(1/35) A thread about growing up as a gay kid in a Christian fundamentalist right-wing homeschooling family in the 1990s, and how I interpret today's political culture in light of those experiences.

Not all tweets are numbered but this is where it's going.
Tweets 3-9 "biblical law" and stoning gay people
Tweets 10-17 coming out in the evangelical church
Tweets 18-29 white-washing confederate history
Tweets 30-35 Scopes in modern politics & education

I grew up with R. J. Rushdoony on the bookshelf, an influential proponent of homeschooling who sought to instill Christian dominion in America. Reading @JulieIngersoll's excellent book last weekend inspired me to share how his ideology impacted my life. @C_Stroop @RLStollar

Ingersoll wrote in her 2015 book about how Rushdoony "advocated the death penalty for gays and incorrigible teens" (xiii). I made the same point in 2009, junior year of college, when I wrote an essay called "Education, the State, and the Fight to Take Back America."

In that 2009 essay, I wrote how Rushdoony promoted a "return to Biblical law, which he said should govern all nations, especially America" and how that law "would even apply the death penalty to homosexuals or rebellious children" (18). I wrote that line based on 2 sources:

1/15 You'll hear a lot of talk today about how what happened yesterday is extraordinary and antithetical to our history. It's important to reject that idea, not out of cynicism or pessimism but because that pretense of innocence is dangerous. Let's talk about U.S. Cruikshank.

2/15 Cruikshank is a case virtually every single con law casebook discusses though most con law professors don't necessarily spend a great deal of time talking about but it's instructive about how we frame yesterday's events.

3/15 In Cruikshank, decided in 1875, SCOTUS considered whether, under the Enforcement Act of 1870, the federal government had the power to prosecute members of a white mob that killed between 80 to 150 Black people. The case was essentially about a mass lynching.

4/x The Court concluded Congress lacked the power to authorize such prosecutions because the massacre involved criminal matters constitutionally left to the states. In short, the court said the massacre was a series of murders and it was up to the states to prosecute such crimes

5/15 The thing is if you read the opinion, you'll get a vague sense that a mob was charged with violence but you'll never get that it was about the 1873 Colfax Massacre - the single deadliest instance of violence during Reconstruction and one that occurred because of an election

Hi Twitter I can't sleep again. I need to ramble and rumble myself into passive aggressively sleeping.
The past 12 years haven't been easy for many but for those of us who are Jews of African descent in America it has been a trial by ordeal.

When Obama was president I remember when 1 of my students expressed a sense of fear of him. Their parents compared him to Hitler, wary of his passionate speeches &ability to arouse the masses. I immediately balked but knew where there was this sentiment there were others.

I lost a friend in Eva when she called him a Muslim born in Kenya. She also splashed a kid in the face with water...a lot...and I was like that's not cool but I also realized that would be my ass if I did that.

A parent I did not know threw a Karen moment at me before I knew what they were for wearing an Obama kippa...I took it off after a mild talking to...and I put it right back on after he won.

Then Trump came on the waves of birtherism. People we thought we knew became more and more hostile, untrustworthy and mean. We saw our community struggle between 2/3 mostly ok with us and 1/3 not. Many of us stopped going to the shuls we always had.

[THREAD]

Why ironically using terms like “aandolanjeevi” and “urban naxals” is unhelpful even when mocking, disagreeing, or “reclaiming” them.

Frank Luntz, a right wing messaging expert in the US, says that one of the key ways to create frames that stick with people is “consistency”, essentially, repeat things.

When terms like “urban naxals” and “aandolanjeevi” are used to describe dissenters, students, artists, we think it’s pretty ridiculous, so we either try and refute it, or we mock it.

In both the situations, we fall into their trap of speaking about ourselves in their terms. We end up using their words and terms over and over again, which is exactly what they want us to do, because it strengthens the connections associated with those words in people’s mind.

For eg, the “anti national” framing was so successful, and we mocked it (“if standing up to authority is anti national, guess I’m anti national too”), negated it (it’s not anti national to protest), or tried to flip it around (“actually those quashing dissent are anti national”)

Does Creality support suck? Fuck yeah. You want a Xiaomi or Apple printer? A blob of injection-molded plastic with proprietary filament and software? That's where it was all going a few years ago. Prusa is great- but many aren't going to buy one delivering pizza or mowing lawns.

Canon, HP, Stratasys, the big names- they wanted in. But they lost & we fucking won- we didn't ekk out a little slice of the pie like Linux, @adrianbowyer's RepRap derivatives won on a vast scale. We absolutely dominate. We kicked their asses so hard they're scared to try again.

We've got this one little corner of hardware with no Jobs. no Edison, all Woz and Telsa. Our team for once. 3D printing is owned by the hackers the way nothing else is. And dealing with people who don't get why it's *not* injection-molded, cartridge taking, Big Box Store garbage-

-why it does not have a massive markup for slick marketing and "genius bars"- is exhausting.
Look we get it- you want all your technology to be indistinguishable from magic, you don't want to hack, or learn, or explore. You can go buy that- but why tear down others who want to?

VR, you know you're fucked right? You're going to have ads beamed straight into your eyeballs, tuned by the best AI Facebook can bring to bear on your distracted brain. And you'll have zero choice but to play by proprietary rules if you want access to that entire medium.

NEW: For more than 10 years, Scarborough residents have been promised improved transit — including a subway. But nothing has been done. Has Scarborough been taken for a ride https://t.co/Q3VP5lxK6w /1

With news the Scarborough RT will fail before anything is built, leaving transit users on the bus, possibly for years, I compiled everything I know about the decisions that led us here, for the first time in chronological order. This will be a long thread. /2

December 2010: During his first day in office, Rob Ford declares David Miller's Transit City LRT plan is dead (Spoiler: It's not). /3

March 2011: But it doesn't happen like that. Ford signs a memorandum of understanding with Metrolinx to kill the Finch & Sheppard LRTs and completely bury the Eglinton Crosstown without council's approval. The original seven-top Scarborough LRT is part of this non-binding deal /4

February 2012: In a major defeat, council rebukes this transit arrangement that requires their approval and votes to build the Transit City lines, including the Scarborough LRT. Ford’s TTC chair Karen Stintz leads the revolt. /5

White dude wrote a thread about how he 'taught' his hungry 9 year old to use a can opener; 'figure it out' The child was in tears unable to figure out how to get the opener to align with and bite the increasingly damaged can for 6+ hours, during which time she didn't eat anything

Leaving aside all the incredibly abusive elements of this, I want to talk a bit about the things I've learned about teaching children, something I've spent a decade doing.

1) Kids, even very young kids, are incredibly perceptive, intelligent, curious, and sensitive.

2) Kids can figure out very complicated things on their own (I taught media analysis/fiction writing ages 7-16), but they need to be given the parts.

ALL my kids knew what a character arc was, but would not have been able to give you the words 'character arc' in a million years.

To repeat, I didn't teach them what a character arc was. They already knew what it was, I just pointed it out to them so they could see the patterns.

Same for plot structure, grammar, punctuation, etc. They all knew what these things were, but not necessarily how to apply them.

Kids can absolutely figure things out, but because they're kids and lack life experience, they have to have what they need in front of them.

You don't tell them 'find all the apples in this picture' and then surprise 'there's two in the shopping bag!'

This man spent almost ₹50 lakh, let go of his 3BHK dream to run a ‘Rice ATM’ for the needy in #Hyderabad

https://t.co/QdULpAMYaV

In the gruelling months of the #coronavirus lockdown earlier this year, several stories of migrant workers and the poor being stranded without jobs and money emerged. This also led to the emergence of stories of @SonuSood and the likes – the real heroes who offered help.

One such story is that of Ramu Dosapati, from Hyderabad-
an HR executive in a corporate firm, he has been running a ‘Rice ATM’- a 24X7 supply of rice and other rations for the needy in Hyderabad since April, 2020.

Dosapati claims to have spent almost ₹50 lakh out of his own pocket and has no intentions of claiming it back.

Just about a month into #lockdown, Dosapati’s younger son wanted to have chicken for his birthday. Dosapati went to the nearest shop to buy chicken, only to find a security guard buying chicken for ₹2000. “I was quite surprised as to why this lady is buying so much chicken...

Here's a happy story to end the week. For years @RonJichardson and I had fantasised about going to New York. For almost as long as we'd known each other we'd dreamt of going and having a holiday there. In 2011 we sorted it and set off on our adventure.

We went for 10 nights which is a long time in New York. It was emotional. For both of us NY was the land of dreams. Seeing the Ghostbusters Fire Station is still one of the highlights of my life. My main memory is of the bars. I think we went to every bar in New York.

The best thing about going for 10 nights is you can do the tourist stuff pretty quick and then you're just mooching about as if you live there for a week. The days are long, especially when you're doing a pub crawl every day.

