Blackmoor Vituperative

Do not seek marriage

Seek humour
Seek dignity
Seek adventure
Seek reliability

Do not seek marriage

Seek vulnerability
Seek strength
Seek kindness
Seek lust

Do not seek marriage

Seek independence
Seek intelligence
Seek passion
Seek friendship

Do not seek marriage

Wait for it to find you
With the realization
That all it will give you
Is a label
For what you already have

Interesting. I am curious what people who primarily speak other langues use in the place of “master/slave”, “blacklist/whitelist”.

GitHub is working on replacing the term “master” on its service with a neutral term like “main” to avoid any unnecessary references to slavery, its CEO said on Friday.

The code-hosting portal is just the latest in a long line of tech companies and open source projects that have expressed support for removing terms that may be offensive to developers in the black community.

This includes dropping terms like “master” and “slave” for alternatives like “main/default/primary” and “secondary;” but also terms like “blacklist” and “whitelist” for “allow list” and “deny/exclude list.”

“GitHub to replace ‘master’ with alternative term to avoid slavery references“, ZDNet

I am thinking about making a series of these.

Amazon may remove “The Dukes Of Hazzard” from its streaming service, due to the Confederate imagery on the roof of the “General Lee”, the Dukes’ gravity-defying orange Dodge Charger.

That makes me a little bit sad. They really were just good old boys, never meaning no harm. I don’t think they (or the people who designed the car) had any racist intent. I normally say “intent matters”. Because it normally does. But I am conflicted about this.

“The Dukes Of Hazzard” was my first exposure to decent people fighting against corrupt police. I was not aware of the history of bootleggers tricking out cars to outrace cops (which eventually led to NASCAR).

I have to think, that if the Dukes were ever told that the rebel flag was a symbol of racism and hatred, that they’d be horrified, and they’d waste no time in finding something better to paint on the roof of their car. Because they were decent, honorable fictional characters, and they would never cause pain to innocent people if they could help it.

Fun story! When I was 18 or 19, the father of a friend of mine was a union organizer. That was a his job: to travel the country and help people who wanted to form unions to do that. He said that one of the questions he got most often from business owners was, “What can I do to keep my employees from forming a union?” His answer was, “Treat your employees fairly, and pay them fairly, and they’ll never want to.”

I know a few people who think calls to defund the police (which really means to demilitarize them, and spend that money to actually help people, instead) or even disband the police (such as in Minneapolis, where the police are a criminal gang in black uniforms) are bizarre. Madness. An invitation to chaos.

Want to know how you keep people from de-funding or disbanding your police department? You treat them with respect. You de-escalate rather than escalate. You don’t assault and murder them. You make their lives BETTER rather than WORSE. And then it won’t even occur to them to reduce your funding.

Any police department being threatened with being “defunded” or dissolved has ASKED for that to happen, a thousand times over. It’s just taken this long for people to be so damned fed up that they are finally, just maybe, doing it.

This is 18 minutes or so, but it’s worth listening to. I particularly like his comment about dominoes. Because it is completely obvious that the protests and the riots are just the last in a long line of dominoes.

I’ve bitten my tongue a few times recently, when people I know have made disparaging comments about protesters, or rioters, or looters. Because I think most of them see quite clearly what has led to this. How could they not? So the fact that they continue criticizing protesters demonstrates to me that we have a fundamental difference of opinion on what kind of society we each want to live in.

People making snide comments about protesters want to live in a society where white women can make a phone call to the police and have a black man murdered, where a cop with a history of using excessive force can calmly murder a black man and get clean away with it if no one filmed it, and where black people don’t so much as silently take a knee in protest.

I’d prefer to live in a society where black people don’t have a reason to protest.

Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017). The entire system could be funded with less financial outlay than is incurred by employers and households paying for health-care premiums combined with existing government allocations. This shift to single-payer health care would provide the greatest relief to lower-income households. Furthermore, we estimate that ensuring health-care access for all Americans would save more than 68,000 lives and 1.73 million life-years every year compared with the status quo.

“The Lancet”, Volume 395, ISSUE 10223, P524-533, February 15, 2020

People who are fine with white nationalism will be voting.

People who are OK with kids in cages will be voting.

People who are good with Kurds being murdered will be voting.

People who are terrified of LGBTQ people will be voting.

People who believe FoxNews is objective truth will be voting.

People who think Trump was sent by God will be voting.

Politicians are NOT all “just as bad”. If you don’t vote, you are standing aside while the worst of them take your silence as consent to screw over you and your children and every living thing on the planet.

If you refuse to vote, you are making a statement. That statement is, “Do what you want with me, and my friends, and my family, and every helpless person at your mercy. I will not lift a finger to stop you.”