NO DAPL: An Urgent Request from Chairman Archambault II.

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My name is David Archambault II, and I’m the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has long opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline project. This proposed pipeline presents a threat to our lands, our sacred sites, and our water. Current and future generations depend on our rivers and aquifer to live.

Will you stand in solidarity and urge President Obama to reject the Dakota Access Pipeline, once and for all?

Yesterday, militarized law enforcement agencies moved in with tanks and riot gear on water protectors who stand in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline—a massive pipeline project that would cut through four states, impact the water to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and violate sacred sites and ancient grounds. While native elders prayed in peace, they were attacked with pepper spray, rubber bullets, as well as sound and concussion cannons. By the end of the day, more than 140 people were arrested.1 Please, add your name and demand that President Obama reject this pipeline once and for all.

[…]

While we engage in the long legal process to curtail construction of the pipeline, Dakota Access is still poised to begin construction. Halting the construction was an unprecedented step in response to our powerful movement—and now President Obama must reject the pipeline’s permit outright.

Current and future generations depend on our rivers and aquifer to live. The Dakota Access pipeline jeopardizes the heath of our water and could affect our people, as well as countless communities who live downstream, as the pipeline would cross four states. The pipeline, as designed, would destroy ancient burial grounds, which is a violation of federal law.

Please, please, sign, and pass this on to as many people as possible. Lila wopila to all you who do so (very great thanks). If enough people do, we can get millions on this petition.

The Handsomest Billionaire Sent by God to Save Us All.

Donald Trump and Wayne Allen Root (YouTube/screen grab).

Donald Trump and Wayne Allyn Root (YouTube/screen grab).

That perpetual font of nuttery, Wayne Allyn Root is at it again. He seems to think it’s simply not possible for “one of the handsomest billionaires ever” to commit sexual assault because handsome. Good lookin’ does not excuse anyone from sexual assault.

Root rejoiced that Trump’s army of “deplorable” supporters have now taken over the GOP, warning that these “savages” are intent on burning Washington, D.C. to the ground.

“Donald Trump is a middle finger to Washington, D.C.,” Root crowed, before warning Christians that they cannot sit on the sideline in this election because Hillary Clinton and the Democrats “are coming to take our Bibles away.”

“If you’re a Christian, you just can’t spend your life worrying about the words of Donald Trump from 11 years ago,” Root said, “or what women he groped 30 years ago. I don’t believe any of it anyway. I believe Donald Trump is one of the handsomest billionaires that’s ever lived; I don’t think he ever had to grope a single woman ever. I think they threw themselves at him, so it’s all a lie.”

Okay, which is it, he did grope women and it’s okay because handsome, or is it a case of bitchez be lying? (No comments about Trump assaulting Wayne, okay? That’s not funny, and it’s not appropriate.) Once again, the cognitive dissonance of Christians never ceases to amaze. There are times I think if you put someone like Root in an MRI, you’d see all the compartments in his brain, keeping things all sealed off.

“The man isn’t a perfect Christian,” Root admitted, but he is “the perfect guy sent from God and from central casting to be the vicious guy we needed to save America, save capitalism, fight the Clinton crime cartel and save Christianity from these vicious, vicious people. They’re terrible, dirty people and a nice guy could have never won this war. Only a dirty player could win the war, so I think Donald’s the perfect guy, sent by God to fill the perfect role and save us all.”

God and central casting. Ohan. So God’s a hollywood mogul with a casting couch now? Saving capitalism? Wait a minute, I thought he was supposed to save your bibles. In spite of themselves, the truth always slips out.

Via Right Wing Watch.

Facebook’s Ethnic Affinities.

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You can’t scuff a toe these days without overturning something unsavoury when it comes to Facebook. ProPublica has found FB’s ethnic affinities, and how their advertising service allows you to exclude said ethnic affinities, which are not at all the same thing as race, no, no. As usual, FB dodges and runs away from providing an actual answer, as they habitually do when caught once again with their metaphorical pants around their ankles.

