Notices by Karen C🥨👵🏻🌲🏖️ (gamehawk@mastodon.social), page 16

@Pinboard@twitter.com: "Immigrants are accused of being animals by the President, who is a vegetable."

Am now waiting for the witty defense of vegetables by @HalfOnionInABag@Twitter.com.

@auntiekiki A regular occurrence at our house: one of us says out loud, "I'll send you that link in Slack." <click>

The other: <DING> "Oh... it was a Slack notification."

@Are0h Yeah, my focus was mostly on local elections. I suspect that might have changed if I had still lived there during the 2016 campaign and election.

Also you left out money launderers: http://www.kansas.com/opinion/editorials/article210741994.html (although I won't rule out him being a pedophile and/or racist too, I guess).

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article211201669.html

:tiny violin:

(These folks got started in my old neighborhood, where rent was cheap on former corner-grocery buildings, and parlayed Kansas' AR15-and-concealed-carry obsession into a big loan for a fancy place, without the usual "oh hunting is a Kansas tradition" cover, just straight up "tactical" stuff. And now they might lose their SUV. CRY ME A RIVER)

@Are0h Yep. Although I have to admit, I got more involved in getting out the "minority vote" (since my own neighborhood was largely Hispanic, and most of the other folks in the neighborhood-association-association were from largely-Black neighborhoods), and all the white people I knew that I was okay with having vote were already voting.

I need to get involved in stuff here, but we've been kinda transient lately. 😔

@Are0h ... of became a crusader against the self-righteous "oh you need an ID for anything so requiring it at the polls is totally non-racist and non-sexist." And sorry but NOPE. One, "you can't fly without it" is amazingly privileged, and two I DID FLY ONCE USING MY FREAKIN' COSTCO CARD YOU SMUG JERK BUT I CAN'T VOTE WITH THAT CAN I? Annnnnyway.

@Are0h ... which meant getting a new birth certificate from California (hard to do without a current picture ID, turns out), a marriage license to prove my "new" name, finally get around to updating my name with SSA (also hard to do without a current picture ID), and so forth. Long story slightly shorter, I went five years without an official government ID, despite being an English-speaking white woman with plenty of time and money on her hands to get it sorted out. So I kind...

@Are0h Yeah, when I lived in Kansas voting was my cause; as you probably know, that's Kris Kobach Kountry and he's done his darndest to make sure older white men control the vote. (I can't be *too* righteous about my motives: when I went to renew my driver's license I discovered that due to modernizing their system they were now linked to the SSA's database and lo and behold when they entered my SSN back in '82 there was a typo, so now I had to prove my identity like a newbie...

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/05/17/the-historic-racist-dog-whistle-of-calling-people-animals/

Yeah, I heard that dog whistle. And I have heard it in my own family: when visiting my mother during the beginnings of the travel ban, she turned away from Fox and told me it was A Good Thing that Syrian refugees were being turned away because "those people are animals, they're not human."

Never mind that I married someone who is half Syrian and her beloved grandson is a quarter Syrian. I guess their skin is light enough to pass for human? I mean, wow.

@Are0h Yeah, I mean, Mom is in her 80's and rarely leaves my sister's home, so there's not too much damage she can do (she managed to keep her overt racism to herself until I was in my 20's, so I assume she's not preaching the Fox gospel to sister's daughters) these days aside from voting. (And I'd say "it's Kansas, she can't make things any worse" but apparently the sleepy Kansas moderates are waking up and they're kinda pissed off, so we'll see.)

@Are0h (And sorry, here I am making you talk politics when you started by saying you didn't want to anymore.)

@Are0h Yeah, as a nerd I keep thinking somehow logic will prevail and... no. Not when my mother can tell me with a straight face that Syrian refugees need to not be allowed into the country because "those people are animals, they're not human" when I'm married to the son of a Syrian refugee. But "well, that's different."

In the face of that, I can certainly see the appeal in just waiting for St. Mueller to deliver us. News media is telling us that's all we need to "do."

@Are0h Yeah, change itself doesn't seem impossible, but changing some individual people through logic sometimes does. ("... salary depends on him not understanding it," etc.)

@theoutrider North American robins (a kind of thrush) do the same thing. They'll gather waiting to see what kind of fun bugs you uncover/stir up.

@Are0h Same. I mean, one can't completely ignore it if one is not a healthy, non-elderly, white, Christian, cis male, but also it's too easy to eagerly watch the news waiting for the Special Counsel to file charges (he won't) and make the current regime vanish (it won't) and magically make The Base come to its senses (they won't).

But man, when relatives would rather *sever relationships* than acknowledge the basic humanity of other people? Change feels impossible sometimes.

@mogwai_poet (Thank you, phone keyboard: "first time it played." No hourglass involved.)

@mogwai_poet I went and found one of the slider things, and the ⏳ time it played I heard very clear Yanny. Bumped it ever so slightly to the right and it went right back to laurel and stayed there until way far to the left where it became Yaley. There's a point where I can't hear both laurel and yaley but I can't make yanny come back.