A thread for Democrats Only
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From Inside U.S.A. (1947) by John Gunther:
“There is no valid reason why the American people cannot work out an evolution in which freedom and security are combined,” Gunther concludes. “In a curious way it is earlier, not later, than we think. The fact that a third of the nation is ill-housed and ill-fed is, in simple fact, not so much a dishonor as a challenge. What Americans have to do is enlarge the dimensions of the democratic process. This country is, I once heard it put, absolutely ‘lousy with greatness’ — with not only the greatest responsibilities but with the greatest opportunities ever known to man.”
The Committee for Kentucky, with a membership of 350,000, found, among many other things, that “42,000 Kentucky farms had no toilets or privies of any kind in 1940, and 97 percent of all farms have no toilets inside the house”; that “in one area a single doctor serves 11,500 people”; that “100,000 Kentuckians have syphilis”; that out of the 114,000 children who in 1932 had started first grade, not fewer than 100,000 had had to drop out by the end of high school; that “34 percent of all Kentucky farms are worth less than $300, only 25 percent have electricity and only 16 percent have telephones”; that the “average teacher’s salary is $1,014.”
The South came as a tremendous shock to Gunther. An “almost unbelievable figure is that 11 million Southerners have annual cash incomes of $250 or below. … The rural slums of the South are almost beyond doubt the most revolting in the nation.” As for the “dry” South, “never in Port Said, Shanghai or Marseilles have I seen the kind of drinking that goes on in Atlanta, Houston or Memphis every Saturday night — with officers in uniforms vomiting in hotel lobbies, 17-year-old girls screaming with hysteria in public elevators, men and women of the country club category being carried bodily off the dance floor by disinterested waiters.”
“There are do-nothing governors in the South today who are little more than nimble ferrets; some have as much spine as an Eskimo pie. Sprinkled through the South are soapy miscreants who want a war with Russia for the fun of it.” But “the South has a good many first-class liberals too. The notion that the area is a debauched hinterland occupied exclusively by reactionaries is as far from the truth as the notion that everything above the Mason and Dixon line is progressive.”
In a chapter called “Negro in the Woodpile,” Gunther acknowledges that “I had heard words like ‘discrimination’ and ‘prejudice’ all my life, but I had no concrete knowledge, no fingertip realization of what lies behind them. I knew that ‘segregation’ was a problem; I had no conception at all of the grim enormousness of the problem.”
“Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among Southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and untouchability — half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India.”
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210627052626/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/06/26/books/review/inside-usa-john-gunther.html
Free Download of Inside U.S.A. (1947) by John Gunther from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.li/search.php?req=John+Gunther+Inside
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I found the author's adult books:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Hey Second...
You're the Pirate King around these parts.
Any chance you can get me a PDF of the children's book Antiracist Baby?
Thanks bud.
https://libgen.unblockit.li/search.php?req=Ibram+X.+Kendi
The baby book version of the adult book is at:
Look Inside the book for free at
www.amazon.com/Antiracist-Baby-Picture-Ibram-Kendi/dp/0593110501/
You can buy it used for $1.51. Shipping is $3.99.
It rhymes:
"No one will see racism if we only stay silent.
If we don’t name racism,
it won’t stop being so violent."
Good enough poetry for a 4 year old.
The GOP’s Attacks on the “Woke” Military Recall Joe McCarthy’s Tactics
The Army has recently come under attack by congressional Republicans for committing the crime of being too “woke.” The prosecution’s exhibit A, waved at a House hearing last week, is a course taught at West Point—the Army’s military academy—called “The Politics of Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality.”
How strange it is that the slave owning Confederate leaders of the fight against the Union are more widely honored—with their names on federal forts, roads, barracks, gates, housing areas, etc.—than are those who fought for the country.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/military-woke-critical-rac
e-theory-milley.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I would never actually read one of his books man. All I could find were his books made for grown up babies too.
Had something else in mind. It would be helpful to have a scanned version or a PDF for it.
Thanks anyway.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Quote:Your prejudice is showing. The GOP has exactly the same prejudice. Recently, a prominent right-wing media figure attacked Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declaring, “He’s not just a pig, he’s stupid.”
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I would never actually read one of his books man. All I could find were his books made for grown up babies too.
Had something else in mind. It would be helpful to have a scanned version or a PDF for it.
Thanks anyway.
That was Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. What set Carlson off was testimony in which Milley told a congressional hearing that he considered it important “for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and widely read.”
The Milley hearing was part of the orchestrated furor over “critical race theory,” which has dominated right-wing media for the past few months, getting close to 2,000 mentions on Fox so far this year.
Those attacking critical race theory understand that it has something to do with assertions that America has a history of racism and of policies that explicitly or implicitly widened racial disparities.
And such assertions are unmistakably true. The 1938 underwriting manual for the Federal Housing Administration really did declare that “incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities.”
We can argue about the relevance of this history to current policy, but who would argue against acknowledging simple facts?
