT or ACT score (as we recommend above), then take the version of the test without the essay—unless you are planning to apply to West Point.

What's this about UC creating its own standardized admissions test?

In the same board measure adopted on May 21st, Pres. Napolitano also tasked UC to come up with its own standardized admissions test by 2025. After the period of suspension (2021-24), UC is supposed to roll out its own proprietary standardized admissions test, which will aim to align with "the content UC expects students should have mastered to demonstrate college readiness for California freshmen." If UC cannot come up with its own proprietary admissions test by 2025, UC will go test-blind in perpetuity.

The Academic Senate's task force which investigated SAT/ACT in UC admissions policy also recommended that UC come up with its own admission test, but they estimated it would take 9 years to do so. In her plan, approved by the UC Regents, Pres. Napolitano has essentially cut the recommended timeline in half, almost daring UC to come up with its own test in half the time that it's projected to take.

What about SAT Subject Tests and AP Tests?

According to the UC Office of Admissions, throughout the period of suspension (2021-24), UC will still consider AP and SAT Subject Test scores.

Even test-blind UC campuses will still consider SAT Subject Test scores and AP scores.

This is especially pertinent to applicants to engineering majors. Typically, colleges of engineering would like to see an applicant's scores in SAT Math Level 2 and an SAT science Subject Test (Chemistry, Biology E/M, or Physics). And AP scores are still being considered, for all students regardless of intended major. The lawsuit is just about the use of SAT/ACT scores in admissions and scholarships.

How does the removal of SAT/ACT scores in the application review affect the way my UC application is evaluated?

When one data point is removed from the evaluation process, the remaining data points become all the more important. Those remaining data points are GPA, both weighted and unweighted; strength of class schedule, meaning the number of AP, IB, or honors level courses taken in high school; AP and Subject Test scores; extracurricular activities list; and the college application essays, also known as personal statements. Pay close attention to these components of your UC application now that SAT/ACT scores have been removed from the equation.

Our counselors and branch directors are experts in college admissions. Make sure to reach out to your local Elite Prep branch to create a plan to maximize your chances in UC and other college admissions. And thank you for allowing us to accompany you on the road to college success.

#college prep #college admissions #go to college #high school #test prep #SAT #ACT

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the-bjd-community-confess · 4 years

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DoA megapost (22 confessions)

Mod: So https://true-bjd-confessions.tumblr.com/post/189300138511/mod-due-to-excessive-offtopic-arguing-in-the

All you guys’ pending DoA confessions presented in no specific order, before we move into the hold, as announced above.

To be clear: I think this is a feature DoA should have yesterday. It’s completely inappropriate to force people to use deadnames and names which are related to traumatic life experiences, or be banned.

However, *weary sigh, gesturing at the multiple 70+ reply confessions on this topic* people told me they were finding the rapidly escalating discussion to be upsetting and offputting, and that’s not my goal for this blog. ❤️

I am exceptionally weary of all the DoA hate over the person who got banned over making a new account after not being allowed to change their user name. DoA isn’t the only doll forum out there. If you don’t like their rules, don’t join. I for one find their rules about on- and off-topic dolls to be unfair and arbitrary as hell, but in the end it comes down to their house, their rules. Move on.

~Anonymous

Us: Sure would be nice to maybe be able to change your name on DOA.

Some of y’all: Are you asking for anarchy?? If we allow this, what’s next?? A reasonable review of outdated rules??? The rules are there for a reason!!1! The reason may be antiqued because technology has updated and changed since then, meaning there are better solutions available, but it’s still a reason so we DEFINITELY should NEVER change!! Change is too scary for me. :( You’re bullies who want to be special :((( Stop that :(

~Anonymous

I love seeing people get so offended at anon saying “bigots”. How do you know it was about you ? Guilty conscience? DOA could allow name changes if they really wanted to. There are other hobbies where they forbid certain people from entering forums while still allowing name changes. It’s not hard if you really care.

~Anonymous

Honestly the way people fall all over themselves to defend DoA against any sort of criticism (regardless of how you personally feel about the validity of said criticism, reader) makes me glad I never got into the community aspect of this hobby. It's just... stressful.

~Anonymous

The transphobia in the comments on this blog in particular are so gross. Being a bigot makes your dolls instantly hideous. And no, I’m not saying everyone who is defending DOAs decision is transphobic. I’m talking about the one who thinks trans people transitioning is wrong and their friends. You’re gross and so are your dolls.

~Anonymous

scammers can & will get around DOA's no name change policy, it's really not that safe. also, DOA isn't the only website which allows the sale of high-value items.

~Anonymous

First it's "if you want name changes coded in DoA, offer to do it yourself!", then it's "why tf would DoA accept some rando to help code their site?" make up your goddamn mind, your argument is falling apart.

Also when did this issue become "DoA vs trans people"? Like, I like DoA yet I also recognize it should be more accessible and updated for the modern userbase. I want it to become as good as it can be because I like the community and would hate to see it die out like so many other forum sites do. Yes, it has flaws- and believe me, the folks who get extremely upset about the idea of admitting that embarrass me- but I liked the format since I was new to the hobby. I just wish it was more inclusive!

~Anonymous

girlisav3rb: "this isn't about exclusion or leaving anyone out". Also girlisav3rb: "I'm just kicking your punk ass off [obvious metaphor for DoA]" yyyyiiiiikkkees

~Anonymous

The DOA username debate is really starting to feel like 4 people's personal beefs against each other. It isn't really about dolls and I wish it wasn't dominating all the confessions here. I don't really care about watching pomoaples, pupkinspce, aigisthewlve and tellmeifthursday make fools of themselves daily.

~Anonymous

10.

Say it louder for the people in the back: IF YOU INSIST ON NAME CHANGES FOR DOA, THEN VOLUNTEER YOUR CODING EXPERTISE. Don't know how to code and are just squawking about something you can't directly contribute towards? Then shut up or offer up money so the mods can hire a computer programmer to make the changes you're DEMANDING from a FREE service.

~Anonymous

11.

God it's so painfully obvious to see how many of the people defending DoA on the grounds that name changes would destroy the integrity of the website have never ever worked on or even been part of a forum or really any website of any kind in their lives. Seriously arguing that "the database" would break if you changed a name like?? No??? Have you ever seen a server backend before? You can automate this shit, you know, keep a log of former names, just... it's not some big huge challenge???

~Anonymous

12.

I don't have a horse in the trans name change race but calling DoA one of the friendlies communities around is abject bullshit lmao. There's not a more elitist, paranoid, abusive community this side of comic books -- but that kind of goes for this hobby as a whole, let's be honest.

