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Posted by Scott Lemieux

I remain unsatisfied with the lack of precision in Kamala Harris’s white papers:

Trump hosted a meeting with some moderates and some members of the Main Street Caucus on Wednesday, where he listened to concerns and touted the wins in the legislation, two sources told NOTUS.

But Trump still doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp about what his signature legislative achievement does. According to three sources with direct knowledge of the comments, the president told Republicans at this meeting that there are three things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

“But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one member responded to Trump, according to the three sources.

“Three things legislation must do is not touch Social Security, not touch Medicare, not touch Medicaid, and not have massive upper class tax…I’ll come in again.”

The post The cognitive ability and policy details candidate appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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Posted by The Conversation

By Katherine Kinzler, University of Chicago

(The Conversation) – In the U.S. and elsewhere, nationality tends to be defined by a set of legal parameters. This may involve birthplace, parental citizenship or procedures for naturalization.

Yet in many Americans’ minds these objective notions of citizenship are a little fuzzy, as social and developmental psychologists like me have documented. Psychologically, some people may just seem a little more American than others, based on factors such as race, ethnicity or language.

Reinforced by identity politics, this results in different ideas about who is welcome, who is tolerated and who is made to not feel welcome at all.

How race affects who belongs

Many people who explicitly endorse egalitarian ideals, such as the notion that all Americans are deserving of the rights of citizenship regardless of race, still implicitly harbor prejudices over who’s “really” American.

In a classic 2005 study, American adults across racial groups were fastest to associate the concept of “American” with white people. White, Black and Asian American adults were asked whether they endorse equality for all citizens. They were then presented with an implicit association test in which participants matched different faces with the categories “American” or “foreign.” They were told that every face was a U.S. citizen.

White and Asian participants responded most quickly in matching the white faces with “American,” even when they initially expressed egalitarian values. Black Americans implicitly saw Black and white faces as equally American – though they too implicitly viewed Asian faces as being less American.

Similarly, in a 2010 study, several groups of American adults implicitly considered British actress Kate Winslet to be more American than U.S.-born Lucy Liu – even though they were aware of their actual nationalities.

Importantly, the development of prejudice can even include feelings that disadvantage one’s own group. This can be seen when Asian Americans who took part in the studies found white faces to be more American than Asian faces. A related 2010 study found that Hispanic participants were also more likely to associate whiteness with “Americanness.”

Language and nationality

These biased views of nationality begin at a young age – and spoken language can often be a primary identifier of who is in which group, as I show in my book “How You Say It.”

Although the U.S. traditionally has not had a national language, many Americans feel that English is critical to being a “true American.” And the president recently released an executive order claiming to designate English as the official language.

In a 2017 study conducted by my research team and led by psychologist Jasmine DeJesus, we gave children a simple task: After viewing a series of faces that varied in skin color and listening to those people speak, children were asked to guess their nationality. The faces were either white- or Asian-looking and spoke either English or Korean. “Is this person American or Korean?” we asked.

We recruited three groups of children for the study: white American children who spoke only English, children in South Korea who spoke only Korean, and Korean American children who spoke both languages. The ages of the children were either 5-6 or 9-10.

The vast majority of the younger monolingual children identified nationality with language, describing English speakers as American and Korean speakers as Korean – even though both groups were divided equally between people who looked white or Asian.

As for the younger bilingual children, they had parents whose first language was Korean, not English, and who lived in the United States. Yet, just like the monolingual children, they thought that the English speakers, and not the Korean speakers, were the Americans.

As they age, however, children increasingly view racial characteristics as an integral part of nationality. By the age of 9, we found that children were considering the white English speakers to be the most American, compared with Korean speakers who looked white or English speakers who looked Asian.

Interestingly, this impact was more pronounced in the older children we recruited in South Korea.

Deep roots

So it seems that for children and adults alike, assessments of what it means to be American hinge on certain traits that have nothing to do with the actual legal requirements for citizenship. Neither whiteness nor fluency in English is a requirement to become American.

