Eroding Rights, Collapsing Rights

We've probably all seen the video of the Tufts graduate student being arrested by ICE. 

She is a Fulbright scholar. She has never committed a crime. She has a valid visa. She is in a graduate program. She has not been charged with anything. She was simply seized and shipped out of state. No one is sure where she is now, and ICE will not let her lawyer talk to her.

As Matt Mikalatos says:

I've heard some people saying lately that there's no reason to be concerned, because immigrants don't have the same rights as citizens, and honestly I find this more stomach-churning than some of the directly racist or xenophobic things I've seen people say. Why on earth are people defending the government that's harming people instead of the vulnerable people being harmed?

I will promise you this: when a government starts violating rights of the vulnerable, it doesn't stop with a single population of people.

And as a Yale professor who has just accepted a job in Canada puts it:

“But how could you speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen?” he questioned. “And if you can’t speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen, when will they come for the American citizens? It’s inevitable.”

Call your reps. Make some noise. Clown show fascists are still fascists.

 

Stolen From Tumbr

 A fable for our times:

Trump Regime Stripping Away Rights

If they can do it to immigrants, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to tourists, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to people who have green cards, they can do it to you.

If they can do it to students, they can do it to you.

None of us are safe. All the Trump regime will need to do is redefine whatever category they please into "non-citizen," or "criminal," and that will be that. 

We're building new prisons in Arkansas, while cutting funds for schools and libraries. If you can't see why that's dangerous, you've been drinking too much Kool-Aid.

ETA:

Haircuts and Nicknames

 In Arkansas, one of our Republicans wants to create civil liability for anyone who "assists" transgender minors. That includes parents, and apparently anyone else on the planet, and it includes things like calling a kid by a name which doesn't "fit" their "biological gender," or allowing them to wear clothing that doesn't align with that gender:

"...any act by which a minor adopts or espouses a gender identity that differs from the minor’s biological sex as determined by the sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles of the minor, including without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.”

(Emphasis mine)

Comments are asking if this means a parent allowing a kid to have a hairstyle (long hair, short hair) which doesn't "fit" their assigned gender will be prosecuted; or if buying jeans for your daughter creates civil liability.

But no. Of course it doesn't. No cis child will be prosecuted for wearing jeans, or having a ponytail. As with most laws, this one will be prosecuted selectively. It's a law that can be weaponized against trans people.

Laws about what clothing people were allowed to wear used to be common in the U.S. Women who wore jeans, men who wore blouses, these people could be arrested and prosecuted. Long hair on men was a crime. Men with eyeshadow or earrings could be prosecuted. These laws were not enforced against "good" people. Like the War on Drugs, they were a way to prosecute the "wrong" sort of people. That's how these laws will be used as well.

Arkansas governor and Trump wannabe Sarah Huckleberry Sanders and her supporters keep blatting about how parents should be in charge of their children, but that's not what they mean. It's not what any of them mean. They mean they want to put "good" parents in charge of their children. And their definition of "good" is parents who agree with them -- Evangelical Christian parents, Trump-supporting parents, bigoted parents. 

Parents like me, and other parents who don't see children as their possessions, as their weapons in a culture war -- we should be prosecuted. We should be jailed. We should definitely not be allowed to make decisions about our children's healthcare, or their education, or their lives. 

As with women's bodies, decisions like these should be left to the government. 

Spring Break Hoves Into View

And then after Spring Break it's only April until I retire -- five weeks and out.

My department is insisting on holding a retirement party for me. Don't they know how much I hate parties? Dr. Skull asked what I wanted to do for my birthday (last week) and I said, "Absolutely nothing. Let's do absolutely nothing."

So that's what we did.

I plan to spend Spring Break putting my books into alphabetical order and writing reviews for Interzone. Also drinking a lot of coffee. It's the perfect holiday.

Books, not yet in alphabetical order

The Kid's First Academic Conference

He's doing a poster presentation on "The Efficacy of Scientific Illustration in Portraying Large Herbivore Impact":

The Kid at the AABA

Violation of the First Amendment

The right to protest against the actions of our government is one of our fundamental rights. It's right there in the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If Trump's regime can redefine that protest as "terrorism," and redefine a person with a green card as an "illegal immigrant," none of us are safe. 

This is one of the foundations of the country. Trump is violating it -- and his base have no problems with that violation. 

When they themselves are arrested, and when they find themselves scheduled for deportation, well, they'll be outraged. (If it happens to them or to their tribe, it's a crime. If it happens to liberals or brown people, it's hilarious.) It'll be too late at that point, of course.

Call your representatives now.

Ten Days Until Spring Break

 ...but who's counting?

(Asking for a friend.)

Via Pharyngula

 Anti-Semitism in the Oval Office, or that really bizarre behavior toward Zelenskyy explained:

The elements that emerged in conversation with Jerzy over the years -- the mockery of Jewish appearances, the need for Jewish submissiveness, the claims about dishonesty, greed, cowardice, and corrupt conspiracies -- figure in the scholarly literature on the subject.

        (snip) 

Zelens'kyi was elected on a peace platform in 2019, but Putin did not want to talk to him, in part because he did not think that Zelens'kyi showed him enough deference.  

        (Snip)

It was all there, in the Oval Office, in the shouting and in the interruptions, in the noises and in the silences. A courageous man seen as Jewish had to be brought down. When he said things that were simply true he was shouted down and called a propagandist. There was no acknowledgement of Zelens'kyi's bravery in remaining in Kyiv. The Americans portrayed themselves as the real heroes because they provided some of the weapons.  