~Anonymous

13.

THE RULES ARE IMPORTANT WE CAN't cHANGE THE RULES IT WILL LEAD TO CHAOS IF WE CHANGE ONE RULE WHERE WILL IT END THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!! In my town it used to be THE RULES that POC have to go to separate schools and use separate bathrooms, but sure, the rules are the most important thing, not the people. And before anyone says cOmPaRiNg DoLlS tO rAciSm, 1) shitting on trans people IS a form of prejudice you smoothbrains, and 2) my ass is POC and I call it like I see it. Check yourselves.

~Anonymous

14.

I personally think DOA should just.. go away? It’s been around for years, most people use it as reference rather than a community anymore. Everything is on FaceBook and Instagram now, DOA is pretty much just a glorified Dolly Dictionary at this point. Besides, if they aren’t going to change an Incredibly simple, easy thing to change just to accommodate transitioning people, it’s not the best place to be.

~Anonymous

15.

I mean about the whole rules is rules is rules thing about doa: the thing is, some rules are there for a reason and obviously do need to be respected whether you agree with them or not, like don’t block fire exits, murder is bad, etc. but some rules eventually become outdated and need to be changed to keep up with society, and that doesn’t make the people pointing out that they need to be changed evil or entitled or spoiled. Imagine if we all still had to drive 10 mph everywhere because when someone pointed out that car technology had improved since 1915 and the speed limit should be increased accordingly everyone had just shouted them down with “BUT TEH RUUULLLEESS!!!” You’d be pretty interested in getting some of this “special treatment” yourself so you could get to work on time, huh?

~Anonymous

16.

Honestly the easiest solution would be let people change their names only once and have it trackable.. as a trans dude its NOT that deep.

~Anonymous

17.

I notice that the unrelenting attacks on DoA are now even using the same phraseology along with the name-calling and implications of sinister motives. These are textbook bullying tactics. Next is the boycott, except that most of these people already say they don’t use the forum because they are just too “21st Century” for it.

Luckily this is just a confession board and no matter how many folks you manage to rile up here, it’s not going to affect DoA. Now, this is why I love DoA–you can’t go on their own site and spew this nonsense. They have Rules. They are Strict. They attempt to avoid drama, especially off-topic drama, and they don’t allow meanness, vulgarity or obscenity. If you’re looking for a pleasant, safe space, it’s your best bet.

~Anonymous

18.

Easy to lay bigotry, laziness, stupidity and worse on DoA mods for not just accepting tales of trauma and pasts to erase. But the internet has always been full of lies by people trying to get their own way or escape consequences. Not just pro scammers. People who cry things like illness, trauma, disaster, family or pet problems over and over to get sympathy for demands or as all-purpose excuses. Recast ownership lies. People who never got a no before, and don't like being turned down no-how.

~Anonymous

19.

I just realized that no one understands the people saying DOA can allow name changes are the people who have actually modded forums before, most forums unless they’re running a totally outdated system use user id numbers that are linked to display names, which can be changed, and you can write a simple string of simple-baby-code to show old display names on a profile, to explain it in simple terms.

~Anonymous

20.

Honestly I think that the anti-name change people are mostly just shilling for DoA because they can't believe that their precious forum with its volunteer mods could be anything but flawless. Or something like that, given how indignantly these people have *always* reacted to confessions criticizing DoA, even before the trans controversy was a thing. There have definitely been some obvious transphobes as well though, whose bile is really more suited to conservative FB pages or something. Go away!

~Anonymous

21.

the DOA mods can obviously change people's usernames because it's 2019 and basically every other site in existence can do it. they might have to change the site slightly to accomplish this. maybe there are reasons for them to choose not to do that, but let's stop pretending it's some technological impossibility.

~Anonymous

22.

How about this: Implement a system on DoA that indentifies users by a unique code and allow users to have a changeable display name. Changing the display name could become a paid feature to pay for the technical changes. Think of a system like discord has. It's a win-win situation. Thoughts?

~Anonymous

#BJD #ABJD #TrueBJDConfessionz #BJD Confessions #DoA #Just let people change their damn usernames

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box-of-god · 4 years

Text

I’m writing this in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and all the events that have followed. To preface, I am a white woman, I feel that it’s important to consider that when hearing my thoughts on these things. Essentially I want to walk through the examples I can find of Jesus’ actions and attitudes relating to what’s going on today, and speak my thoughts on the actions of some people who proclaim themselves to be Christians. I’m no bible scholar, nor am I an expert in the arena of social, racial, or political issues, so I may get some things misconstrued, so take all this with a grain of salt.

Jesus and political injustice

The interpretation of Matthew 5:38-42 I am using in my take on this topic comes from this podcast Bema Discipleship Podcast Episode 96 18:34

It takes into consideration the cultural and political climate of the time it was written. The scripture at face value from a modern lens is a nice teaching, but I feel that the added context of the historical social implications of what’s being said adds a new layer that is highly applicable to what’s going on now.

The gist of what I take away is that Jesus promotes acts that highlight and call out instances of injustice. A roman soldier can ask you to carry his things for one mile, but the law says he cannot ask you to go any farther than that. Jesus says to carry his bag for two miles anyways. With the cultural context, it doesn’t seem to be suggested as an act of kindness, but an act of protest. An act that is meant to point out how unfair it is that you were forced to carry his bag in the first place. This sort of act could provoke the solider in some way, could get him in trouble. It seems to say, the system is corrupt, the laws are corrupt, do something to spite them. This act of going an extra mile is technically non-violent, but it is also actively doing something you know the person in a position of power is not going to want you to do. It could be seen as framing the soldier for a crime, framing to make it look like he was breaking the rules set out for him.

How that translates to modern day, what implications that has on our current situation, I’m not sure. What I want to bring up with this is that modern Christians in America tend to portray Jesus as a passive guy.

The core of Jesus’ teaching is love. Love is not passive. I don’t think the teaching of turning the other cheek is necessarily “stand by and do nothing because that makes you the bigger person,” but somewhere closer to, “If you are being treated unjustly, use it to make a statement. Don’t give them the satisfaction of reacting in the way they want you to.” Don’t fight back, but also, don’t run away. Stand up for the rights of yourself and those around you.