And this bias has consequences. Research has found that the degree to which people link whiteness with Americanness is related to their discriminatory behaviors in hiring or questioning others’ loyalty.


Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

That we find these biases in children does not mean they are in any way absolute. We know that children begin to pick up on these types of biased cultural cues and values at a young age. It does mean, however, that these biases have deep roots in our psychology.

Understanding that biases exist may make it easier to correct them. So Americans celebrating the Fourth of July perhaps should ponder what it means to be an American – and whether social biases distort your beliefs about who belongs.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 2, 2020.The Conversation

Katherine Kinzler, Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Purrcy; Pride

Jul. 3rd, 2025 12:20 am
mecurtin: Simon's cat makes laptop goes meeeoow? (meeeoow laptop cat)
[personal profile] mecurtin
I finished taking the laundry out of this basket & put it down on its side for Purrcy investigation. It was worth snooping in, but not really good for long-term use, he found.

What's that in the sky? he wondered, after several days of rain & thunder-growler attacks.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby stands in a brown cloth laundry bin lying on its side. He peers out and up at the sunlight coming from the skylight above, his whiskers looking long but rather doubtful.

My back continues to be better, while not being anything like *all* better. Prednisone has the reputation of being Side Effects City, my biggest ones so far are dry mouth making my voice all scratchy, and a certain amount of ADHD/mania type behavior, trouble settling & sleeping. Only 3 more days of tapering to go, though.

Amid all The Horrors ramping up & up, here's something that's given me active joy in the past couple of days: Sir Ian McKellan joining Scissor Sisters onstage at Glastonbury Festival:



My god, he's still got that full Royal Shakespeare voice.

It makes me cry a bit with joy at the end there, seeing Sir Ian being able to lead his people in a public celebration of being out & proud. And to see an old man being *venerated*, for once, admired for achievements but in this case also as a symbol of what people like those in the audience can have with age: a *full* life, a *long* life, a life with everything in it, despite what they may have been told. You don't have to be young to be queer, it's not a phase, it's part of a complete human life.
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Posted by Victor Mair

When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to.  Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were the 9 Pauline letters to Christian churches that we refer to as "epistles".  I was most captivated by these 9 books and I wanted to know what kind of people they were, what their communities were like, what their ethnicities were, and, above all, even way back then, what languages they spoke.

These communities were called:

Romans
Corinthians — Paul wrote two epistles to them
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Thessalonians — Paul also wrote two epistles to them

I knew who the Romans were, and what language they spoke, so no problem there.  Moreover, I was aware from a sense of architectural history that a Corinthian capital column was a Greek creation.  Several of the others had a Greek ring to them as well.  But the one that attracted my attention above all the others was the letter to the Galatians, who were located in a region of Anatolia known as Galatia.  Somehow Galatians didn't seem to fit the Mediterranean paradigm that I suspected for the other communities.

Only much later did I learn that the Galatians were a type of Gauls, i.e., Celts, who had migrated from what is now France to what is now Türkiye.  What, pray tell, would have driven them there so far from the north to the south, when most population movements during the Holocene Epoch (last ten thousand years) generally were from south to north?

The Gauls and their confrères were outstanding miners.  They mined a variety of minerals, including gold, iron, and tin.  The latter was important in its own right, but also for alloying with copper to produce bronze, the metallurgy of which the Celts were renowned for.  Above all, however, the Celts / Gauls were masters of saltmining, which is reflected in these toponyms:  Hallstatt, Hallein, Halle, G(h)alich.

Even today, though, when I think of Celts, a bucolic picture of shepherds with their flocks comes to mind, and it's not difficult to imagine that, just as the Celts went wandering in search of metal sources, so they were ever in quest of better pastures for their sheep.