…The ad we purchased was targeted to Facebook members who were house hunting and excluded anyone with an “affinity” for African-American, Asian-American or Hispanic people. (Here’s the ad itself.)

When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.”

[…]

Facebook says its policies prohibit advertisers from using the targeting options for discrimination, harassment, disparagement or predatory advertising practices.

“We take a strong stand against advertisers misusing our platform: Our policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate, and they require compliance with the law,” said Steve Satterfield, privacy and public policy manager at Facebook. “We take prompt enforcement action when we determine that ads violate our policies.”

Satterfield said it’s important for advertisers to have the ability to both include and exclude groups as they test how their marketing performs. For instance, he said, an advertiser “might run one campaign in English that excludes the Hispanic affinity group to see how well the campaign performs against running that ad campaign in Spanish. This is a common practice in the industry.”

He said Facebook began offering the “Ethnic Affinity” categories within the past two years as part of a “multicultural advertising” effort.

Satterfield added that the “Ethnic Affinity” is not the same as race — which Facebook does not ask its members about. Facebook assigns members an “Ethnic Affinity” based on pages and posts they have liked or engaged with on Facebook.

When we asked why “Ethnic Affinity” was included in the “Demographics” category of its ad-targeting tool if it’s not a representation of demographics, Facebook responded that it plans to move “Ethnic Affinity” to another section.

Facebook declined to answer questions about why our housing-categories ad excluding minority groups was approved 15 minutes after we placed the order.

The full story is at ProPublica.

This Is NOT Your Word.

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There’s a professor at Suffolk University in Boston who seems to think that certain words simply cannot be used by those inferior brown peoples. This is shameful, full stop. Yes, I know teachers need to be alert for the possibility of cheating, but it’s quite obvious that is not what happened here.

A Latina student at a university in Boston said that her professor on Thursday handed back her paper and told her, in front of the class, “This is not your language.”

After looking at more of the comments the professor left on her literature review, Suffolk University sociology major Tiffany Martínez noticed that the professor had circled the word “hence” and had written, “This is not your word,” underlining “not” twice.

And at the top of her paper, the professor had written, “Please go back & indicate where you cut & paste.”

[…]

Martínez, an aspiring professor who was born and raised in the Bronx, told BuzzFeed News that her professor had called her to the front of the senior seminar course on Thursday to receive her graded paper when she made the language comment.

“She spoke loudly enough that students at the back of the room heard and asked if I was OK after class,” Martínez said.

She felt terrified after the incident.

“I spent the rest of the class going back through every single line, every single citation to make sure that nothing had been plagiarized, even though I knew I hadn’t,” she said.

Later that day in a blog post titled “Academia, Love Me Back,” Martínez wrote about her experiences as both a first-generation college student and US citizen at what she calls “an institution extremely populated with high-income white counterparts.”

“My last name and appearance immediately instills a set of biases before I have the chance to open my mouth,” she wrote.

“As a minority in my classrooms, I continuously hear my peers and professors use language that both covertly and overtly oppresses the communities I belong to. Therefore, I do not always feel safe when I attempt to advocate for my people in these spaces,” she added.

This incident certainly makes me wonder just how many other people have been stomped on and rendered suspect by this professor over the years. Such openly racist behaviour has no part in decent society, and definitely should not be part and parcel of a person’s education.

Martinez also described how the incident made her doubt her capabilities as a scholar.

In this interaction, my undergraduate career was both challenged and critiqued. It is worth repeating how my professor assumed I could not use the word “hence,” a simple transitory word that connected two relating statements. The professor assumed I could not produce quality research. The professor read a few pages that reflected my comprehension of complex sociological theories and terms and invalidated it all. Their blue pen was the catalyst that opened an ocean of self-doubt that I worked so hard to destroy. In front of my peers, I was criticized by a person who had the academic position I aimed to acquire. I am hurting because my professor assumed that the only way I could produce content as good as this was to “cut and paste.” I am hurting because for a brief moment I believed them.