My personal opinion is that the people focusing on the riots are actively choosing ignorance. They are taking the focus away from the message and purpose of the protests. (this is where that whole love thing comes in)

If you saw someone slap back the Roman soldier instead of turning the other cheek, and you focused on the civilian's actions instead of the Roman soldier’s abuse of power? That seems a bit messed up to me. You can empathize with a person being treated treated unjustly while disagreeing with their reaction. The rest of the world is not required to live up to Jesus’ teachings. If they don’t claim Jesus as Lord, then you have no right to ask them to live the way you do. Plain and simple. (1 Corinthians 5:12)

I have heard of cases of police acting violently against peaceful protests without warning. Of undercover cops being the ones to start the first domino of violence in otherwise peaceful protests. Of bricks being strategically placed to encourage violence. We all live under a system that is unfair and unjust to the people living under it, and you choose to spend your time judging other people’s reactions to this unfairness? These people are crying out for there to be change, crying out for you to care about what is being done to them, and you choose to rebuke them for how they call out in the midst of immense suffering? You have the opportunity to stand up and speak out against injustice, and you choose to judge the people who are in a less fortunate position than you are in? That is where your priorities lie?

Today I heard someone say “The world doesn’t need social justice, the world needs the gospel.”

And my personal opinion is that what the gospel stood for is social justice. It seems so obvious to me that it baffles me that people don’t see it that way. (Luke 7:22, Luke 14:13, 1 John 3:17-18) Jesus teaches to care for those that have been put at a disadvantage within society. He constantly holds in high regards those that are considered social outcasts, those that have been neglected and mistreated by society, and calls us to do the same. (ex: widows and lepers)

We are called to love. First and foremost, and above all else. Matthew 22:36-40. Those who claim to follow Jesus, yet are faster to pass judgement than they are to love, should really take a step back and examine themselves.

I believe giving to the needy includes giving our voice and support to those who need it. If you are someone who thinks in a conversation about the Black Lives Matter movement, it is necessary to debate its validity and motives? You’re missing the point. If you think that all lives matter in the eyes of our law enforcement as a whole, you are not paying attention. I encourage you to take some time to actually listen to what is being said. Inform yourself on the countless instances of racially charged police brutality in recent times, and how they were handled.

One bad cop doesn't make them all bad, but when a bad cop is not held accountable for their actions, when a pattern emerges of police acting with unnecessary force and violence against specific groups of people, and they continue to walk away free of consequences? It becomes a matter of the policies and culture of our law enforcement. The institution as a whole allows for these “bad cops” to thrive in their positions of power.

The conversation of what can be done about this is not one I am qualified to have. I just want to say, if you don’t think this is an issue, if you don’t think that something needs to change, you’re willingly ignorant to what is going on. You sit there with the power of your voice, of your care, but refuse to give it to the people who need it. Ask yourself what is at stake for you giving your voice and influence to those in need, and what could be at stake for them if you don’t. You might be uncomfortable, you might get judgement from those around you. The people who need your voice? They risk continuing to live in a world where they are targeted and killed by the people who are supposed to protect them.

Educate yourself. Allow yourself to love others. Don’t continue in willful ignorance.

#these are the thoughts that have been swirling around my head the past week #I really needed to get them all down in writing #I am so;;;;;;;;; emotionally drained #ugh

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Conversation

Masha Gessen, Interview: Judith Butler Wants Us To Reshape Our Rage, The New Yorker (February 9, 2020)

Masha Gessen: In this new book, you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are.

Judith Butler: We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence. I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group, deciding, “Nonviolence is the best way to achieve our goal,” and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world, which is probably more practical. I’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.

Masha Gessen: You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?

Judith Butler: In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life. Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well.

Masha Gessen: And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others.

Judith Butler: That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations. Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.

Masha Gessen: You have written before about the concept of grievability, and it is an important idea in this book. Can you talk about it?

Judith Butler: You know when I think it started for me? Here in the United States, during the aids crisis, when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss. In many cases, people would go home to their families and try to explain their loss, or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss. The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love. That puts you into what Freud called melancholia. In contemporary terms, it is a version of depression, even as it admits of manic forms—but not just individual depression but shared melancholia. It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations. And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not. Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children. The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning.

Masha Gessen: You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times, right?

Judith Butler: Yes. It was rather amazing the way that the undocumented were not really openly and publicly mourned through those obituaries, and a lot of gay and lesbian people were mourned in a shadowy way or not at all. They fell into the dustbin of the unmournable or the ungrievable. We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all. Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.

Masha Gessen: You write about the militant potential of mourning.

Judith Butler: It’s something that can happen, though it doesn’t always happen. Black Lives Matter emerged from mourning. Douglas Crimp, the great art historian and theorist, reflected on mourning and militancy in an important essay by that name.

Masha Gessen: In “The Force of Nonviolence,” you repeatedly stress the importance of counter-realism, even an “ethical obligation” to be unrealistic. Can you explain that?

Judith Butler: Take the example of electability. If one takes the view that it is simply not realistic that a woman can be elected President, one speaks in a way that seems both practical and knowing. As a prediction, it may be true, or it may be shifting as we speak. But the claim that it is not realistic confirms that very idea of reality and gives it further power over our beliefs and expectations. If “that is just the way the world is,” even though we wish it were different, then we concede the intractability of that version of reality. We’ve said such “realistic” things about gay marriage before it became a reality. We said it years ago about a black President. We’ve said it about many things in this world, about tyrannical or authoritarian regimes we never thought would come down. To stay within the framework of Realpolitik is, I think, to accept a closing down of horizons, a way to seem “cool” and skeptical at the expense of radical hope and aspiration. Sometimes you have to imagine in a radical way that makes you seem a little crazy, that puts you in an embarrassing light, in order to open up a possibility that others have already closed down with their knowing realism. I’m prepared to be mocked and dismissed for defending nonviolence in the way that I do. It might be understood as one of the most profoundly unrealistic positions you could hold in this life. But when I ask people whether they would want to live in a world in which no one takes that position, they say that that would be terrible.

Masha Gessen: I want to challenge your examples a little bit. The electability issue can be argued not from the point of view of counter-realism but by saying, “Your view of reality is limited. It doesn’t take into account the number of women voters, or the number of women who were elected in the midterms.” Same with gay marriage--people who didn’t believe it was possible simply didn’t realize what a huge shift in social attitudes had occurred between generations. In a sense, those are easier arguments than the one I think you are making, which is, “You might be right about reality, but this is not a reality we should be willing to accept.”

Judith Butler: I am talking about how the term “reality” functions in social-political discourse. Sometimes “reality” is used to debunk as childish or unknowledgeable points of view that actually are holding out a more radical possibility of equality or freedom or democracy or justice, which means stepping out of a settled understanding. We see how socialist ideals, for instance, are dismissed as “fanciful” in the current election. I find that the dismissive form of realism is guarding those borders and shutting down those horizons of possibility. It reminds me of parents who say, “Oh, you’re gay . . .” or “Oh, you’re trans—well, of course I accept you, but it’s going to be a very hard life.” Instead of saying, “This is a new world, and we are going to build it together, and you’re going to have my full support.”

