Below is a quote from Reuters:
KYIV (Reuters) - As volunteer fighters Oleksandr Zhuhan and Antonina Romanova pack for a return to active duty, they contemplate the unicorn insignia that gives their uniform a rare distinction - a symbol of their status as an LGBTQ couple who are Ukrainian soldiers.
Members of Ukraine's LGBTQ community who sign up for the war have taken to sewing the image of the mythical beast into their standard-issue epaulettes just below the national flag.
De Selby's wife, a mysterious old woman, said yesterday, "If you're not corrupt, it's your own fault."
For several days now the cable news programs have been devoted entirely to one topic, the latest massacre of school children. But that's not news. Mass killings happen almost weekly. Massacres, like time zones, are now a standard part of American lives. They aren't news.
This phenomenon is uniquely American. Frequent massacres are not allowed in other countries.
I want to see something done to stop the killing. I don't listen to people talking about it anymore. No point. I want action, not words. Confiscate the weapons of war.
We will not get action as long as the Republican Party holds offices. The country needs a second party but not a party that does nothing to stop the killing. Never vote Republican.
Suppose an alien from outer space asks me what it is like to take part in a human conversation.
In a conversation, when I start a sentence, I usually don't know how the sentence will end. I'm improvising. That's how we do it.
Much of the time this conversation is effortless. My sentence finds an ending. As I begin a sentence, I watch the people I'm talking to, checking if the gestures, expressions and language (often naturally metaphorical) are understood.
A conversation is a collaboration, with everyone checking responses, making encouraging nods, interrupting, repeating key words and so on--while taking into account the context, the time and place and who the people are. We do this easily.
I'm talking here.
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When I volunteered at my library's literacy program, I found myself coaching English as a second language, I did not know how to do that, but my student and I made do. She had to learn English.
Most of the time we just talked. I would ask Noemi questions. She would answer in English. Because she had little English, that was a struggle. She would try a few words. My face would show I did not understand. She'd say something in Spanish, and maybe I got a clue, so I would repeat the Spanish word. She would be looking at me closely. She would gesture. I would smile, and she would attempt a four syllable English word, pronouncing each syllable incorrectly. It would finally dawn on me what she meant. We would go on. And we made progress.
Here's the point. A conversation between humans is a collaboration. It's nothing like two computers exchanging information. It's more like improv. And that is how the first human talk began in Africa a million years ago, like a game of charades, pointing, gesturing, face to face.
When I first began to read about climate change, almost the first thing I learned was that global warming would drive massive chunks of migration. That was about 30 years ago.
As deserts grow, people go where the food is.
A fairly recent example is what happened in Syria. The crops failed several years in a row. The farmers moved to the city, where the food was, and demanded help. They got none. They ended up starting a civil war, which was crushed by the Russians, using artillery, bombers and poison gas.
Climate migrations have begun.
Legacy Americans
When I first heard the term "legacy Americans," I thought it was a reference to the last of the Mohicans. Jack de Selby jumped on my mistake, as he often does, telling me that legacy American is a name for blue-eyed American people of Northern European origin who alone have the right to govern.
Legacy Americans, de Selby explained, consider themselves rightful heirs to the nation, indigenous hicks who deserve special privileges. Everyone else is an outsider. Legacy language should be the only language. Only legacy holidays should be celebrated. All politics should be identity politics. That is normal.
When immigrants appear, legacy Americans fear replacement. In the past in America when white males seemed about to be outvoted by minority groups, the solutions were simple. Legacy Americans turned to violence (the KKK) or they turned a minority group into honorary white males, which enlarged the legacy ranks.
The original genuine white males came from England, France and Northern Europe. They got to vote first. On the verge of being out-registered, American legacy voters turned white women into second class white males. White women got to vote. That was about a hundred years ago.
As needed the Catholic Irish, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs and so on became second class white males. Even so, legacy voters are about to be outnumbered again.
De Selby predicts that soon Hispanics will become second-class whites. That's already happening. After Hispanics the next large group to make the grade will likely be Chinese-Americans or, maybe, people of mixed background like President Obama. (De Selby is guessing.) At the same time new minorities will be growing; some race will always be there to provide a feared opposition.
According to Jack de Selby the Supreme Court has mistakenly tackled the abortion controversy from the end instead of the beginning. Don't ban abortions. Ban erections. Make erections punishable with ten years in prison. (Erections are not mentioned in the Constitution, so they are not protected, according to Justice Sammy Alito.)
The original Healdsburg Peace Project began as a University of California student exercise. That happened a long time before Susan and I returned to California. The project then went dormant until it was reanimated by local progressives like Bob and Laura and Robert and Heidi around the time of the crackpot second war against Iraq.
For more than 20 years the project met at the town square in Healdsburg on Thursday evenings and held up signs calling for peace. And then we would usually adjourn to someone's house and enjoy a potluck dinner and an argument.
The Peace Project won an award or two. We joined many larger demonstrations. Over time important leaders died. People moved away. Some of us got old. The generation that had opposed wars of aggression in the 1960s was going. And now the Peace Project has shut its doors. The friendships remain, and we'll be seeing you, as the song goes, in all the old familiar places.
In HOW CIVIL WARS START, Barbara F. Walter notes that dictators often seize power by being elected in a democracy. They do this as champions of identity politics.
Often you can spot identity-based dictators because they refer to political opponents as insects. Putin recently characterized his Russian opponents as bugs that fly into your mouth and you spit them out. Calling your opponents bugs is common to ultranationalists on many continents.
In identity politics you base your political actions on what you consider best for your own religion, race, gender, social caste or whatever. In America if you are a white man and you demand what is best for white men, you are practicing identity politics as part of a faction so large it gets taken as the norm. For instance, Mitt Romney is opposed to cancelling student loans, because it would be of little benefit to his identity group of rich white males.
It is hard to change the minds of voters practicing identity politics; their politics are baked into their identities.
Democracies depend on the ability of voters to change their minds. Democracies depend on voters accepting diversity and accepting losses at the polls. According to Walter, when the voters devolve into hardened factions that will not admit political defeat, that leads to violence and civil war.
