Thursday, July 19, 2012

Echo SUX BALSAC!

So the little commenting platform that I've used for ages is going away in October. In the mean time, they've stopped all support for it. Apologies in retrospect and in advance. It's now eating comments. I am not getting notified if someone leaves a comment. It just crapola on toast. So if you leave a comment and it doesn't show up- it's Echo (unless you're an asshole who's been blocked. And if you are an asshole, you already know you're blocked.) If you leave a comment and I don't respond, it's because Echo didn't tell me and I am way too lazy to check the actual front blog page thingy on the regular. I don't know if I'll keep bloggering come October. I may just pack up shop and move to Tumblr, since I am reblogging shit over there ALL DAY LONG. There are Tumbrl templates that allow Discus as a commenting platform. But that's a few months from now. So there's all that. What's new with y'all? Whatcha doing, reading, watching?

Everything Old Is New Again!

Ok peeps. Here's a little quiz. Guess what this slightly redacted quote is referring to:

Republicans are typically cast as the bad guys in this narrative because, well, that’s how they cast themselves. They decided to be the zealots opposed to any and all forms of REDACTED. In their bizarro world, that made them the good guys: They were the noble defenders of private property rights against “big government” encroachment (i.e, the extension of REDACTED). .... Republicans attached a series of amendments to the bill that rendered it impotent, incapable of forcing the issue of REDACTED.


And the Democrats let them. Got right on board with it. Voted it through, and declared the REDACTED a triumph. Because it was more important for liberals to have an expedient, symbolic victory than to pass a bill that actually protected REDACTED.
Sounds a little like RObamney Care, right?

Actually it's about the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Also I WOULD WATCH THE FUCK OUT OF THIS SHOW. Make it happen HBO. 

So how have we fared 44 years on from Fair Housing. Non-Whites can now own houses, but are more likely to have been pushed into bad loans even if they had the credit for better ones. Gentrification is pushing poor people further away from jobs and resources and reasonable public transit. Detroit happened. And Seattle manages to have one of the most racially diverse neighborhoods in the country, but since they're building light rail down there, the rents are pricing out the working class people who live there.

Also it's telling that I used the phrase "down there". In Seattle, north of downtown is pretty pasty. South of downtown is pretty tan. Defacto segregation, but it's cool cause it's more about income disparity than race (as if the two aren't related).

In 40 years, what is healthcare going to look like? Will we be taking on intergenerational loans to cover our government mandated premiums order to get paid to private insurance companies?