Masha Gessen: On the other hand, I have been accused by my kids of not understanding how the world works—for rejecting what’s broadly understood to be the way things are. Don’t we also have a responsibility to acknowledge the hardships kids face?

Judith Butler: If the terms of their struggle and their suffering are the ones that they bring to you from their experience, then, yes, of course. But if you impose it on them before they even had a chance to live, that’s not so good.

Masha Gessen: Let’s talk about your approach to nonviolence as a matter not of individual morality but of a social philosophy of living.

Judith Butler: Most of the time, when we ask moral questions—like “What would you do?” or “How would you conduct yourself, and how would you justify your actions?” if such-and-such were the case—it’s framed as a hypothetical in which one person is offering a justification to another person, with the aim of taking individual responsibility for a potential action. That way of thinking rests on the notion that individual deliberation is at the core of moral action. Of course, to some degree it is, but we do not think critically about the individual. I am seeking to shift the question of nonviolence into a question of social obligations but also to suggest that probing social relationality will give us some clues about what a different ethical framework would be. What do we owe those with whom we inhabit the earth? And what do we owe the earth, as well, while we’re at it? And why do we owe people or other living creatures that concern? Why do we owe them regard for life or a commitment to a nonviolent relationship? Our interdependency serves as the basis of our ethical obligations to one another. When we strike at one another, we strike at that very bond. Many social psychologists will tell us that certain social bonds are consolidated through violence, and those tend to be group bonds, including nationalism and racism. If you’re part of a group that engages in violence and feels that the bonds of your connection to one another are fortified through that violence, that presumes that the group you’re targeting is destroyable and dispensable, and who you are is only negatively related to who they are. That’s also a way of saying that certain lives are more valuable than others. But what would it mean to live in a world of radical equality? My argument is that then we cannot kill one another, we cannot do violence to one another, we cannot abandon each other’s lives.

Masha Gessen: And this is where your critique of self-defense comes in.

Judith Butler: Don’t get me wrong--I’ve been trained in self-defense. I’m very grateful for that early training. But I’ve always wondered what that self is that we’re defending. Many people have pointed out that only certain people, in courts of law, are permitted to argue self-defense, and others very rarely are. We know that white men can protect themselves and their property and wield force in self-defense much more easily than black and brown people can. Who has the kind of self that is recognized by the law and the public as worthy of self-defense? If I think of myself not just as this bounded individual but as fundamentally related to others, then I locate this self in those relations. In that case, the self I am trying to defend is not just me but all those relations that define and sustain me, and those relations can, and should be, extended indefinitely beyond local units like family and community. If the self I’m trying to defend is also in some sense related to the person I’m tempted to kill, I have to make sure not to do violence to that relation, because that’s also me. One could go further--I’m also attacking myself by attacking that person, since I am breaking a social bond that we have between us. The problem of nonviolence looks different if you see it that way.

Masha Gessen: In a couple of places in the book, you say that nonviolence is not an absolute principle, or that you’re not arguing that no one has the right to self-defense—you are just suggesting a new set of guiding principles. I found myself a little disappointed every time you make that caveat. Does it not weaken your argument when you say, “I’m arguing against self-defense, but I’m not saying that no one has a right to self-defense”?

Judith Butler: If I were giving a rational justification for nonviolence as a position, which would make me into a much more proper philosopher than I am—or wish to be—then it would make sense to rule out all exceptions. But we don’t need a new rational justification for nonviolence. We actually need to pose the question of violence and nonviolence within a different framework, where the question is not “What ought I to do?” but “Who am I in relation to others, and how do I understand that relationship?” Once social equality becomes the framework, I’m not sure we are deliberating as individuals trying to come up with a fully rational position, consistent and complete and comprehensive for all circumstances. We might then approach the world in a way that would make violence less likely, that would allow us to think about how to live together given our anger and our aggression, our murderous wishes—how to live together and to make a commitment to that, outside of the boundaries of community or the boundaries of the nation. I think that that’s a way of thinking, an ethos—I guess I would use that word, “ethos,” as something that would be more important to me than a fully rational system that is constantly confounded by exceptions.

Masha Gessen: And would it be correct to say that you are also asking us not to adopt this new framework individually but actually to rethink together with others—that adopting this frame requires doing it in an interdependent way?

Judith Butler: I think so. We would need to develop political practices to make decisions about how to live together less violently. We have to be able to identify institutional modes of violence, including prisons and the carceral state, that are too often taken for granted and not recognized as violent. It’s a question of bringing out in clear terms those institutions and sets of policies that regularly make these kinds of distinctions between valuable and non-valuable lives.

Masha Gessen: You talk about nonviolence, rather unexpectedly, as a force, and even use words like “militant” and “aggressive.” Can you explain how they go together?

Judith Butler: I think many positions assume that nonviolence involves inhabiting the peaceful region of the soul, where you are supposed to rid yourself of violent feelings or wishes or fantasy. But what interests me is cultivating aggression into forms of conduct that can be effective without being destructive.

Masha Gessen: How do you define the boundary of what is violence?

Judith Butler: The physical blow cannot be the only model for thinking about what violence is. Anything that jeopardizes the lives of others through explicit policy or through negligence—and that would include all kinds of public policies or state policies—are practices of institutional or systemic violence. Prisons are the most persistent form of systemic violence regularly accepted as a necessary reality. We can think about contemporary borders and detention centers as clear institutions of violence. These violent institutions claim that they are seeking to make society less violent, or that borders keep violent people out. We have to be careful in thinking about how “violence” is used in these kinds of justifications. Once those targeted with violence are identified with violence, then violent institutions can say, “The violence is over there, not here,” and inflict injury as they wish. People in the world have every reason to be in a state of total rage. What we do with that rage together is important. Rage can be crafted—it’s sort of an art form of politics. The significance of nonviolence is not to be found in our most pacific moments but precisely when revenge makes perfect sense.

Masha Gessen: What kinds of situations are those?

Judith Butler: If you’re someone whose family has been murdered, or if you’re part of a community that has been violently uprooted from your homes. In the midst of feeling that rage, one can also work with others to find that other way, and I see that happening in nonviolent movements. I see it happening in Black Lives Matter. I think the feminist movement is very strongly nonviolent—it very rarely gets put in that category, but most of its activities are nonviolent, especially the struggle against sexual violence. There are nonviolent groups in Palestine fighting colonization, and anticolonial struggles have offered many of the most important nonviolent movements, including Gandhi’s resistance to British colonialism. Antiwar protests are almost by definition nonviolent.

