This picture grid brilliantly sums up the attitudes in nearly every IT office I’ve ever worked in. This is the oldest reference to it I can find. Let me know in the comments if you can find an older source!
And so on. There is, as we see, a huge range of reasons in the case of voting for Secretary Clinton. Why is it, then, that when it comes to the Trump voter, you create this image in your mind of not only who he is, but exactly why he voted for Trump? He is a white male (obviously) and a sexist, and a bigot, and homophobic. Or, at any rate, doesn’t have problems with racism and sexism and homophobia, because that is all Trump ever talked about and no one could possibly see it any different.
It does not seem to occur to you that, just as some of you were in denial about or excused or justified or ignored Secretary Clinton’s Wall Street connections, her actions in Haiti, in Libya, in providing enthusiastic aid to President Clinton’s racist and anti-working class “war on drugs,” that some of these people were in denial about or excused or justified some of Trump’s positions.
Of course, if your goal is to feel morally superior, then fine, please keep your image of the Trump voter intact and move on with your life. And if your political position starts and ends with the question of whether to “be kind,” then feel free to be kind or not be kind to whomever you please.
But we are now living in a country in which the chief executive officer is a fascistic demagogue, and in which police state measures are being introduced even faster than I had thought they would be. I beg to submit that to fight him effectively is going to take hard work, it is going to take organizing, it is going to take thinking things through, and it is going to take some of the 63 million people who voted for him. I further beg to submit that immense numbers of them will come to hate him, and for good reason. If fighting Trump seems more important than feeling morally superior, then it might be worth your while to consider that there might be more going on in the thinking of those 63 million people than the image of them you’ve created in your head.
I freely admit, this can be dangerous. It might lead you toward questions you don’t care to look at, such as, how far has capitalism degenerated when such an election can take place, an election that was conducted somewhere below the level of discourse one finds in a junior high locker room? You might need to consider that such easy answers to what happened as, “The Republicans lied,” ignore the fact the Republicans (and the Democrats, but skip that) have been lying for decades. You might need to consider that there have been Trump equivalents floating around for at least a century, but now, at this point in history, one got elected. You might need to consider, why did so many people find the idea of “more of the same” so utterly unacceptable? You might start thinking that glib answers such as, “they’re racists,” and “they’re sexist” bring up more questions than they answer. You might come to realize that the machinations and maneuvering of the two parties of big business are far more a reflection of and reaction to the state of capitalism than a determinate. You might even discover the immense suffering of those people who you’ve been assured have no problems except what’s in their heads.
”Do you think the U.S. Attorney General has a responsibility to say no to the president if he asks for something that is improper?,” asked Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-Alabama) in 2015.
“I believe they have an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution,” replied U.S. Deputy Attorney General nominee Sally Q. Yates.
Trump apparently personally fired Yates on Monday for refusing to defend his regime’s ‘sneak attack’ ethnically targeted travel ban. Yates did so because of Trump’s repeated racist comments about Muslim people, according to reports.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a DRM system for web video, being pushed by Netflix, movie studios, and a few broadcasters. It’s been hugely controversial within the W3C and outside of it, but one argument that DRM defenders have made throughout the debate is that the DRM is optional, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it. That’s not true any more.
Some time in the past few days, Google quietly updated Chrome (and derivative browsers like Chromium) so that Widevine (Google’s version of EME) can no longer be disabled; it comes switched on and installed in every Chrome instance.
Because of laws like section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (and Canada’s Bill C11, and EU implementations of Article 6 of the EUCD), browsers that have DRM in them are risky for security researchers to audit. These laws provide both criminal and civil penalties for those who tamper with DRM, even for legal, legitimate purposes, and courts and companies have interpreted this to mean that companies can punish security researchers who reveal defects in their products.
Dozens of W3C members – and hundreds of security professionals – have asked the W3C to amend its policies so that its members can’t use EME to silence security researchers and whistleblowers who want to warn web users that they are in danger from security vulnerabilities in browsers.
So far, the W3C has stonewalled on this. This weekend, the W3C executive announced that it would not make such an agreement part of the EME work, and endorsed the idea that the W3C should participate in creating new legal rights for companies to decide which true facts about browser defects can be disclosed and under what circumstances.
Barriers to disclosure ensure that defects linger. Google’s now-mandatory Widevine had a critical flaw for six years, which was only reported because a researcher from Israel, the only industrialized nation that doesn’t have a law protecting DRM, published his findings.
While the American public’s attention was focused on the thousands of families whose lives were disrupted and even put at risk by Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the USA, the US Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were removed from the list of permanent attendees in the President’s National Security Council. They were replaced with white nationalist Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
Trump announced the changes shortly after speaking with Putin for an hour.
Presidential press spokesman Sean Spicer downplayed Bannon’s lack of expertise, describing the avowed racist as “a former naval officer.” Bannon left the Navy in 1983. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Bannon is replacing, is an active-service four-star general.
Girls as young as 6 already doubt that they could ever be as smart or as capable as men, according to a new report.
Researchers came to this heart-rending conclusion after conducting a study where they told a story about a “really, really smart” person to 400 children between the ages of 5 and 7, asking them to identify the gender of this described brilliant person.
They found that 5-year-old boys and girls were likely to “associate brilliance with their own gender.”
However, this tendency took a dramatic turn for girls ages 6 and 7 — they were “significantly less likely” to see the “really, really smart” person as a woman. Read more
Threats from the Trump administration to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities have caused California to start looking for methods to not pay taxes to the Federal government.
California’s long-time status as a “donor state,” one that pays more tax than it receives in federal funding, has been a contentious issue. Teapublicans have also long claimed the government has no right to tax people, anyways, and it’d be super fun to see what they have to say about liberals using their rhetoric against them.
Regardless, it should scare the ill-fitting pants off our illegitimately elected President that the most populous state, contributing the most money to his coffers, has state officials looking for ways to not pay taxes, and a public movement to secede. He may be in a place to push his bigoted and hateful policies forward, but California doesn’t want to pay for them.
A federal judge for New York’s Eastern District issued an emergency stay on Saturday night that temporarily halts President Donald Trump’s Friday executive order banning entry to the US from seven mostly Muslim countries.
Trump’s executive order led to widespread protests at airports around the country, and chaos as travelers from the blacklisted countries were detained, interrogated, and refused entry to the United States.
The lawyers who sued the government said the decision following an emergency hearing in a New York City courtroom could affect an estimated 100 to 200 people.
Donald J Trump’s executive order banning Muslims from entering the US threw the world into chaos yesterday, as US citizens, lawful permanent residents and visa holders found themselves stranded abroad, detained at airports on arrival to the USA, or helplessly waiting outside immigration checkpoint for news of sick and vulnerable family members who were held incommunicado by US immigration officials who refused to obey a US federal court order.
Immigration officials and the State Department were given little to no notice of the ban, and were in disarray when it came into effect. An unnamed senior US immigration official was so offended by the chaos and illegality that he spoke extensively and critically of the ban to reporters from The Intercept – presaging a near future in which US government employees open up back-channels to the press to complain about the administration’s racist, unconstitutional and illegal conduct. He said the ban “took everyone by surprise” and that they “had less than a day to review vague details…This EO took hours, and we never, never saw the final draft.”
The official described some of those turned away in the chaos: “a young mother of a U.S. citizen child, and students at some of the nation’s top universities publicly recognized for their outstanding achievement. These students had already undergone rigorous U.S. government vetting before being admitted to the country, and had only traveled abroad briefly over their winter break.”
According to the official, “They were only informed [that their visas had been terminated] when they attempted to use their visas to seek admission and were denied. Even though they were ignorant of the termination, they were still charged with violating U.S. immigration law and given a five-year ban to future admission.”
The ban also resulted in bona fide refugee claimants being returned to countries where they faced detention and torture.
Most chillingly, CBP officials refused to comply with a federal court order suspending the ban, and would not discuss their decision with US Members of Congress who intervened on behalf of detainees. At LAX, CBP officials insisted that a visa-holding Iranian citizen named Sara Yarjani would have to fly to Copenhagen, and when Rep. Judy Chu and Rep. Nanette Barragan asked to speak to the officials about the court order, CBP said they reported to Donald J Trump and hung up on the Congresswomen.
I am a US green card holder, the son of a displaced person, the grandson of a child soldier, and the father of an immigrant. I am afraid.
More news on the Chinese crackdown on money-laundering and its impact on the global property bubble: the controls the Chinese government has put on “capital outflows” (taking money out of China) are actually working, and there’s been a mass exodus of Chinese property buyers from the market, with many abandoning six-figure down payments because they can’t smuggle enough money out of the country to make the installment payments.
The market is being kept on life-support by Chinese money-launderers who smuggled their cash out of China before the controls came in; they’re using their offshore cash reserves to make payments on the properties they’ve speculated on (presumably they can access even more capital by remortgaging some of their properties). There are also big-money speculators who have the sophistication needed to circumvent the capital controls.
But the median speculator/money lender is dead in the water, it seems. With demand softening, it is likely that there will be a collapse in housing prices (luxury houses first, but then “normal” properties in overheated markets like Seattle and London, bought as teardowns with the intention of erecting McMansions), which could trigger a cascade of sell-offs. First, because the big-money investors who can evade the controls will see their investments declining in value and liquidity – this latter is very important, as the real-estate bubble has created the historically unique situation in which property is extremely liquid, with owners being able to sell off and get their cash out in a matter of days or weeks, allowing for much more leveraged speculation – and second, because banks will make margin calls on mortgages that are “underwater” – asking for immediate payment in full on properties whose valuation is suddenly lower than the speculators’ outstanding debts to the banks.
The more sell-offs, the lower the prices will go, and the more sell-offs there will be. For example, about one third of buyers in London’s iconic Spire tower have actually made the payments they had promised to make. If 30+% of units in The Spire suddenly go on the market, the remaining units would likely see a decline in value. Skittish speculators might spook at that point, selling their units, triggering more price declines and more sales.
This also bodes ill for the recent Bitcoin bubble, which has been almost entirely driven by Chinese money-launderers. The Chinese government has the whip-hand over the blockchain. There are Chinese miners who have enough compute-power to compromise the entire ledger, but who choose not to out of a combination of stewardship for the blockchain and self-interest in the continued stability of cryptocurrencies. But these firms could be coerced by Beijing into injecting much mischief into the blockchain as a means of scaring off potential money-launderers from using Bitcoin to evade the capital controls. Just the threat of such action may be enough to make the biggest miners into willing deputies for the official anti-laundering measures, with the companies taking “voluntary” measures to prevent the use of cryptocurrencies to get around export controls (for small-fry launderers, at least – those with political clout may still find a warm welcome in cryptocurrency circles).