Buzzfeed has the full story. One thing I know already: Ms. Martinez will make an outstanding professor, and is already much better than Prof. Not your word.

A Measure of Trust.

One of the young Turkeys was on the deck, and I took a chance and opened the window, slowly. The youngster stopped now and then, keeping an eye on me, but kept on eating. I got the window all the way open, said hello and talked for a moment or two. Then I focused and took a photo – the shutter noise on Nikons is quite loud, and rather scary when doing rapid shooting. I got the hairy eyeball, then it was back to eating. Took a deep breath and commenced with the rapid fire. Outside of a look or two, the youngster stayed relaxed, and kept eating, trusting the strange, noisy creature to do no harm. I’m all manner excited. Click for full size.

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© C. Ford.

Those White Nationalist Roots.

Jerry Falwell.

Jerry Falwell.

Most people associate the religious right with issues like abortion and “family values”. Those were latecomers to the religious right’s embrace though. Donald Wildmon started the whole decency campaign business, in the mid 1970s, which was aimed at television, because he thought most television shows were terribly indecent. Shows like M*A*S*H, but not because of the serious subjects like war and death, but hey, sleeping around! Around 1980, Wildmon recruited Jerry Falwell in his crusade against television. They hadn’t yet glommed onto abortion as an issue, but it wouldn’t be long before that became their main banner, and a highly successful tactical move, along with the move of fueling paranoia about all those perverted gays and their satanic agenda. Things hadn’t gone well for them on the television front, they were dismissed and mocked, for the most part, and of course, the shows they railed against gained very large viewerships. I ended up watching a few shows myself just because of the fuss they made. Prior to the attempt to control television, then moving onto controlling the lives of possibly pregnant people, and trying to stuff all queer people down a well, the religious right was very active in keeping things white. Very white. There are a number of evangelical people now citing abortion as a reason for sticking with Trump, even though they freely admit he’s an awful person, but I suspect the main reason is white nationalism, now back and more popular than ever before. Right Wing Watch has a good look at this, and the hope for the good ol’ days which is fueling much of the religious right’s backing of Trump.

Decades before the current paranoia about LGBT and women’s rights somehow contributing to anti-Christian persecution, right-wing activistsemployedrhetoric about religious liberty and government overreach to defend their private segregated academies and deride efforts to “redefine” marriage to include couples of different races.

Evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones explicitly preached racial separation and opposition to the civil rights movement. Falwell opened a segregated school in response to efforts to integrate Virginia’s education system. Jones’ university openly practiced racial discrimination for decades, citing the Bible.

In fact, the modern Religious Right movement emerged as a political force not to fight abortion rights, as many of its supporters routinely claim, but to protect segregated private schools and institutions like Bob Jones University from losing tax-exempt status because of their racist policies, claiming that losing tax-exempt status constituted a government attack on their religious beliefs.

Religious Right favorites like former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and Family Research Council head Tony Perkins courted a well-known segregationist group, and pamphlets such as “Segregation: God’s Plan and God’s Purpose” and “God: The Original Segregationist” portrayed integration as a direct attack on God and biblical commandments.

Trump, much in the tradition of conservative stalwarts like Jesse Helms and George Wallace, has stoked outrage about social progress, and has run a campaign based on the demonization of Latinos and African Americans.

Trump’s warnings about a global conspiracy of powerful bankers, media barons and secret puppet masters seeking to take down his campaign and destroy America resemble past and current conspiracy theories popular on the far Right that are often ridden with anti-Semitic imagery. His remarks about nefarious elites quashing U.S. freedom and sovereignty to create “a world government“ mirror the conspiratorial warnings about a coming “New World Order“ from televangelists such as Pat Robertson and John Hagee.

Those white nationalist roots of the religious right are now close to coming home to roost, and they most seriously want that to happen. They’ve learned to talk only about hot button issues, like abortion, or fueling panic and paranoia about transgender people occasionally having the need to use a public lav, but the initial shared desires have not changed, and they won’t have a much better chance of bringing those roots to bear than with Trump.

Via RRW.