The modern right, that’s who. It’s only one of multiple subjects that become a litmus test for anyone hoping to succeed in Republican politics.
Thus, to be a Republican in good standing one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on things like the efficacy of tax cuts.
What underlies this cross-disciplinary commitment? On each subject, refusing to acknowledge reality serves special interests. Climate denial caters to the fossil fuel industry; evolution denial caters to religious fundamentalists; tax-cut mysticism caters to billionaire donors.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210629023334/https://www.nytimes.com/202
1/06/28/opinion/tucker-carlson-general-milley-republicans.html
https://i.imgur.com/cHamiag.jpeg
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Your prejudice is showing.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
I would never actually read one of his books man. All I could find were his books made for grown up babies too.
Had something else in mind. It would be helpful to have a scanned version or a PDF for it.
Thanks anyway.
I don't read racist books written by racists.
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And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
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Remember When the US Presidency Was Gleefully Corrupt? This brings back memories:
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, [Sonny] Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America....An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Remember when Donald Trump was president and stories like this were almost weekly occurrences? And Republicans didn't care even slightly? Those were the days.
https://jabberwocking.com/remember-when-the-us-presidency-was-gleefull
y-corrupt/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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We’re Learning the Wrong Lessons From the World’s Happiest Countries
Sort of like how the launch of Sputnik in 1957 led Americans to feel like their country was falling behind technologically, or how the results of international standardized tests in the 2000s led them to feel like their kids were falling behind educationally, the happiness rankings have subtly encouraged an anxiety fit for our era of self-optimization: that somewhere, other people are doing things that make them much happier than we are.
This disturbing thought has contributed to the rise of a genre of lifestyle content that aims to help unhappy Americans emulate the daily practices and philosophies of happier places, whether that means taking a dip in frigid water or making your living room super-cozy. Wanting to copy the happiest people in the world is an understandable impulse, but it distracts from a key message of the happiness rankings — that equitable, balanced societies make for happier residents. In the process, a research-heavy, policy-oriented document gets mistaken, through a terrible global game of telephone, for a trove of self-help advice.
The happiness rankings are a useful countervailing force in a world that tends to take GDP as a proxy for a country’s success. The lessons of the report are not shocking: People are more satisfied with their lives when they have a comfortable standard of living, a supportive social network, good health, the latitude to choose their course in life, and a government they trust. The highest echelon of happy countries also tends to have universal health care, ample paid vacation time, and affordable child care.
A central takeaway from nine years of happiness reports is that a wealthier country is not always a happier country. In the U.S., “we are living with such incredibly frayed social trust and bad vibes and addictions and so many other things, and still people say ‘Don't tax me,’ ‘Don’t tax the rich,’” Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University and an editor of the report, told me. “This is part of our politics that I think is all wrong, and that I think is what puts us well behind countries that are not quite as rich as the United States but in my view are much more balanced in their lives.”
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210629070921if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/family/archive/2021/06/worlds-happiest-countries-denmark-finland-norway/619299/
https://i.imgur.com/boQTPQZ.jpeg
As a Dutchman, I get universal health care, excellent roads, good public transport, and easily accessible high quality education.
As an American, you get to dream that you too will be rich some day.
https://imgur.com/gallery/6Njj4qS
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Remember When the US Presidency Was Gleefully Corrupt? This brings back memories:
In February 2017, weeks after President Donald Trump selected him to be agriculture secretary, [Sonny] Perdue’s company bought a small grain plant in South Carolina from one of the biggest agricultural corporations in America....An examination of public records by The Washington Post has found that the agricultural company, Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), sold the land at a small fraction of its estimated value just as it stood to benefit from a friendly secretary of agriculture.
Remember when Donald Trump was president and stories like this were almost weekly occurrences? And Republicans didn't care even slightly? Those were the days.
https://jabberwocking.com/remember-when-the-us-presidency-was-gleefull
y-corrupt/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
We don't hear about the corruption happening now because the corrupt media is in love with the current corruption.
Turns out that's not good for the bottom line though since only 29% of Americans now trust the media and their ratings have never been lower.
--------------------------------------------------
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We’re Learning the Wrong Lessons From the World’s Happiest Countries
As a Dutchman, I get universal health care, excellent roads, good public transport, and easily accessible high quality education.
As an American, you get to dream that you too will be rich some day.
I don't want to hear you talking about my money with me again.
--------------------------------------------------
And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Fox News did not cover Trump administration corruption because it did not want to. Fox News wants to cover Biden administration corruption, but is not for a different reason.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:We don't hear about the corruption happening now because the corrupt media is in love with the current corruption.
Originally posted by second:
Remember When the US Presidency Was Gleefully Corrupt? This brings back memories:
https://jabberwocking.com/remember-when-the-us-presidency-was-gleefull
y-corrupt/
Turns out that's not good for the bottom line though since only 29% of Americans now trust the media and their ratings have never been lower.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME