New Lawsuit Calls Louisiana’s Pipeline Protest Law ‘Unconstitutional’
hmmmm
Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy
In the past year, Ancestry changed its search engine to detach the history of slavery from basic genealogical inquiries. When searching for an individual’s name, Ancestry.com stopped including results from the 1850 or 1860 United States Census Slave Schedules.
…Before this change occurred, Ancestry.com subscribers would often have to face the uncomfortable fact that their family kept others enslaved. …Attempting that research today would hide this distressing (though important) aspect of [a] family’s history.
The search engine functions to hide both slave ownership and enslaved people from the eyes of contemporary genealogists.
…Even if a casual observer did suspect a family history of slave ownership and had the inclination to then search the slave schedules themselves, they found the schedules no longer searchable by name on Ancestry.com.
…While Americans who are descended from enslavers are now less likely to discover the full truth of their family histories, this change also presented similar difficulties for professional historians. The 1860 Slave Schedule represents the gold standard among Civil War historians wanting to establish whether someone owned another human being.
…These recent issue with the census slave schedules do not appear to be a conspiracy to hide slave ownership, but instead the byproduct of trying to please a small group of customers without thinking through the societal ramifications of those choices. …The tech world is overwhelmingly populated with white men. Diversity isn’t just about doing the right thing morally—although perhaps that should be enough. It is also about making certain that products function well and don’t accidentally reinforce racial disparities by privileging one group’s search for the past over that of another.
…Bad historical knowledge can lead modern inequities to appear as solely the fault of the impoverished and not the product of centuries of discrimination. In this twisted world view, affirmative action can be understood as reverse discrimination because historically created inequality does not appear to even exist. Denying the existence of institutional racism, produced by a long history of oppression, serves to maintain inequality today. The danger of hiding slavery’s extent, horrors, and legacy is that it leads Americans to fundamentally misunderstand why racism remains such a problem. And you can’t solve a problem if you do not understand its roots.
Beyond Romantic Advertisements: Ancestry.com, Genealogy, and White Supremacy – AAIHS
sigh…
How Banning Abortion Will Transform America into Something akin to Soviet states.
A century of evidence from around the worldshows that coercive reproduction policies correlate weakly with actual fertility rates. The fact is that women’s decisions about family size are based on material realities. When basic food supplies are scarce (as in Romania in the 1980s), women will risk their lives having back-alley abortions, for fear of lacking the means to care for a child. Where paid parental leave and childcare are absent or prohibitively expensive, as they are in the US, women will make similar economic choices, regardless of the laws on the books.
After communism, Romania’s people recognized that democratic societies have a responsibility to guarantee women’s bodily autonomy, and to respect the right of all citizens to make their own decisions about whether and when to start or add to a family. It is odd that in the “land of the free,” one of the major parties would emulate a communist dictator.
How Banning Abortion Will Transform America by Maria Bucur & Kristen R. Ghodsee – Project Syndicate
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Presumed Consent and America’s Organ Donor Shortage
Presumed Consent and America’s Organ Donor Shortage | Civic | US News
Jeezus Krreyst….
Organ donation? Hard yes. Government mandated, even when it is soft-balled as presumed consent? Helll the efff no!
Woman whose rapist was granted joint custody of child speaks out – CBS News
Woman whose rapist was granted joint custody of child speaks out – CBS News
Agggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Why the fuck can people who are involved with out in-justice system fucking THINK?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The judge who made the original ruling should be in jail.
Vox goes off on Ari Fleischer for pushing a false narrative about what lead up to the Second Gulf War
There were numerous occasions when Bush and his advisers made statements that intelligence agencies knew to be false, both about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and about Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda.
…The CIA had informed policymakers it had “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” The “massive stockpile” was just literally made up.
…In August 2002, Cheney declared, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” But as Corn notes, at that time there was “no confirmed intelligence at this point establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation.”
……“Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.”
…While some noble dissenters, like the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and technical nuclear weapons experts at the Department of Energy, pushed back on the prevailing view in the intelligence community, the community as a whole clearly failed and vastly overestimated the likelihood that biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs existed.
…The atmosphere of impending war, the commission continues, “contributed to the too-ready willingness to accept dubious information as supporting the conventional wisdom and to an unwillingness even to consider the possibility that the conventional wisdom was wrong.”
…To engage in world politics is to weigh in on matters of life and death. Policymakers will get things wrong and they will cause people to lose their lives. But engagement in world politics does not necessitate lying to the American people and the world at large.
Ari Fleischer is wrong: Bush did lie, and people did die – Vox
hmmmm
Trump’s pick for ICE director: I can tell which migrant children will become gang members by looking into their eyes
“I’ve been to detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under,” Morgan said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in January. “I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s unequivocal.”
…The view that unaccompanied minors are more likely to become criminals is unsupported by statistical evidence. Studies have shown immigrants — legal and undocumented — are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
For the love of Krrrr-eyest….
Hardly Any Women Regret Having an Abortion, a New Study Finds
Ninety-five percent of women who have had abortions do not regret the decision to terminate their pregnancies, according to a study published last week in the multidisciplinary academic journal PLOS ONE.
…Its conclusions come after a three-year research period in which nearly 670 women were regularly surveyed on the subject of their abortions. The sample group was diverse with regard to standard social metrics (race, education, and employment) and on the matter of what the study calls pregnancy and abortion circumstances. Financial considerations were given as the reasons for an abortion by 40 percent of women; 36 percent had decided it was “not the right time;” 26 percent of women found the decision very or somewhat easy; 53 percent found it very or somewhat difficult.
Hardly Any Women Regret Having an Abortion, a New Study Finds | Time
hmmm
Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Government Was an Absolute Clown Show
Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren’t actually wrong in their assessment of his competency—they just failed to realise that this wasn’t enough to stand in the way of his ambition.
…His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans.
…There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff.
…He wouldn’t get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn’t do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him,
…He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens.
…In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish.
…He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked.)
…Hitler’s personal failings didn’t stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don’t actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.
,,,Many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a “half-mad rascal” or a “man with a beery vocal organ.” In a sense, they weren’t wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it’s possible to get.
Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show | Opinion
de ja hmmm
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