It is no wonder that, being the skillful shepherds that they were, the Celts would become the premier wool weavers we know them to be.  It just so happens that one of the textile types they perfected was diagonal twill.  If you add some colored thread into the warp and the weft in a repeated pattern, you get plaid, beloved of the Gaelic Scots still to this day. It is not an accident that the earliest and best preserved plaids in the world are found in the salt mines of the Celtic areas of Europe, as well as in the bogs of northern Europe, whose tannin preserves organic materials, including plaids and other woolen textiles (not to mention human bodies!).  The only other place on earth I know of for the early conservation of woolen textiles, including very early plaids from the same period as those in the northern European bogs and Celtic salt mines of north central Europe, is the Tarim Basin, especially Qizilchoqa (near Qumul [Hami]) and Zaghunluq (near Chärchän [Qiemo]). both of which have highly saline soils and exquisite Bronze Age woolen textiles, including plaids.  I have tasted the deposits exposed in a tunnel 400 meters down at Hallstatt and from the tableland where Ur-David (Chärchän Man) was discovered.  You can use them as table salt to flavor your food.

The Celts / Gauls certainly had a wanderlust, and that would explain what brought them to Anatolia — and other far-flung places.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Elizabeth J. W. Barber, J. P. Mallory, and Douglas Q. Adams]

[syndicated profile] lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed

Posted by Scott Lemieux

Flames rise from a Tesla Cybertruck after it exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., January 1, 2025 in this screengrab taken from a social media video. Alcides Antunes/via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. MANDATORY CREDIT. THIS PICTURE WAS PROCESSED BY REUTERS TO ENHANCE QUALITY. AN UNPROCESSED VERSION HAS BEEN PROVIDED SEPARATELY. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Apparently still not going well:

Tesla has posted its second quarter delivery numbers — and they’re not looking good.

As the New York Times reports, the company reported it had delivered just 384,000 vehicles between April and June, a massive drop from 444,000 vehicles over the same period last year.

Meanwhile, CEO Elon Musk has focused his carmaker’s resources on developing a robotaxi network of fully autonomous vehicles. However, given a disastrous launch filled with near-collisionsbizarre driving behavior, and human “safety monitors” being forced to jump into the driver’s seat, dropping sales are only the tip of the iceberg of Tesla’s troubles.

The company’s brand has been dragged through the mud by its mercurial CEO’s embrace of far-right talking points, leading to plummeting demand and furious protesters denouncing Musk in front of dealerships.

Worse yet, international competition is really starting to ramp up. While Tesla’s sales numbers have been dropping for months now, interest in EVs, particularly in the offerings of Chinese carmakers like BYD, is still steadily increasing.

Investors and analysts alike were expecting bad news for Tesla’s second quarter.

“We expect Tesla’s 2Q25 deliveries to miss… but this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Deutsche Bank analysts wrote in a note earlier this week, citing cratering European sales.

However, considering the company’s shares have risen more than this morning, chances are investors were prepared for far worse — or simply looking for a good deal after the stock slid more than five percent on Tuesday.

In April, the company reported an astonishing 71 percent drop in net income since the first quarter of last year, indicating the company was seriously struggling.

Even the billionaire’s purported departure from the world of politics and return to his EV business hasn’t helped the situation. The company’s shares are still down roughly 22 percent year to date.

And remember that even if his alienation from Trump continues (which I certainly wouldn’t bet on) what he did at DOGE involved acts which can never be forgiven.

The post Checking in on the “going all-in on alienating your core consumers” strategy appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Packing for Westercon

Jul. 2nd, 2025 06:18 pm
kevin_standlee: Kevin beind the Worldcon 76 info table at Westercon 71 in Denver. (Con Table Kevin)
[personal profile] kevin_standlee
Because I'm driving to Westercon instead of flying, I can be more expansive in my packing and don't have to fit everything into one (or at most two) bags. That's both good and bad. The good part is not having to work so hard packing. The bad part is carrying way too much stuff. But I guess it's sort of good practice for Worldcon. I sprung for first class for the flight to Seattle, so I get two checked bags, and based on what I've been packing for Westercon, I think I'll need it. Mind you, I won't be taking an extra Banker's Box of Westercon gear with me to Seattle, which will help.

