Debris and detritus

Apr 24

parislemon:

joshuanguyen:

One chart can speak volumes about politics, history, technology, and the human race.

It comes around.

This is great, but I’m curious why the U.S. seems to have a sliver of a bar before it existed.

Apr 21

wilwheaton:

Your daily constitutional scholar, with a degree from Hannity University.

The Bill of Rights is more of a suggestion, really.

Mar 26

“

Why do we have an abortion rate 20% higher than France’s (and more than twice as high as Germany’s), especially considering most doctors here won’t perform them? The answer is any country that has universal health care, where contraception is free, where child care is free or inexpensive, where there is less poverty because people don’t become bankrupt over medical bills — those societies are simply going to have fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

And there the mask gets pulled off the Bart Stupaks and the “Christians.” If the statistics show that countries with government-provided universal health care and nearly-free abortions are, in fact, the countries with the fewest abortions, then why on earth wouldn’t the Right be the first in line to support universal health care?

Because it isn’t about “universal health care.” It’s about controlling women, period. It’s about sticking your nose in other people’s business. It’s about pushing your religious beliefs on everyone else because voices in your head tell you your Jesus is The One — even though your Jesus never said one single solitary word in any of the four gospels of the Bible about abortion or fertilized eggs being human. You’ve just gone and made it up about “life beginning at conception.” Jesus never said that. The little voice in your head said that, the same little voice that wants your grubby paws on women’s uteruses. You need help. Please get some help and leave the rest of us alone, Mr. Stupak and friends.

”

Michael Moore: My Congressman, Bart Stupak, Has Neither a Uterus Nor a Brain (via veruca-assault)

I wish I could reblog this 1,000 times.

(via evangotlib)

(via wilwheaton)

Mar 22

shortformblog:

thedailywhat:

White House Petition of the Day: Make Legislators Wear Logos of Corporate Backers

The latest brilliant idea to come out of We The People website is this petition suggesting that lawmakers should be required to be more transparent about their financial backers by wearing logos of their corporate “sponsors,” just like the NASCAR drivers do. As of Thursday evening, it has accrued more than 9,000 of the 100,000 signatures it needs to be formally addressed by the White House. GOOD magazine previously explored this idea with photoshopped mockups of New York Senator Charles Schumer and Florida Senator Marco Rubio donning logo patches of their contributors on their suits.

Hat tip goes to Dangerous Minds.

Not likely to go anywhere (just NASCAR drivers, who drive in circles), but sort of amazing.

(via wilwheaton)

Mar 20

upworthy:

The Chart That Might Just Bring Forth The Apocalypse

Having faith in a higher power has nothing to do with a belief in evolution. The two can totally exist in harmony. Yet here we are, thanks to a delightful anti-science campaign that has somehow managed to stoke fear of scientific thought, to our own detriment.

[Original by Tony Piro’s Calamities of Nature. You can see the data behind his chart here.]

(via wilwheaton)

Mar 13

“This is not an extreme left wing idea,” he said. “This is a matter of whether or not we’re going to live in a civilized society.”

Unanimous Vote, Loud Applause for Earned Sick Leave in Portland

One could say the same for public health care, tho.

Feb 26

liberalsarecool:

Joe Biden refreshes our memory about Republicans.

The story remains the same.

(via wilwheaton)

Feb 19

becauseiamawoman:

joebidendoesthingsisabamf:

Happy Vice President’s Day!

Best tweet ever?

(via upworthy)

Feb 13

fantasticbeautifulmess:

Melissa Harris Perry- The Politics of Black Hair

“It seems like you’re making a statement, even when you’re not making a statement.”