Masha Gessen: One of the most striking passages in the book is about what you call “the contagious sense of the uninhibited satisfactions of sadism.” You write about the appeal of blatant and indifferent destructiveness. What did you have in mind when you wrote those phrases?

Judith Butler: It’s unclear whether Trump is watching Netanyahu and Erdoğan, whether anyone is watching Bolsonaro, whether Bolsonaro is watching Putin, but I think there are some contagious effects. A leader can defy the laws of his own country and test to see how much power he can take. He can imprison dissenters and inflict violence on neighboring regions. He can block migrants from certain countries or religions. He can kill them at a moment’s notice. Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks--no shame, no legal repercussions. They have this leader who models that freedom. The sadism intensifies and accelerates I think, as many people do, that Trump has licensed the overt violence of white supremacy and also unleashed police violence by suspending any sense of constraint. Many people thrill to see embodied in their government leader a will to destruction that is uninhibited, invoking a kind of moral sadism as its perverse justification. It’s going to be up to us to see if people can thrill to something else.

Masha Gessen: That goes back to my question about where the boundary of violence lies. For example, can you describe Trump’s speech acts as violence? He hasn’t himself stopped anybody at the border or shot anyone in a mosque.

Judith Butler: Executive speech acts have the power to stop people, so his speech acts do stop people at the border. The executive order is a weird speech act, but he does position himself as a quasi king or sovereign who can make policy through simply uttering certain words.

Masha Gessen: Or tweeting.

Judith Butler: The tweet acts as an incitation but also as a virtual attack with consequences; it gives public license to violence. He models a kind of entitlement that positions him above the law. Those who support him, even love him, want to live in that zone with him. He is a sovereign unchecked by the rule of law he represents, and many think that is the most free and courageous kind of liberation. But it is liberation from all social obligation, a self-aggrandizing sovereignty of the individual.

Masha Gessen: You describe this current moment rather beautifully in the book as a “politically consequential form of phantasmagoria.”

Judith Butler: If we think about the cases of police violence against black women, men, and children who are unarmed, or are actually running away, or sleeping on the couch, or completely constrained and saying that they cannot breathe, we would reasonably suppose that the manifest violence and injustice of these killings is evident. Yet there are ways of seeing those very videos that document police violence where the black person is identified as the one who is about to commit some terribly violent act. How could anyone be persuaded of that? What are the conditions of persuasion such that a lawyer could make that argument, on the basis of video documentation, and have a jury or judge accept that view? The only way we can imagine that is if we understand potential violence to be something that black people carry in them as part of their blackness. It has been shocking to see juries and judges and police investigators exonerate police time and again, when it would seem—to many of us, at least—that these were cases of unprovoked, deadly violence. So I understand it as a kind of racial phantasmagoria.

Masha Gessen: Just to be clear, you’re not saying that these juries saw violence being perpetrated against somebody nonviolent and decided to let the perpetrator off. You’re saying that they actually perceived violence--in the radically subjugated black body, or the radically constrained black body, or the black body that’s running with fear away from some officer who is threatening them with violence. And if you’re a jury—especially a white jury that thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to imagine that a black person, even under extreme restraint, could leap up and kill you in a flash—that’s phantasmagoria. It’s not individual psychopathology but a shared phantasmatic scene.

Masha Gessen: How did this book come about?

Judith Butler: I have been working on this topic for a while. It’s linked to the problem of grievability, to human rights, to boycott politics, to thinking about nonviolent modes of resistance. But, also, some of my allies on the left were pretty sure that, when Trump was elected, we were living in a time of fascism that required a violent overthrow or a violent set of resistance tactics, citing the resistance to Nazism in Europe and Fascism in Italy and Spain. Some groups were affirming destruction rather than trying to build new alliances based on a new analysis of our times, one that would eventually be strong enough to oppose this dangerous current trend of authoritarian, neo-Fascist rule.

Masha Gessen: Can you give some examples of what you see as affirming destruction?

Judith Butler: At a very simple level--getting into physical fights with fascists who come to provoke you. Or destruction of storefronts because capitalism has to be brought to its knees, as has happened during Occupy and anti-fascist protests in the Bay Area, even if those storefronts belong to black people who struggled to establish those businesses. When I was in Chile last April, I was struck by the fact that the feminist movement was at the forefront of the left, and it made a huge difference in thinking about tactics, strategies, and aims. In the U.S., I think that some men who always saw feminism as a secondary issue feel much freer to voice their anti-feminism in the context of a renewed interest in socialism. Of course, it does not have to go that way, but I worry about a return to the framework of primary and secondary impressions. Many social movements fought against that for decades.

Masha Gessen: You have faced violence, and I know there are some countries you no longer feel safe travelling to. What has happened?

Judith Butler: There are usually two issues, Palestine or gender. I have come to understand in what places which issue is controversial. The anti-“gender ideology” movement has spread throughout Latin America, affecting national elections and targeting sexual and gender minorities. Those who work on gender are often maligned as “diabolical” or “demons.” The image of the devil is used a lot, which is very hard on me for many reasons, partly because it feels anti-Semitic. Sometimes they treat me as trans, or they can’t decide whether I’m trans or lesbian or whatever, and they credit my work from thirty years ago as introducing this idea of gender, when even cursory research will show that the category has been operative since the nineteen-fifties.

Masha Gessen: How do you know that they see you as trans?

Judith Butler: In Brazil, they put a pink bra on the effigy that they made of me.

Masha Gessen: There was an effigy?

Judith Butler: Yes, and they burned that effigy.

Masha Gessen: “Pink bra” wouldn’t seem to be the headline of that story?

Judith Butler: But the idea was that the bra would be incongruent with who I am, so they were assuming a more masculine core, and the pink bra would have been a way to portray me in drag. That was kind of interesting. It was kind of horrible, too.

Masha Gessen: Did you witness it physically?

Judith Butler: I was protected inside a cultural center, and there were crowds outside. I am glad to say that the crowd opposing the right-wing Christians was much larger.

Masha Gessen: Are you scared?

Judith Butler: I was scared. I had a really good bodyguard, who remains my friend. But I wasn’t allowed to walk the streets on my own.

Masha Gessen: Let’s review this “gender ideology” idea, because not everyone is familiar with this phenomenon.

Judith Butler: It’s huge.