Tomorrow's plan is for me to get away from Fernley as early as possible. I typically am up around 3 or 3:30 AM on Thursdays anyway, so if I can make an early start, I should be able to get to the hotel and get moved in fairly early. I'm I'm lucky, I won't get tangled up in any of the commute-time traffic, save possibly the morning Sacramento commute. Wish me luck!

The Defund Red America Act

Jul. 3rd, 2025 12:13 am
[syndicated profile] lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed

Posted by Scott Lemieux

The Inflation Reduction Act deliberately titled its benefits toward red states to protect it politically. Alas, this greatly underestimated the nihilistic contempt Republican legislators have for their own constituents:

In a December speech on his economic legacy, President Joe Biden predicted that clean energy investments stemming from his signature climate law were “so deeply rooted in the nation” that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” for the incoming Trump administration to undo them.

With Republicans on the verge of passing President Donald Trump’s sweeping taxand immigration bill, that prediction increasingly appearspolitically unsound — and is shaping up to be economically costly for hundreds of businesses that could lose billions of dollars in promised funding.

Trump’s priority legislation, which is still being hashed out in Congress, aims to gut much of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, undermining the former president’s wager that he could insulate his economic legacy from a MAGA onslaught by spurring a wave of advanced manufacturing in red states. While Republicans faced a backlash when they tried to overturn former president Barack Obama’s signature health care law in 2017 — ultimately dooming Trump’s first major legislative push — there has been less public pushback as Biden’s climate legislation has advanced toward its demise.

The result has set the stage for a swift and dramatic reversal of economic policy, leaving business leaders, local officials, climate activists and former Biden aides to grapple with the fallout of Trump’s norm-shattering approach to governing.

Needless to say, the voters trending Republican during the Trump era are going to get particularly screwed by the Medicaid cuts. If you don’t have a seven figure income, Republicans could care less about the constitients.

Not sure how the cottage industry of pundits who insist that rural whites vote Republican for the material benefits are going to survive this, but I suppose there’s exactly as much evidence for this claim as there’s always been.

The post The Defund Red America Act appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

25 Fourth of July Icons

Jul. 2nd, 2025 04:57 pm
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[personal profile] casey28 posting in [community profile] icons
casey28 4th-1-2025.jpg casey28 4th-2-2025.jpg casey28 4th-3-2025.jpg

More icons here at [personal profile] casey28

JR Dawson launch party!

Jul. 2nd, 2025 09:41 pm
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Posted by Marissa Lingen

My friend J.R. Dawson is launching their second book, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, and I get to be part of the festivities! We’ll be at Moon Palace Books at 6:00 p.m. on July 29, having a lovely conversation about this book and the previous book and other stories and life in general, and you can come join in the fun!

Afternoon

Jul. 2nd, 2025 07:47 pm
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I understand they are having problems passing the bill. I have faith in them.
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Posted by GillianCrafts

With 12 years of content, Sewcialists already has many posts related to gender identity, presentation, and body-affirming joy! Grab a snack, because this is a long list.

All Chests Welcome Month

All Butts Welcome Month

Menswear for Everyone Month

Gabby’s Fitting Series – I can’t highlight just one post, because they are all great!

…and some highlights from 2SLGBTQIA+ sewists!

It’s interesting how we tackled gendered sewing over the years. One of our first theme months was “Sew Lingerie” in 2015, which was very “women wear bras” focused. In 2019, we explored “Menswear For Everyone”, acknowledging that “menswear” and “womenswear” are socially constructed categories. “All Chests Welcome” in 2020 and “All Butts Welcome” in 2021 were a re-do of Sew Lingerie with a updated gender-neutral approach. I’m so happy that we are back in 2025 with Sewing Trans Joy to gather useful resources and celebrate the ingenuity of trans sewists.

