Speaking of things can can only be said here, it does seem to me that the Portland leadership of the BLM movement could conclude that focus is being lost, and announce that the next weekend of demonstrations would be at the municipal (or county?) buildings -- police, prosecutors -- rather than the federal building, because the actual issue of racially differential police violence is primarily cultural, and primarily local.
This puts the focus back on police and funding, and deprives Trump's goons of any excuse to be in Portland. They'll stay, because their actual purpose is the generation of photo ops, but it'll be even less effective for Trump.
Am I missing something here?
1: I think your main mistake there is assuming that BLM in Portland has either centralized leadership or control over the protests.
Hmm, I don't read it so much as a white savior thing as a reminder that everybody is somebody's child, even when they're 6'4" grown men. YMMV, I guess.
Everybody is somebody's child, but only that person's child. The idea of someone else claiming motherhood of my child makes me extremely uncomfortable.
(Well, there are multiple parents who can claim a child, of course.)
If you find a child on the ground below a tree, don't touch it or its mother won't recognize it
I thought you were supposed to threaten to chop it in half, and then give the pieces to the fake mother?
Let your toddler run free. If it returns, it's yours; if it doesn't, it wasn't.
No, I mean people who can speak with moral authority say -- 'let's keep the focus on local police violence' and put out some flyers. The moms could line up between the protesters and the federal building, and sing na na na kiss him goodbye.
A thing which I would only say here
Allow me to play the role of un-hip realworlder around whom such things must not be said: I am not sufficiently evolved to give up on sentimentality about motherhood. Floyd really did call out to his mother.
I am not his mother in any sense.
I am! The impulse to universalize decency is a fine thing, and you grumpy feminists aren't going to take it away from me. We are the world! We are the children!
No, I mean people who can speak with moral authority say -- 'let's keep the focus on local police violence' and put out some flyers.
I haven't been following the Portland events super-closely, but again, I don't think there are such people. The really aggressive hard core of protesters who are throwing stuff and setting fires actively want to provoke confrontations with authorities, and Trump sending in federal goons suits them just fine. If anything it helps enhance focus on the protests and shifts public opinion toward greater support.
Yeah, I think part of the problem in Portland is a well-established left fringe that really is out to pick fights and happy to continue the confrontation with DHS goons indefinitely.
A fire caused extensive damage at the state Democratic Party headquarters early Friday morning in downtown Phoenix, and police are investigating the cause
It does take a village. I think we should all rise to her aid. It's just something about coopting her unique role that makes me uncomfortable. (But if that's just me, I won't worry about it.)
14: They've concluded it was arson.
I'm honor of white fragility, I'm watching Columbo, drinking gin and tonics, and eating cheese.
Just one more thing, Mr Hick...
Heebie, I think I hear you.
There is an icky strain of sentimentality about motherhood in the US (very white-centred, of course), combined with an actual lack of support for real-world mothers (those 12 months of paid 'mat [maternity] leave' that my sisters in Canada took when they became mothers, that they took just as a matter of course? Not yet happening in the US...).
'Motherhood' can be a shorthand for humanity; decency; our shared human ties; our impulse to look after one another. But sometimes, when looking at the bigger picture, its invocation can be more irritating than inspirational....
Those signs resonated with me, perhaps mawkishly. Since having a kid, I've definitely gained a new line of thinking about groups of men about to be in violence along the lines of "but those were once little boys and their moms loved them so much". I guess it highlights the tragedy of the conflict in a dimension that didn't feel immediate before I had a kid.
What if Russian mothers love their children too?
The question, then, isn't what Fred [Rogers] would do, what Fred would say, in the face of outrage and horror, because Fred was the most stubbornly consistent of men. He would say that Donald Trump was a child once too.
I'll go ask the guy who sells me shoes if that's true, because he used to sell shoes to Mr. Rogers.
I do feel the sentiment in 22. I do viscerally feel the pain of the their mothers when something happens to grown ups.
But yeah, somehow this isn't that for me. My heart aches for the mothers (parents), and I think it's okay to say I grieve for Floyd, or that I'm affected, and even affected as a mother, but I am really off-put by the notion that I'm affected as his mother, because it seems like I'm coopting something that's not mine, and that the real mother would not want to share with me.
But it sounds like this is my idiosyncrasy. I think JPJ's angle is even slightly different.
