Father. Husband. Writer. Teacher. Son. Brother. Friend. Neighbor. Radical (d)emocrat. Not always in that order.
As I write this, a heatwave is devastating the Pacific Northwest. New England, meanwhile, suffers under a heatwave of our own. I don’t do well in the heat, and just writing this post has me on the edge of a panic attack.
In Candide, Voltaire’s “honest Turk” presumes “that they who meddle with the administration of public affairs sometimes perish miserably, and that they deserve it.” The more I ignore the nastiness of the narcissists in Washington D.C., the more I tend to agree with Voltaire.
From There Is a Generational Divide Among Republicans:
The formula is simple or at least ought to be: Americans should be able to support a family of four, own a home and send their kids to school on a single median wage. The party that understands this, talks about it honestly and addresses the problem effectively will win a lot of elections. And they’ll deserve to.
From Teachers, child care workers, more high-risk Vermonters eligible for vaccination next week:
With the Johnson & Johnson vaccine coming online and the federal pharmacy program ramping up, Gov. Phil Scott announced Tuesday that school staff, child care workers and more Vermonters with high-risk conditions would become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine starting [March 8, 2021].
With my wife and I both working as teachers, this is incredible news!
From Sanders blasts MLB for dropping Vermont Lake Monsters ball club:
“If the multibillionaire owners of Major League Baseball have enough money to pay hundreds of millions in compensation to a single superstar baseball player,” Sanders said, “they have enough money to prevent 40 minor league teams from shutting down in Vermont and all over this country.”
From How to Radicalize Your Parents:
When trying to educate older relatives about radical politics, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to—and in, fact, shouldn’t—get everything done in one discussion. It’s much better to start with one topic and branch out from there. Many radical frameworks and policy issues such as prison abolition, defunding the police, decriminalizing sex work, and raising the minimum wage, are related and strongly interconnected. If you can get your relatives on board with one idea, it can be easier to convince them of the next one.
From “Mark Changed The Rules”: How Facebook Went Easy On Alex Jones And Other Right-Wing Figures:
“Ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class,” a [Facebook] content policy employee who left weeks after the election wrote. “White supremacy is an ideology; so is anarchism. Neither view is immutable, nor should either be beyond scrutiny. The idea that our content ranking decisions should be balanced on a scale from right to left is impracticable … and frankly can be dangerous, as one side of that scale actively challenges core democratic institutions and fails to recognize the results of a free and fair election.”