My co-blogger Abe Drayton at Oceanoxia needs help. They have been job hunting and the pandemic has affected hiring in their country.

They have resources for people in the same situation, and have been covering how the fossil fuel industry and government has been taking advantage of the pandemic.

If anyone can help and they like what read they are accepting patrons.

Aparently this administration thinks being able to arrest and lock up anyone they want for any reason is important. At least that seems like a reasonable summary of what I read from Peter Wade in Rolling Stone magazine (via Lynna at PZ’s Political Madness thread).

This was what I had to say on facebook.

You will bring all proposed constitutional suspensions to the public or you will get a revolution during a pandemic.
This administration has given no one a reason to trust it. As far as I’m concerned they would treat me as bad as they would a migrant.
The Republicans allow such social cruelty that I am rationally prejudiced against them. As a group they simply don’t give a shit about prisoners, abuse by authorities, and and other assorted social cruelties.
The Democrats let Obama become complicit in torture, abuse government whistle blowers, and allowed government espionage against american citizens through telecom companies.
If you do this without a through public hearing the remaining social confidence in government will break.

I’ve been thinking about that. I spend a lot of time thinking about why groups of people do what they do and this one has me somewhat puzzled.

While I’m not sure how it got started I have an idea about how it continued. Once the toilet paper started running low people wanted to make sure they would have some so they ran out to buy it too, which is a least not disease related irrationality. So the hoarding keeps going disease relation or no disease relation.

For the record I’m not participating in that. I’ll use the water in the bowl, my hand, and wash my hands before I join the flock in this.

Now as for how it got started, I don’t know. I’ve to find examples of the early people hoarding it to see what they thought they were gaining. Maybe the toilet paper was just in someone’s field of view when the hoarding instinct clicked on.

The situation with my position in whiteness becomes more complicated when I consider the census.

I still believe that whiteness is a political fiction designed for social dominance. An unhealthy social obsession that damages my country’s politics. “Other” seems like my only viable option. If anyone asks I give them my reasons.

But once again my actions do not exist in a vacuum. I have to plan for social responses. My general position still gets reactions and I’m still seeing people, white people* in all likelihood, choosing to obsess over blackness. One acted like the slave origin of blackness made me a hypocrite, which is pretending blackness and whiteness are equivalent and history lets me kill that. I will watch what white people do with whiteness and pay attention to how they act towards blackness.

What could a social reaction to white people associating with “other” on the census be?

*no more scare quotes because a political group naming themselves white people need none.