Masha Gessen: It’s the idea, promoted by groups affiliated with Catholic, evangelical, and Eastern Orthodox churches, that a Jewish Marxist–Frankfurt School–Judith Butler conspiracy has hatched a plot to destroy the family by questioning the immutability of sex roles, and this will lead white people to extinction.

Judith Butler: They are taking the idea of the performativity of gender to mean that we’re all free to choose our gender as we wish and that there is no natural sex. They see it as an attack on both the God-given character of male and female and the ostensibly natural social form in which they join each other—heterosexual marriage. But, sometimes, by “gender” they simply mean gender equality, which, for them, is destroying the family, which presumes that the family has a necessary hierarchy in which men hold power. They also understand “gender” as trans rights, gay rights, and as gay equality under the law. Gay marriage is particularly terrifying to them and seen as a threat to “the family,” and gay and lesbian adoption is understood to involve the molestation of children. They imagine that those of us who belong to this “gender movement,” as they put it, have no restrictions on what we will do, that we represent and promote unchecked sexual freedom, which leads to pedophilia. It is all very frightening, and it has been successful in threatening scholars and, in some cases, shutting down programs. There is also an active resistance against them, and I am now part of that.

Masha Gessen: How long has this been going on, this particular stage of your existence in the world?

Judith Butler: The Pontifical Council for the Family, led by Pope Francis before his elevation, published papers against “gender” in 2000. I wrote briefly about that but could not imagine then that it would become a well-financed campaign throughout the world. It started to affect my life in 2012 or ’13.

Masha Gessen: And, aside from finding it, as I can tell, sometimes a little bit amusing—

Judith Butler: Oh, no, it’s terrifying. I have feared for my life a few times, and scholars in Bahia and other parts of the world have been threatened with violence. Even the clip you saw online was incomplete—they, the gender-ideology people, made it and circulated it because they were apparently proud of themselves. What they didn’t show is the woman who came after me, running with a cart, as I went to the security checkpoint. She was about to shove me with that metal cart when some young man with a backpack came out of a store and actually interposed his body between the cart and me, and he ended up on the floor, in a physical fight with her, which I saw as I was going up the elevator. I looked back, and I thought, This guy has sacrificed his physical well-being for me. I don’t know who he is to this day. I would like to find this person and thank him.

Masha Gessen: Is that the only time you have faced physical violence?

Judith Butler: Some people in Switzerland, too, were up in arms about Biblical authority on the sexes. This was probably about four or five years ago.

Masha Gessen: Do you see this at all as an indication of your influence?

Judith Butler: It seems like a terrible indication of my influence, in the sense that they don’t actually know my work or what I was trying to say. I see that they’re very frightened, for many reasons, but I don’t think this shows my influence.

Masha Gessen: And, other than that, how are you feeling about your work in the world?

Judith Butler: I’m working collaboratively with people, and I like that more than being an individual author or public figure who goes around and proclaims things. My connection with the women’s movement in Latin America has been important to me, and I work with a number of people in gender studies throughout Europe. Leaving this country allows me to get a new perspective, to see what is local and limited about U.S. political discourse, and I suppose my work tends to be more transnational now than it used to be.

Masha Gessen: What is the work in Latin America?

Judith Butler: I have been part of a grant from the Mellon Foundation to organize an international consortium of critical-theory programs. Critical theory is understood not only in the Frankfurt School sense but as theoretical reflection that’s trying to grasp the world we live in, to think about and transform that world in ways that overcome a range of oppressions and inequalities. We often connect with academic and activist movements and reflect on social movements together. The Ni Una Menos—“Not One Less”—grassroots movement fighting violence against women, in particular, has been really impressive to me. Sometimes the movement can bring one [million] to three million people out into the streets. They work very deliberatively and collectively, through public assemblies and strikes. They’re very fierce and smart, and they are also hopeful in the midst of grim realities. I am also working with friends in Europe and elsewhere who are trying to defend gender-studies programs against closure—we call ourselves the Gender International.

Masha Gessen: Are you still involved in Palestine work?

Judith Butler: It’s not as central in my life as it was, but all my commitments are still there. Israel has banned me from entry, because of my support for B.D.S. [the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement], so it is hard to sustain alliances in Palestine—Israel controls all those borders. I work with Jewish Voice for Peace. I’m particularly worried about Trump’s new anti-Semitism doctrine, which seems to suggest that every Jew truly or ultimately is a citizen of the state of Israel. And that means that any critique of Israel can be called anti-Semitic, since Trump—and Netanyahu—want to say that the state of Israel represents all Jewish people. This is a terrible reduction of what Jewish life has been, historically and in the present, but, most frighteningly, the new anti-Semitism policy will license the suppression of Palestinian student organizations on campus as well as research in Middle East studies. I have some deep fears about that, as should anyone who cares about state involvement in the suppression of knowledge and the importance of nonviolent forms of advocacy for those who have suffered dispossession, violence, and injustice.

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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As the Democratic primaries start to heat up, it’s become clear that Bernie Sanders wants to hit Joe Biden hard on trade:

When people take a look at my record versus Vice-President Biden’s record, I helped lead the fight against NAFTA—he voted for NAFTA. I helped lead the fight against permanent normal trade relations with China—he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership—he supported it.

Since 2016, American politics has focused quite heavily on immigration. It’s a much more visible issue than trade. Immigrants and refugees are physical people you can see, or even interview. The border is a place you can go, a wall is a physical thing that either gets built or it doesn’t. Some of us are friends of immigrants, some of us are immigrants, but all of us are descended from people who came over here at some point. Trade is different. The effects of trade are hard to see and hard to measure. You can see stuff in your local big box store stamped with “Made in China,” but otherwise trade doesn’t make itself obvious to you unless you’re one of the people who loses a job to outsourcing. So the mainstream press doesn’t write about trade very much, unless it’s implying that President Trump is going to visit unspeakable horrors on us through a trade war with China. Even the left press is typically quiet about it. This is a shame, because trade has much larger impacts on ordinary American workers than immigration does.

Many economists love free trade. They love to point out that free trade means that goods are made in the places where it’s cheapest and most efficient to make them. That drives down consumer prices and it increases headline economic growth rates. If you want GDP growth, free trade is great. The trouble is that this “efficiency” is all too often achieved by lowering labor costs and offering firms tax breaks and loose regulations. An American worker is expensive compared to a worker from a poor country. If we recklessly remove trade barriers, our workers lose negotiating leverage with their employers. Some Americans lose their jobs and others see their wage growth decrease, halt, or reverse. And in the meantime, the race to the bottom on taxes and regulations means less money for public services and infrastructure. It often means poorer quality goods, unsafe working conditions, and all manner of abuses great and small.