So, on the subject of what mothers owe to other mothers, and other people... I've been venting about the various "pandemic school pods are the new new Jim Crow" editorials that I've seen go by, because they seem to generate a lot of heat without advocating for any alternative -- even to the point of saying explicitly, in one case, "What else should parents do? I have no idea." It's deeply frustrating to me. There's still time to implement some kind of solution at some kind of scale, right? I really dislike the way the blanket condemnations will have the effect of normalizing people's bad faith over doing a thing they have reason to believe is harmful, but to which there's no good alternative. We already live too much of our lives like that.
(I'm not involved with a schooling pod, although I think the afternoon childcare coop will continue into the fall to some extent. I'm probably not even exactly the kind of parent these articles are aimed at. The obvious next step is to join the PTA and see what task forces they put together around equity for students; at this point I can probably also raid my childcare FSA, eat the fees, and donate the whole thing to a grant fund for low-income families at kid's school. But I want to see better solutions than all that.)
The schooling pods should be paid for by the federal government, and they should be strictly daycare by camp counselors, facilitating the remote learning provided by the school district. Quick to implement.
I know you're venting about others and not actually asking for a solution, but I'm unable
to resist restating my own.
The schooling pods should be paid for by the federal government, and they should be strictly daycare by camp counselors, facilitating the remote learning provided by the school district. Quick to implement.
I know you're venting about others and not actually asking for a solution, but I'm unable
to resist restating my own.
All these sentimental invocations of motherhood and yet no one has even mentioned apple pie.
Well there is the thing where I hear a kid cry out, and feel immediately roused, and then hopefully hear that it isn't my kid, and then feel the sweet relief of 'not my kid; some other hovering parent has to do it'. If we truncate that back to roused, it is maybe the good impulse underlying the "all mothers were called" sign.
Yeah, I think your objection is idiosyncratic, though there's no harm done by anyone not liking the sentiment.
All of these sentimental invocations of motherhood and yet no one has even mentioned the AOC/Yoho conflict.
Her response was devastatingly effective, I thought, along with many of her colleagues. Pressley stood out, I think.
As a Yoho constituent, I kind of love that he's ending his many years as a basically low-profile garbage Rep with this huge embarrassment of a news story. So much for gliding into retirement, heh.
As a constituent of Yoo-Hoo, I'm glad he at least spells the name differently.
37: Nor about a threesome with him and Regis Philbon.
34,35: And unless you are paywalled, people should read Rebecca Traister's write up in The Cut of how it was covered (especially in the dog-ass NYT). It was all "norm-shattering" and "punching each syllable in the vulgarity" (which she in fact simply spoke in a matter-of-fact way). The most galling to me was their focus on how she used it to build "her brand." As if there is no .brand-building by the endless attacks on her from the likes of Yoho and other Republicans).
Maybe that's all in the weeds, but given the last x years of politics and political commentary in this benighted country I just found it extremely depressing to see the framing.
But, yess, everyone should watch her speech itself.
39 & 40 me.
And speaking of misogyny not sure anyone here circled back on the attempted judge assassination (and yes she clearly was his original target although he was clearly of disordered mind).
A write-up here about his target list. He apparently almost certainly had gone out to LA the week before and shot a "rival" men's rights lawyer and had a list of possible targets including several other judges*.
I was also struck by this piece in the WaPo.
"Do you remember that creepy guy who used to call the office and complain when we wrote about him?" I texted former co-workers at Bitch Media. Looking back on pieces I'd written about Hollander more than a decade ago, I was struck by my own tone. Calling Hollander "the Energizer Bunny of frivolous litigation" wasn't inaccurate. But my tendency to turn him into a joke rather than treating him as a threat shows why it's so easy for violent misogyny to hide in plain sight.
As part of his notoriety he apparently had been on Fox News several times as he fought the feminazi menace through the majestic apparatus of the civil courts.
*Brings to mind how the excuse for no visible names for the Portland thugs** is that they fear being tracked down by violent criminals. Also how Roger Stone not only intimidated witnesses but made borderline "threats" against his judge. Thank God we have a Law and order administration.
**And I did see some story that apparently confirmed that many of them are "contractors." (Not too surprising, really.)
Coherence left I have none of. Order words bad. Mean well but not execute. Sad. Upon reading prior comments this comment is made in my mind. And now the computer.
28 that's been driving me crazy too. Every solution possible on an individual basis is wrong, so pick one and let us harangue you. And if you complain you are selfish and want to kill teachers. I'd love the plan in 29. Which I suppose means I want to kill camp counselors.