Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Archive for December 2013

The Daily F Bomb, Thursday 12/19/13

Interrogatories

Are there any pets in your neighborhood that you wish would move out?

What is your greatest vice? Greatest virtue?

What category of book do you own the most of?

What smells, for you, mark each season?

The Twitter Emitter

Thursday Morning Herd Check-in

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  

   


    PLEASE Do Not Recommend the check-in diary

        Fierces on the Weather Critter Comment are obligatory welcome.

The Daily F Bomb, Wednesday 12/18/13

Interrogatories

Have you ever been to a performance of “Nutcracker,” or is it a yearly TV viewing experience for your family?

Do you ever bake cookies or other foods as gifts? What kinds?

What magazines did your family subscribe to when you were growing up? Which were your favorites, and why?

What is the most boring sport?

The Twitter Emitter

Wednesday Watering Hole: Check In & Hangout for the Herd

Good morning, Moosekind.


  PLEASE Do Not Recommend the check-in diary! 

        Recs on the weather jar comment are still welcome.

The common Moose, Alces alces, unlike other members of the deer family, is a solitary animal that doesn’t form herds. Not so its rarer but nearest relative, Alces purplius, the Motley Moose. Though sometimes solitary, the Motley Moose herds in ever shifting groups at the local watering hole to exchange news and just pass the time.

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Jersey City Mayor Gives Best Response to Gun Control Equals Holocaust Meme

Many conservatives have invoked Holocaust comparisons – and claimed that if European Jews only had guns in the 1930’s and 1940’s there would have never been a Holocaust – when it comes to any effort to implement new gun control laws.  This time, the focus of their anger is Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop, himself a grandchild of Holocaust survivors.

Mayor Fulop’s offense is that he supports a measure which would require gun vendors that seek contracts with Jersey City to fill out a gun safety questionnaire.  For this, his grandparents ordeal in the Shoah was invoked by Scott Bach, a member of the National Rifle Association’s board.

Mayor Fulop’s response to the claim that if only his grandparents, and other Jews, had guns when the Nazis came for them:

If my grandparents had guns in their house when the Nazis came, my grandparents would be dead and I wouldn’t be here. (emphasis my own) So that’s probably the reality of the situation. But I don’t think that you can equate religious persecution to a manipulation of the intent of the Second Amendment.

These conservatives seem to forget exactly what would happen if you had one or two people go up against fully equipped soldiers.  Maybe one or two or even three soldiers would get killed, but, in the end, it would be the ordinary people that were killed.  No, it wasn’t a lack of guns that caused the Holocaust, but the complicity of millions of people in Germany and occupied Europe who actively assisted in the Shoah and those, throughout the world, that turned a blind eye to what was happening and the countries that closed their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing for their very lives.

The stuff that piles up and wears you down-microaggressions


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(photo: Kiyun)




Dr. Chester Middlebrook Pierce, Emeritus Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School put an academic name to racial stressors. He wrote about:

the effects of racism, first proposing the concept of racial microaggressions in 1970. Microaggression usually involves “demeaning implications and other subtle insults against minorities”. He described these subtle nonverbal exchanges as ‘put-downs’ of blacks by offenders and suggested they may also play a role in unfairness in the legal system as microaggressions can influence the decisions of juries.

Most of us are aware of racism. There are big, flaming in your face, cross-burning, spewing, blatantly racist moments in time that almost everyone you know can see, and react to. Those are easy-almost. But the things that wear at you, tear at you, day-in-day-out tend to be smaller, shrug-offable, till they pile up, drop by drop, irritation by irritation.

Those of us who are forced to bear with them and bear up under them rarely get a chance to be vindicated, and are often chastised for being “overly sensitive” or “imagining it all” when we finally speak up to put a stop to yet another “diss” or put-down.

For visual representations, take a look at 21 Racial Microaggressions You Hear On A Daily Basis


Photographer Kiyun asked her friends at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus to “write down an instance of racial microaggression they have faced.”

The Daily F Bomb, Tuesday 12/17/13

Interrogatories

Do you have any annual celebrations that aren’t on the mainstream radar? Besides your own birthday, that is.

Do you consider yourself patriotic? How patriotic? Love it or leave it, or change it or lose it?

Did you start to misbehave in class when the teacher left the room, or were you a virtuous child? What sort of things did you get up to?

What is your favorite book store, and why?

The Twitter Emitter

Tuesday Morning Herd Check-in

  Make sure you let your peeps

  know where to find you!  


    PLEASE Do Not Recommend the check-in diary!   

        Fierces on the Weather Critter Comment are obligatory welcome.

The Daily F Bomb, Monday 12/16/13

Interrogatories

What is your favorite thing to dip in chocolate?

What’s the biggest earthquake you ever felt?

Did anyone ever give you a stupid toy? What was it?

Are you re-gifting anything this year? What is it?

The Twitter Emitter

Bachelet wins landslide victory in Chile!

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President-elect of Chile, Michelle Bachelet

Felicitaciones a los chilenos

Congratulations to the Chilean people, and to President-elect Bachelet.

Chilean Voters Return a Former President to Power

Ms. Bachelet received about 62 percent of the vote, compared with 38 percent for her opponent, Evelyn Matthei, according to preliminary results from the Chilean electoral service. Ms. Matthei conceded defeat.

Ms. Bachelet, who was widely admired as president from 2006 to 2010, when her policies helped shield Chile from a sharp downturn during the global financial crisis, has put forth an ambitious package of proposals that would, among other things, increase corporate taxes, expand access to higher education and overhaul the 1980 Constitution, which dates to the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Her platform contrasted sharply with the anti-tax views of Ms. Matthei, a former labor minister who belongs to the most conservative wing of the governing coalition of President Sebastián Piñera, a right-wing billionaire. Ghosts of the Pinochet era hung over this year’s race; unlike Mr. Piñera himself, Ms. Matthei voted in favor of General Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite that opened the way for democracy to be re-established in Chile.

The coalition that led her to victory is the Nueva Mayoría

The New Majority (Spanish: Nueva Mayoría) is a Chilean electoral coalition created in 2013 and composed mainly of center-left political parties supporting the presidential candidacy of Michelle Bachelet in the 2013 election.

The coalition consists of the four principal parties of the Concert of Parties for Democracy, namely, the Socialist Party of Chile (PS), the Christian Democratic Party (Chile) (PDC), the Party for Democracy (PPD) and the Social Democrat Radical Party (PRSD). In addition, the New Majority also includes the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh), the Citizen Left (IC), the Broad Social Movement (MAS) and centre-left independents

Queue exploding heads of wing-nuttia here in the U.S.

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