But not every job is tradeable. You’d be hard-pressed to outsource teachers, or doctors, or the waiter at your local diner. Trade now accounts for about 27 percent of U.S. GDP:

If you’re in a non-tradeable sector, initially trade just lowers the cost of your consumer goods. It’s only when the people who are laid off in tradeable sectors begin competing for jobs with you that you start to see trade erode your negotiating leverage. It’s only when the state lowers taxes and regulations to compete to hold onto jobs that you notice budget cuts to public programs and sliding standards. If you’re not thinking about it, it’s easy to not even recognize these things as related to trade.

Trade also inhibits investment in labor-saving technology. If you can reduce labor costs by outsourcing, you don’t need to make more expensive investments in automation to get costs down. So while trade increases economic growth rates and makes consumer goods cheaper, it also reduces the bargaining power of workers and slows technological development. The short-run growth comes at a long-run productivity cost. It’s difficult to predict or measure how much technological development and worker bargaining power we give up when we sign free trade agreements, and this makes it very hard for economists to account for these things when estimating the consequences of trade deals. It’s much easier to focus on headline growth increases and drops in consumer prices.

At the same time, if we refused to trade with other states, we’d make it much harder for their economies to develop. Many countries are able to goose development by exporting goods to the United States. Their workers are paid inhumane and substandard wages by our standards, but even these meagre wages are often more than they would have been paid for the subsistence agricultural jobs that often predated the arrival of American firms. The right loves to point out that workers in sweatshops are still often paid more than they were paid when they were peasant farmers. But this wage increase doesn’t necessarily make these workers happier. As countries industrialize, there are massive increases in the number of hours expected from workers, especially in places where labor laws are weak. This is visible in the history of western industry. British and American workers saw their hours increase dramatically before labor laws intervened:

Industrialization was so miserable for most workers that they were compelled to organize to a degree never before seen. Medieval peasants didn’t build trade unions, and neither did the rural peasants of today’s developing states. So while sweat shops might put more money in peasants’ pockets, they’re not necessarily make their lives better, at least not in the short to medium-term.

What about the long-run? In the long-run, developing countries might hope that by sacrificing the lives of their peasants to the corporate behemoths they can one day achieve prosperity comparable to what the rich states experience. For them, free trade with the western states is a form of indentured service—they hope that by turning their people into slaves for the west, eventually enough western investment will trickle in to enable them to make “the leap” and become rich themselves.

What right do we have to deny them that choice? We might point out that given the reality of climate change, the choice is suicidal—it’s not possible for everyone to live like Americans. But this doesn’t stop developing countries from trying. India’s carbon emissions increased by 6.3 percent in 2018. A few weeks ago I discussed this with a couple Indians who support the Modi government, and they made the understandable point that India faces crippling poverty today, poverty it can erase with economic development. They say they’ll worry about the environment later. Can we blame them for feeling that way?

Yet at the same time, we are socialists and that means we’re meant to care about American workers. Our workers face job loss, wage stagnation, and austerity if we trade with countries without making any provision for the race to the bottom on wages, taxes, and regulations. Eventually, they face the consequences of climate change too. If we won’t defend them from these forces, why should we expect them to support us? And what good is a socialist movement that doesn’t care enough about its workers to defend them?

This is what the right wants—a false binary choice between helping poor people in developing countries and defending poor and working people at home. It wants to frame trade as a dichotomy between free trade policies that lift poor countries out of poverty while making consumer goods cheap for us and protectionist policies that defend American jobs while keeping poor countries poor and expensive goods expensive. The right wants to use your compassion for postcolonial peoples to make you stab your neighbors in the back. And before too long, it won’t just be your neighbors who suffer—you too will end up afflicted with the consequences of austerity, poor quality products, and chronic under-investment in infrastructure and productivity. It’s already happening. Look around you.

So what is to be done? We don’t have to accept this false choice. We can trade with other countries on terms that protect our workers and force other states to treat their workers better than we treated ours in the 19th century. Rich states should demand, as a condition of trade agreements, adjustments in wages, taxes, and regulations to reduce or eliminate disparities in the treatment of rich workers and poor workers. It’s one thing if we import stuff from a foreign state because that state has real productive advantages in making the stuff. It’s quite another if we’re importing stuff from a foreign state because that state is treating its workers like meat.

Right now, free trade agreements are being used to run down workers in rich states while giving workers in poor states far too little compensation for far too much hardship. The USA and the EU command access to gigantic consumer markets, and they have a lot of leverage over governments in developing countries. Instead of using that leverage to push these governments to offer up their workers on a platter for transnational corporations to devour at their leisure, we ought to use our leverage to secure workers around the world fairer deals. Beyond this, we ought to demand that developing states take action to ensure they fight poverty in a clean, sustainable way—and supply them with the investment and extra help, where necessary, to do this.

This is what a socialist trade policy looks like—not unadulterated protectionism, but trade deals that put workers first by creating strong international minimum standards on wages, taxes, and regulations. This must be led by the USA and EU, because only they command enough market share to successfully push governments in poor countries to adopt more humane and sustainable models of development.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #trade #democratic socialism #socialism #free trade #capitalism #neoliberalism #neoliberal capitalism

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donnia115things-blog · 5 years

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Fitbit Ace 2 audit

There Are Lots of health trackers such as Grown Ups, nevertheless A few for kids, specially ones built brands up such as Fitbit. The Ace two will be here to fill this gap. It has $70 and replaces but overlooked the mark such as water proofing in zones. Fitbit has been tuned in and also the Ace comes with an allnew appearance -- together with participation in kiddies -- only.I've got three kids who drop Within the target ages (6 Into 1 2 ) for its Ace 2. I let them with the tracker to get about per month to comprehend everything works and what does not.

Rough and replaceable:

Even the Fitbit Ace 2 looks like that a kids rendition of this Fitbit Inspire they have been just two health trackers. The Ace two can be a go back to the days once the Fitbit was only just a after unit. Fitbit can tear the tie or violate the fix and chose this tracker policy for durability motives. At slip it and it simple to divert the tracker. Wristbands can be bought from Fitbit within child examples and a range of colors that are splendid.The silicone bands really are somewhat sturdy, intended using a shield to Ensure the Show Case that is delicate. Some supports my kiddies identified just how exactly to scrape on screen of utilising the Ace 2, in the month. The fix is created out of vinyl that was thin, yet it's elastic and may last well. The bands are quantified perfectly and under for changes in accordance with plenty of room .Not always like more Fitbit components That Have to be Whilst it's inside the wrist band expelled in their group the Ace two could be charged. If you have to put it you will have to evacuate the tracker. Except if -- it completed a couple of times is dropped out by the tracker, That's. This motivated a pursuit to track down the shadowy unit.The tracker fell outside if the Kiddies were carrying the classes on and away. They regularly squeezed too hard on the tracker whilst shifting the ring, and it'd pop right out. Maybe not the astute program.

Child benevolent activitys:

The Fitbit Ace 2 obtains greatly from your Fitbit Inspire. Both gadgets start using a similar touchscreen OLED series and there exists a lone physiological grab for communicating. The Ace two port is powered through an flexible clock-face and information displays that kids may look by swiping over and tapping to decide on them. Much like the Fitbit Inspire, the other negative grab can be used to make the journey into the eloquent settings menu, where you are able to assess the batteryturn on/off warnings, and some.

The Fitbit Ace 2's breathtaking colors and vivified watch faces Will interest children.

The clock face is really your coming display and may be altered In the Fitbit application. Kiddies can select between an range of clock trains running out of significant simple watch face-to enlivened faces which change since kiddies profit earth towards their development objective.Rocket boat and the plant were selections between my Two men. A growing plant or perhaps even a moving aircraft boat was somewhat more important for them compared to a growing number, plus so they cherished that the festival on the monitor when a health or break aim was arrive at.

Propelling and compensating after:

Even the Fitbit Ace 2 does not possess a heartbeat screen or GPS, therefore After is restricted to measure dynamic and tally minutes. It's a kid's wellbeing tracker, and so any additional dimensions are obviously surplus. Even the Fitbit application consequently selects goals for movement (measure tally, lively moments, and hourly actions ) and exercise (1 7 days of preparing) but you are able to transform those qualities from the applying to mirror your child's wellbeing degree.It's crucial, however it does not imply it's off bottom. The Fitbit Ace 2 just estimated both progress tallies and lively minutes. I never really once detected much mistake between activity level and also the advance test or lively minutes. My kiddies even wore their own trackers onto a handful of long-separation climbs, and also we viewed step tallies ahead of your afternoon's end. Their development believes were double large as mine, but their walk span is uncontrollably extra-ordinary, which explains the differentiation.I appreciated the swim-confirmation arrangement that allowed my Without even needing to clear away the tracker Kiddies course.Fitbit Should urge kids to become more lively, therefore it is not Astounding the Ace two is one. There are aim festivals once per day daily purpose is fulfilled and identifications which can be allowed whenever your child arrives in a accomplishment. Kiddies in addition can combine welcome and difficulties family members to have an interest. Difficulties motivate kiddies to maneuver and progress benevolent challenge among associates. The champ of every and every battle acquires a decoration that's inserted to their own profile at the Fitbit application.

Rush after:

Since it doesn't possess a heartbeat display, rest after on the Ace is just two fundamental. It consequently describes whenever your kid reaches the sofa so when they get up. It amounts from what degree they will have dozed as well as what extent they're fretful or awake throughout the evening. Most the data is routed into this Fitbit application where your kid could watch it.You can Use the Ace to help improve Your Child's remainder by Establishing a break aim. Obviously, it's placed to 9 hrs yet you may change it. Very similar as measure objectives, youths will probably be paid once they arrive in their remainder aim. You're able to place a sleep period proposal to empower your kids to continue to hold a trustworthy sleeping period. You in addition can place a vibrating alarm to wake up them at the very first region of your afternoon if needed.The care is not intended for remainder Enlightened remainder part that differentiates the very ideal time for you to wake up you -- nevertheless, you can whatever the case put it to use to stir your own kid. Therefore that you should examine that 10, the shaking is delicate. It awakened among my youngsters reliably maybe perhaps not the opposite who strolled directly throughout the humming.

The Fitbit encounter until you Want to change:

The Fitbit Ace 2 games up into the Fitbit program on I-OS or Android. Inspite of the undeniable fact I loathed the Fitbit port along with its own usability, the Ace two experience isn't fun. The Ace two works better when it's coupled with the telephone of your kid and none. At case your kid comes with a telephonethey are able to look the tracker and monitor their improvement using a child. This"Child View" is just really a compact adaptation of this Fitbit interface which shows details and identifications with restricted societal highlights.My difficulty is measuring among parent and kid view -- You have to get into your Fitbit keyword each moment.Their clock faces can alter and select and symbols, But also with companies they're able to simply interface for reasons. Messages can be sent by them in a amicable manner as insult and cheer them to companions.Be as it may, just one out of each youngster that is strange under 1 2 features a telephone, and that's the place problems emerge. I had been signed in to the parent accounts, After I set up the Ace two, and also the gadget was first linked to my own album. Register in to the little one profile you want to generate a young child's record and set that the tablet computer, therefore it's assigned into the record of the youngster and none. In the time they ought to switch between your parent visit along with the little one view. The matter is you want to re-emerge your own Fitbit keyword, and it is a bother.

Constrained finds:

Like Fitbit gadgets, the most Ace two is outfitted with. Blue tooth to synchronize into tablet or your mobile phone computer. The tracker fits upward you enable each daytime adapt. It is going to synchronize every time you start the Fitbit application in child view manner. Synchronizing has been solid, yet we had to restart the gadget a few days to make it to complement.The Ace two backings warnings, also it problems fragile Vibrations children understand. Kiddies can receive warnings against the Fitbit application, fresh identifications, for example low battery alerts, which is simply the tip of this iceberg. At the function they will have their very own mobile, your kid is able to view upcoming their tracker they can not capture outsider program finds or writings to telephone approaches. Kids can temper killer telephone warnings utilising the setting menu that is lively or in the Fitbit application.

Battery life:

The Ace two includes a five days of battery lifetime, also that I Five days, Watched the estimate as certifiable usage.My kids preferred the presentations battery Life was. Whatever the circumstance merited the trade off.Value, availability, and warranty information

The Fitbit Ace 2 expenses and can be available for sale today.

Fitbit spreads in workmanship and materials under Ordinary usage year.

The Fitbit Ace 2 isn't a tracker that is grownup that is re-branded. Its Watch faces that are enlivened and colors can talk with kids, and guardians Will appreciate the ability to check out along with their kid wellbeing Protection controls which help protect your own kids. My problem is Exchanging one of parent and child visit from the Fitbit application, and it really is really just a Unnecessary matter.

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https://medium.com/@rosefoster746/fitbit-ace-2-audit-183e64bf7068

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