Go read it all, as the kids today say.

To forestall the MAGAs: We've been told that Trump can't be anti-Semitic, because he has Jews in his own family. But that's like saying he can't be a misogynist because he married a woman. Pretty much all bigots are okay with "their" member of whatever group they hate. I've had transphobes explain to me that they know trans people, so they can't be anti-trans. 

Also, honestly, it's probably also to do with Zelenskyy having more backbone and being a better president than Trump. Trump, like most weak men, can't stand strength in those around him.

Original post at Pharyngula

See also this.

Oh No

Kevin Drum has died.

He was a voice of sanity on the interwebs, and had been for decades. One of the first real bloggers. 

Activism Tab from N&M

Nicole and Maggie write about activism today.

Your one-stop shopping for things to do to resist our current regime.

Via PZ Myers, today is Stand Up For Science day.

Five Things I Like about Living Here So Far

(1) It's colder than Fort Smith and we get more snow. Not much colder and not much more snow, but it's still a win. Also, there are snow plows here, so that's nice.

(2) The Ozark Natural Foods Co-Op is less than a five minute drive away, so I can go there anytime I want and get great food and great ingredients to make great food.

(3) SO MANY parks, walking, and biking trails.

(4) The four-story library

Children's Room at the library

(5) My power company is a Co-op, and my water company, city-owned, does everything it can it encourage recycling -- including charging people who recycle lower fees to pick up their trash, and funding giant recycling centers.

Bonus: Jeni's ice cream is available at Harps. Like, just right there in the freezers. Amazing!

Five Books I've Read This Week

Maureen McHugh, After the Apocalypse

A collection of short stories by one of my favorite writers. I'm pretty sure I read this one before, but I didn't remember some of the stories, so maybe not. McHugh is the author of one of my favorite novels, China Mountain Zhang, about (among other things) a construction worker living in an AU version of America where we had a second American revolution and where China is the dominant world power. This collection is a bunch of unrelated but excellent SF stories.

Audrey Schulman, The Dolphin House

Science fiction only in that it's fiction about scientists. In the early 1960s, a partially deaf waitress gets a job working with a pack of scientists studying how dolphins communicate. Engaging and extremely readable but also pretty upsetting due to animal mistreatment in the name of science. This is the Schulman who wrote Theory of Bastards, which I read last week and really loved. It's also about scientists and animals, bonobos in that case, and also has a partially disabled main character. Not as much animal abuse, though, and more science fiction.

Ruth Chan, Uprooted: A Memoir about What Happens When Your Family Moves Back

A graphic novel about Ruth's experiences when her family moves to Hong Kong after her father gets a job in China. There's also a flashback subplot about how and why the family moved to Canada. Nice detail about the life of a young teenager in Hong Kong, as well as the differences between life, food, and schools in Canada and life, food, and schools in Hong Kong. A quick and interesting read.

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

I actually only read about half of this one. Pretty much everyone in the SF world loves this book, and also it won the Booker Prize, but honestly it bored me so much I couldn't go on. Maybe it got better in the second half? It's about some astronauts as they orbit Earth and what they're thinking about and seeing. None of their thoughts or anything they see interested me much, but other people clearly thought otherwise. Nothing really happens except those thoughts and the astronauts looking down at Earth. The language Harvey used got a lot of praise in other reviews I read, but that also didn't seem especially good to me. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something.

John Barnes, Finity

This one is actually a re-read. It's about an alternate Earth where the Nazis won WWII, or actually about a bazillion AU Earths where various things happened differently. It's also about math, sort of, and about being online. It's not a very good book, and the ending is particularly flat, but I always enjoy reading it anyway. If you're into AU novels, and want a non-taxing read, this is your book.

How the Sausage is Made

 And why:

(Image shows Trump, GOP elephant, and Elon killing a bunch of programs (WIC, Medicaid and Medicare, SNAP) in order to stuff them into a sausage grinder which extrudes huge tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country.)

See also this.

Republicans love smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. They're laying off thousands of workers chaotically even though salary costs are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Elon Musk is pretending to save far more money than he really is. Now Senate Republicans are trying to hide the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts using a new wheeze called the "current policy baseline."

Five Reasons to Dump Trump

Or at least stop supporting the current regime. I don't think impeaching him will have any effect, since the GOP (including my representatives) are too cowed by Trump to take any sort of action against him.

(1) Tax breaks for billionaires, while increasing tax burden on the lowest quintillions

(2) Destroying scientific research in this country, because his base hates experts and would rather have their children die from preventable diseases than trust science.

(3) Gutting civil rights protections, for no other purpose than to feed the bigotry of his base

(4) Defunding Medicaid and WIC, two of the most successful programs in our current American landscape, under the pretense that this would "cut waste" and save money.

(5) Ukraine and Zelensky. We all knew how petty, inept, and faithless Trump is, but the barefaced contempt shown, out of pure spite, for a leader, a supposed ally, fighting for his country, told the entire world how little Trump, and the US in general at this point, are to be trusted.

I could go on -- the destroying of our national parks, and the EPA, and consumer protections against giant corporations, and giving unprecedented power to Elon Musk, a man as inept as Trump himself, and as dishonest as Vance -- but five's the limit, that's the rule. 

Call your representatives, for what little good that is doing those of us who live in Red States. (I keep getting told by my congressmen and senators that everything Trump is doing is good and necessary, actually. See my opening paragraph.)

See also this: