Chris Tackett
I'm Chris. These are things I find beautiful and interesting.
twitter.com/christackett:
Who should be TreeHugger’s Person of the Year? Vote now!
I exchanged emails with MoJo’s Adam Weinstein about the Romney video, here’s what he had to say…
How much advanced notice did you personally have that the first video was getting posted?
All of us in the DC bureau took an active role for a couple of weeks in vetting the video and prepping it…
A fellow social media editor, Michael Hayes of Buzzfeed interviews Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein about the impact of the Romney videos on their site numbers and engagement. Congrats to Mother Jones and David Corn for the huge story! Fun when those servers start smokin’!
Redwoods are awesome. No question about it. Since politics can be so divisive, we thought we’d highlight where we share common ground. Here are 26 Things We Can All Agree On
Proud of this.
Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who is challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill in the Missouri Senate race, recently defended his belief that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of incest and rape, by claiming that, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Um, what?
Thinking people everywhere responded by pointing out how inaccurate and ridiculous Akin’s statement is.
Responding to the controversy, Discovery News helpfully refreshes our memory on the basic, basic, science of the birds and bees:
When a viable sperm penetrates a viable egg inside a woman’s reproductive tract, the result is a fertilized egg that can then implant in the uterus. That fact of life is consistent regardless of how that sperm and egg met up, including whether or not the sperm was ejaculated during rape.
…
“Physiologically, if the sperm is in the vagina, a pregnancy can occur, regardless of the circumstances of how that sperm got there,” said Dr. Melisa Holmes, an ob-gyn and founder of Girlology, an organization that promotes healthy sexuality and communication in families.
That’s helpful, but GEEZ. It’s 2012 and scientists and doctors and journalists and citizens are really having to spend precious time explaining how babies are made. To a US Congressman! What the heck!?
It’s expected that people will have different opinions on what policy should be enacted by our government, but we have a serious problem when people are trying to base their policy ideas on their own set of facts.
Ta-Nahesi Coates made an important point in The Atlantic when he noted how what this Akin affair is really about is the desire of politicians to have their own facts and the power that that provides.
- “At any rate, I think what’s interesting here is the assumed power. I have the right to objectively define pregnancy from rape as rare. I have the right to determine separate legitimate rape from all those instances when you were in need of encouragement, wearing a red dress or otherwise asking for it. I have the right to manufacture scientific theories about your body — theories which reinforce my power. If the body doesn’t “shut that whole thing down” then clearly you weren’t raped, and there’s no need to talk about an abortion. And even if I am wrong on every count, I still have the right to dictate the terms of your body and the remaining days of your life.”
Coates concludes by saying, “the idea of putting medicine in the hands of people who think that, in the instance of rape, the female body can “shut that whole thing down” or “secrete a certain secretion” to prevent pregnancy is utterly terrifying. Essentially these dudes are answering medical questions by citing magic.”
Indeed. And this magical thinking doesn’t stop with abortion.
Consider the many outrageous things politicians (mostly Republican, mostly male) have said about women, science, climate change and the realities of the world we live in.
- Of course, we have Akin’s ridiculous statement about rape and pregnancy, which, asMother Jones highlights, is not the first time a Republican has made such a claim. This voodoo science goes back decades on The Right.
- Upset that a science panel had predicted dangerous sea level rise, Republicans in North Carolina voted this summer to make it illegal for scientists to predict sea level rise. Really.
- Last week, Kentucky Republicans complained that the national ACT exam standards should be changed to not test on evolution, because Kentucky students tested so poorly on the subject.
- This Spring, Tennessee passed a law that allows climate change denial and creationism to be taught as science.
- Louisiana’s Republican-led school voucher program spends taxpayer money on schools that teach all sorts of crazy bullshit. Dinosaurs and humans co-existed, dragons are real, etc.
These are just a few examples from the last couple weeks and months. This stuff has been happening for years and has become so normal, that it takes something truly crazy like Akin’s statement to cut through and become a topic of discussion nationally.
I was shocked to learn that Akin is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Not surprisingly, Akin holds no degrees in science or technology.
This guy helps lead our nations science and technology policy. Let that just wash over you.
How are we ever going to solve a global crisis like climate change if we have such ignorance polluting our government and politicians intent on ensuring our education system raises a new generation of science illiterate citizens?
