Luther Blissett » Fri Nov 06, 2015 2:07 pm wrote:Fair enough on my grant just being anecdotal evidence…but I'm pretty sure the executive branch isn't doing anything but deepening environmental racism. Most new toxic waste sites, incinerators, landfills, and other new polluting facilities are placed in poor communities. That particular problem is getting worse.
I don't want to speak for leftists as a whole here but I don't want power (short term or long term), I want a leaderless paradigm shift, peace and utopia, to be frank. I accept this as science fiction, that's fine, but it's some kind of aspiration. I do like your list of victories, all sound like things that I want. I too accept that it's hard to see victory in absence of these. The metaphor I always use, based on an actual fight I've had with my peers, is "why would I want to celebrate advances in child poverty while children still starve to death?"
The rest of the progress still left for LGBT people includes getting the murder and suicide rates for trans people down from their current astronomic levels down to societal parity (and then reducing the rates for all even further), housing and employment protection, cessation of discrimination, custody rights, representation, etc. Globally there's still a ton of work to be done in eliminating executions for LGBT people, access to therapy and surgery, plus all of the preceding domestic examples.
I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on the conservatism of the Ivy League. The students around here are broadly recognized as wealthy racists who don't tip and disdain the working class and service industry, filled with reverence for their ultra-elitist secret clubs, societies, and fraternities, and who are going to grow up to run neocon think tanks and oil companies. The most prominent school is the business school. Maybe this is a more recent shift in the 21st century, or maybe it's really just Dartmouth, Princeton, and Penn, but it's real: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1201 ... love-ivies
I'd probably have nothing ideologically in common with the KGB.
Howard Zinn was fired for marching for civil rights.
I know that we don't see the world in the same way at all, FourthBase, but here's why I think the Ivy League is arch-conservative:
Black UPenn freshmen added to racist social media account with ‘daily lynching’ calendar
“I spent my morning running to the Vice Provost office of my university in the middle of class because my freshmen brothers and sisters got added to a group called '[slur] Lynching.'
I know we have vastly different life experiences that can cause us to look at the same thing and see nearly polar opposite results, but the above is no surprise to me and that culture is the basis for this disagreement.