(via upworthy)

Feb 4

“Last week, I awoke to find Aaron with me. He was sitting next to my bed, grinning his cheekiest grin, holding my hand.
For a few minutes, I savored a sweet uncertainty: Were the last few weeks all a nightmare, and Aaron was still with me? Or was I awaking inside a dream state, and in the real world Aaron was actually dead?
Then Aaron started trying to read a book to me, but he was having trouble deciphering the sentences. He said he was forgetting how to read for lack of practice. It became clear then that he was dream Aaron — real Aaron would never forget how to read. And that meant that everything I remembered about him killing himself must have been true in real life.
So I asked him why. Why did you do it? What was going through your mind when you killed yourself? I would have done anything for you. Anything at all, if you’d just told me what you needed.
“I’m dream Aaron,” he replied, after a long pause. “It’s not my job to tell you why. You see, as dream Aaron, I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
As sadness enveloped me, I forced myself awake from the dream nightmare, only to confront the real-life nightmare. I will never have all the answers I crave. But I do have answers that no one else has. And that is why I’m writing this blog post.
*********
I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.
I say this with the understanding that many other people would not have made the same choice that Aaron made, even under the same pressures he faced.
I say this not in any way to understate the pain he was in — nor, for that matter, the pain that clinically depressed people are in.
I say this despite the fact that early on in our relationship, I had read and discussed with him his infamous blog post about suicide written years before — so I was not unaware that he had struggled with mental health in the past.
I say this because over the last 20 months of his life, Aaron spent more time with me than with anyone else in the world. For much of the last 8 months of his life, we lived together, commuted together, and worked in the same office — and I was never worried he was depressed until the last 24 hours of his life.
I say this because, since his suicide, as I’ve tried to grapple with what happened, I’ve been learning. I’ve researched clinical depression and associated disorders. I’ve read their symptoms, and at least until the last 24 hours of his life, Aaron didn’t fit them.
And that makes it hard to read, in so many articles, that “Aaron struggled with depression” — as though the prosecution was just one factor among many, as though, perhaps, he might have committed suicide on January 11 without it.
Depression is characterized by low energy and inactivity, withdrawal and isolation, feelings of low self-worth, trouble concentrating and remembering detail, and an inability to take pleasure in everyday life. Not all depressed people feel all of these things all the time, but those are the recipe. And, indeed, Aaron’s blog post about his own depression years before had alluded to many of these things.
But let me tell you about the Aaron I knew—the Aaron Swartz of 2011, 2012, and the first few days of 2013.
*********
The Aaron I knew was active. He worked out most days until he got the flu two weeks before he died. Just a few weeks before that, when I was out of town for the weekend, he had surprised me by taking himself on a day-long hike outside of New York. He came back glowing that evening, describing how he had scrambled up a steep rocky “shortcut” with some other hikers watching (and in the process lost his Kindle down a crevice).
The Aaron I knew was sociable and excited to spend time with his favorite people, right up to the very end. He had plans and ambitions — huge ones. On January 9, two days before he died, he spent hours deep in conversation with our Australian friend Sam about the new organization Aaron was in the early stages of building. Sam asked him whether he had support, and Aaron replied that everyone who was competent enough to support him was, in fact, supporting him — classic Aaron pessimistic arrogance, but also a reminder that he knew his friends were standing with him. Sam gave Aaron a quick overview of Australian politics; Aaron expressed astonishment at how easy it would be to “take over Australia”, but concluded that a country of only 20 million probably wouldn’t be worth it.
Self-esteem, needless to say, was definitely not Aaron’s problem.
The Aaron I knew had no trouble concentrating or remembering detail. Up through the week before he died, he was devouring all the scientific literature he could find on drug addiction and effective interventions. Not, to be clear, because he had any drug issues himself (he almost never even drank alcohol), but for a consulting project he was working on for Givewell, his favorite charity. He related to me with deep intellectual excitement his conversations with the top experts in the field, the interventions that had shown the most promise at combating alcoholism, his developing theories about what types of policy changes might be most politically feasible. We debated the cultural constructs that allow our society to treat almost indistinguishable chemicals as differently as we treat heroin and morphine.