This was a great segment from Rachel Maddow with Chris Hayes discussing the reason Mitt Romney’s business record and tax avoidance strategy should be fair game for discussion.
Making this point in another way is The Wire creator, David Simon, who is stunned by Romney’s promise of having never paid less than 13%:
I can’t get over the absurdity of this moment, honestly: Hey, I never paid less than thirteen percent. I swear. And no, you can’t examine my tax returns in any more detail. But I promise you all, my fellow American citizens, I never once slipped to single digits. I’m just not that kind of guy.
The Civil War was, at its core, a military battle between these two elites for the soul of the country. It pitted the more communalist, democratic and industrialized Northern vision of the American future against the hierarchical, aristocratic, agrarian Southern one. Though the Union won the war, the fundamental conflict at its root still hasn’t been resolved to this day. (The current conservative culture war is the Civil War still being re-fought by other means.) After the war, the rise of Northern industrialists and the dominance of Northern universities and media ensured that subsequent generations of the American power elite continued to subscribe to the Northern worldview — even when the individual leaders came from other parts of the country.
Ironically, though: it was that old Yankee commitment to national betterment that ultimately gave the Southern aristocracy its big chance to break out and go national. According to Lind, it was easy for the Northeast to hold onto cultural, political and economic power as long as all the country’s major banks, businesses, universities, and industries were headquartered there. But the New Deal — and, especially, the post-war interstate highways, dams, power grids, and other infrastructure investments that gave rise to the Sun Belt — fatally loosened the Yankees’ stranglehold on national power. The gleaming new cities of the South and West shifted the American population centers westward, unleashing new political and economic forces with real power to challenge the Yankee consensus. And because a vast number of these westward migrants came out of the South, the elites that rose along with these cities tended to hew to the old Southern code, and either tacitly or openly resist the moral imperatives of the Yankee canon. The soaring postwar fortunes of cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta fed that ancient Barbadian slaveholder model of power with plenty of room and resources to launch a fresh and unexpected 20th-century revival.
"Yesterday, on TreeHugger, I wrote about the strategy and politics that Republicans used to help create the drama that was yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. Last night, on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow began the show also answering the question: how did we get here? but from a long-term historical perspective. She explains why our system came to depend on employers providing health care and how it has become such a patchwork of different types of plans (Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, etc.) It’s a great clip. Watch it.
That’s Ray Bradbury talking about optimism, but I quoted him to make a point about health care and why Republicans continuously kick Democrats’ butts.
The Texas Republican 2012 platform, which officially opposes teaching students “critical thinking skills.”
Read 4 more of the Texas GOP’s craziest policies.
(via think-progress)
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Idiocracy begins in Texas.
(via dceiver)
(via dceiver)
I’m pro-choice for a number of reasons, but it all comes back to respecting women to make the choice that is right for them. This belief was cemented even more for me when I read this terrible news from my friend (and very first editor), Maggie Koerth-Baker. Society expects women to hear news like this and hide away in seclusion or talk about it in hushed tones and for some that is the right choice, but I’m thankful Maggie choose to use her platform as a writer to share her feelings and thought process. It’s not something I’ve ever had to deal with, so it was eye-opening to see how she’s handling this terrible news. As she explains in the post, none of her options are good. It is a tragic situation, but what is important is that she has options. Too many women in the US have no access to abortion services, due to poor health care coverage, lack of providers, or restrictive laws. Republicans (and too many Democrats) across the nation are eagerly passing laws to restrict these options for women even further. I think the best thing we can do to grow as humans is to expose ourselves to new ideas. I hope many pro-life readers find Maggie’s story and can appreciate the tragedy of her situation, but respect her desire to have options for dealing with it.
Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.
This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.
Chronological ethnocentrism plays a helpful role for history textbook authors: it lets them sequester bad things, from racism to the robber barons, in the distant past. Unfortunately for students, it also makes history impossibly dull, because we all “know” everything turned out for the best. It also makes history irrelevant, because it separates what we might learn about, say, racism or the robber barons in the past from issues of the here and now. Unfortunately for us all, just as ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from other societies, chronological ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from our past. It makes us stupider.
"Think the US is more tolerant than ever before? This post is a good lesson in why that isn’t the case.
Read the rest: Our real first gay president - Salon.com