If you know of other online resources for gender-affirming sewing, please link them below!

The Third American Republic

Jul. 2nd, 2025 10:03 pm
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Posted by Cheryl Rofer

I’m always looking for productive frameworks to use in analyzing our national situation. Over the weekend, the Bluesky account called Shower Cat Love (a friend of the blog) came up with one that resonates with some things I’ve been thinking. I won’t claim any great insight or one weird trick, just a potentially useful way of thinking about our situation.

They suggest that the United States has had two Republics:

The Republic that is collapsing now is the Second Republic. The First Republic collapsed in the Civil War; the Reconstruction Amendments were needed to found the Second Republic. That is failing now. To recover the United States from the current collapse will require changes to the Constitution.

Shower Cat Love (@shower-cat.bsky.social) 2025-06-28T12:13:25.113Z

A commenter on the thread suggested a slightly different division of Republics.

I’m not wedded to this framework. But I do see the current unraveling as the reaction to grand bargain of post-Reconstruction politics, in which everyone agreed to behave politely as long as certain groups were excluded as full members of the polity.

Shower Cat Love (@shower-cat.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T12:22:29.976Z

When the terms of that bargain was broken by the coalition of northern Reps and Dems to produce the Civil Rights Act, all hell broke loose, because the conservatives could not accept that the formerly excluded groups (or those elected with support from those groups) could legitimately govern.

Shower Cat Love (@shower-cat.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T12:22:29.977Z

Today, as Erik noted in a Bluesky thread, is the anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lyndon Johnson, who came from a place where he knew racial bigotry very well, said to his young aide Bill Moyers “Well, I think we may have lost the South for your lifetime – and mine” because of that signing. Moyers died last week, Johnson long before. The turmoil doesn’t look like it will end any time soon.

And, it turned out, it wasn’t just the South. Donald Trump has tapped into a rich national vein of bigotry.

As the sixties moved on, the momentum for human rights slowed under the weight of the Vietnam War. Reaction began. It has long seemed to me that there was a turning point somewhere in the late sixties when the forces of opposition grew stronger.

What then was the end of Shower Cat Love’s second Republic? The signing of the Civil Rights Act? Or will we not reach it until we defeat the forces of reaction?

This all happens within the structure of the post-Reconstruction Constitution (expansion of civil rights broadly rests on the 14th Amendment), which is the reason why I am periodicizing in this way. What’s happening now is the final failure of Reconstruction.

Shower Cat Love (@shower-cat.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T12:22:29.978Z

I am not an historian either, but I find this useful as an analytical framework for what is happening politically. It’s not perfect but it seems to work.

Shower Cat Love (@shower-cat.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T12:22:29.979Z

We’ve gone through a number of ways to consider the reactionaries/ radicals. We didn’t want to believe that it was bigotry, so we talked about economic anxiety. But yeah, it’s bigotry left over from Reconstruction and activated by the Civil Rights Act.

Trump is unusually talented in stirring up the fear of the other. Yesterday he was bragging about a potential system of detention camps in which to keep people – not just migrants – in inhumane conditions. His supporters in the Senate voted to take food and medicine from children to give Jeff Bezos more money.

JD Vance gives us the bottom line. Don’t think he wouldn’t give up Usha and his children in his auto-da-fé.

And in case you were in any doubt, Laura Loomer makes clear what she would do with the entire US population of Latinos.

The Second American Republic has failed. We’ve been working up to this since the 1960s. My preferred Third American Republic would be a democratic, multicultural society that protects its people. Now we have to make that happen.

The post The Third American Republic appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Bleeding

Jul. 4th, 2025 05:02 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Ugh

*****************************


Read more... )
[syndicated profile] marissalingen_feed

Posted by Marissa Lingen

As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)

The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)

Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)

Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)

Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)

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