The Aaron I knew had profound capacity for pleasure in everyday life. He did, of course, have problems with eating — within the range of normal symptoms associated with his ulcerative colitis. But when he found truly great food — or for that matter, truly great anything — he reveled in it. He had a finely honed aesthetic sense. He could get deeper, truer joy out of a perfect corn muffin, a brilliantly constructed narrative arc from Robert Caro’s LBJ biography, a beautiful font, than anyone I’ve ever met.
And maybe most impressively, he sustained all of these qualities for almost two years, in the face of an ongoing ordeal that threatened to ruin his life.
*********
Aaron was human: He wasn’t happy every moment, and I’d be the first to say he could be a real pain to live with sometimes. Aaron could be moody and introverted. Aaron was often in substantial physical pain from his stomach. Aaron was hard on himself (and equally hard on others). And Aaron obviously, at the end, was suicidal.
But I say it again: Aaron’s death was not caused by depression. This is an important point, because many people are arguing that it was, and that the appropriate response to his death is better treatment for depression, better detection of suicidal tendencies. This country absolutely needs these things — Aaron would have been the first to agree — but we need them because they’re the right thing to do, not because of what happened to Aaron.
I don’t know exactly why Aaron killed himself. I don’t know exactly what was going through his mind. If I had known those things on January 11, if I had even known the right questions to ask, maybe I could have stopped him. Since January 11, I think about it every hour of every day.
But as dream Aaron reminded me, I can only know what I already know. And with the knowledge I have — from watching, listening, asking, next to him on the bed, over meals, talking on the subway, from our adjacent desks at the office where we worked on separate projects — from our lives together, I believe that Aaron’s death was not caused by depression.
I believe Aaron’s death was caused by exhaustion, by fear, and by uncertainty. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a persecution and a prosecution that had already wound on for 2 years (what happened to our right to a speedy trial?) and had already drained all of his financial resources. I believe that Aaron’s death was caused by a criminal justice system that prioritizes power over mercy, vengeance over justice; a system that punishes innocent people for trying to prove their innocence instead of accepting plea deals that mark them as criminals in perpetuity; a system where incentives and power structures align for prosecutors to destroy the life of an innovator like Aaron in the pursuit of their own ambitions.
Ask yourself this: If on January 10, Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz at the Massachusetts US Attorney’s office had called Aaron’s lawyer and said they’d realized their mistake and that they were dropping all charges — or even for that matter that they were ready to offer a reasonable plea deal that wouldn’t have marked Aaron as a felon for the rest of his life — would Aaron have killed himself on January 11?
The answer is unquestionably no. You should follow me on Twitter here.” TarenSK: Why Aaron died

Jan 24

The geography of abortion access in the United States

I always imagined the bible belt lied farther east.

Jan 18

(via upworthy)

Jan 7

America’s Rape Problem: We Refuse to Admit That There Is One

jessicavalenti:

Rape is as American as apple pie—until we own that, nothing will change.

(via upworthy)

Dec 21

Penny Arcade - A Comic

+3 Insightful

Dec 19

gaywrites:

A recent report from progressive watchdog organization Media Matters found that despite the hot-button nature of Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, cable news networks in America have seriously lagged in covering the legislation. In November, for example, the viral music video for “Gangnam Style” by South Korean rapper Psy received more coverage on CNN and Fox News than Uganda’s attempt to kill LGBT people. In fact, Fox didn’t cover the legislation at all. Notably, MSNBC devoted twice as much airtime to covering the “Kill the Gays” bill as it did to discussing “Gangnam Style.” (via The Advocate)

We need to talk about why we’re not talking about Uganda.

More info on said bill

(via upworthy)

Debris and detritus

stuff as curated by tekniklr; cyborg, programmer, gamer, miscreant.

White House Petition of the Day: Make Legislators Wear Logos of Corporate Backers

America’s Rape Problem: We Refuse to Admit That There Is One