One of the games we'd play at home was The Lookalike Game. On a train, in a pub or on the Tube you'd spot someone and say "over your right shoulder, looks like a short Les Dennis" or "by the bar, a male Barbara Streisand". It was purely for our own amusement.

Towards the end of our trip in New York we're walking down a busy street in downtown Manhattan. We're playing the lookalike game. Jon says "he looks like Billy Connolly". I look up and there's a radiant man in a North Face gilet. He didn't look like Billy Connolly.

I'm posting this paper because poor medical communication this year has resulted in a distrust in science. To improve vaccine uptake we need to understand what works and what doesn't.

Increasing Vaccination: Putting Psychological Science Into

Vaccination is one of the great achievements of the 20th century, yet persistent public-health problems include inadequate, delayed, and unstable vaccination uptake.

Psychology offers three general propositions for understanding and intervening to increase uptake where vaccines are available and affordable. The first proposition is that thoughts and feelings can motivate getting vaccinated.

Hundreds of studies have shown that risk beliefs and anticipated regret about infectious disease correlate reliably with getting vaccinated; low confidence in vaccine effectiveness and concern about safety correlate reliably with not getting vaccinated.

We were surprised to find that few randomized trials have successfully changed what people think and feel about vaccines, and those few that succeeded were minimally effective in increasing uptake. The second proposition is that social processes can motivate getting vaccinated.

⭐️ What We Learned ⭐️

1: 2020, a thread. Like everyone, B4B faced countless curve-balls in 2020. Here are some things we learned, that helped us increase our influence in the toughest year we have lived through /

2: Act quickly: As Covid fears grew, we had a contingency plan ready by March 2, long before lockdown was a threat. By March 12, work from home was a thing, and on March 15 we closed the office completely /

3: Put the team first: In a crisis, you need the team more than ever. We got our staff from overseas back home early, trialled work-from-home early, put health (inc mental health) and working policies in place early, so everyone was clear what was happening /

4: Use the tech. Our team was already using Zoom, Slack and various other tools but they really came into their own to do the heavy lifting of working remotely, before the Covid nervousness became a full-blown crisis /

5: Keep the team vibe: Daily team Zooms – a huddle to get things going in the morning, an update in the afternoon, & always a willingness to use some of the time for social chit-chat & the small-talk that we take for granted in an office. /

A THREAD: Since today brought on a greater desire/focus to follow the prophet, I felt like it was a great time to review some of his many invitations he has given us as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

#DezNat

Keep on the covenant path. Your commitment to follow the Savior by making covenants with Him and then keeping those covenants will open the door to every spiritual blessing and privilege available to men, women, and children everywhere. (“New First Presidency Broadcast”)

I’m extending a prophetic plea to you, the women of the Church, to shape the future by helping to gather scattered Israel. (“Sisters’ Participation in the Gathering of Israel” – Women’s Session)

So, I invite you to study prayerfully section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants and discover what the Holy Ghost will teach you. Your personal spiritual endeavor will bring you joy as you gain, understand, and use the power with which you have been endowed. (“Spiritual Treasures”)

Repentance: Teach that repentance is a joyful opportunity to change and grow, something all of God’s children should do with appreciation for the privilege. (Official First Presidency Letter)

State of this children's home in Lancashire, run by the private company Care 4 Children Residential Services Ltd: this Ofsted report was uploaded today

Firstly, it is a shit hole (excuse the language, but...)

A child's clothes and shoes are taken away to stop him from running away.

The home is short-staffed and in chaos.

Staff take under-age children to buy cigarettes.

Thread: 2021 is gearing up to be a difficult year for human rights. It's all a question of seeing how individual comments and policies create a pattern, but that in turn risks you sounding like a conspiracy theorist, so let's break it down. 1/

From @pritipatel and @BorisJohnson's comments about "lefty do-gooders" and "activist lawyers" there has been a gradual narrative built up that human rights are some kind of left wing stalking horse. Yet in practical terms they should be apolitical. They apply to all of us. 2/

This is an excellent article by Director of @RunnymedeTrust, Halima Begum about the language the government is using to create division. I fear that it could lead some to think that she is saying the voters being targeted are white supremacists though.

Let's be totally clear here, the "culture war" being gamed by the government is a myth, but it is a myth which resonates with people who feel disconnected from society. A year of isolation, fear and economic concerns has likely increased that disconnect. 4/

Public attitudes fluctuate, and I am not denying that there is still a massive problem of racism within society, but attitudes towards immigration for example are, on the whole, softening. Problem is those against it tend to be more vocal.