… and damn is he good — he scorched the GOP candidates raw.

Jen Psaki, Chris, Joy, Rachel, Steph Rule, Ari — I hope DU watched this.

Here’s a thing you may have missed in your alienation: the war against Fascism and Naziism and the Axis was very present in the consciousness of the country when we, the Olde Boomers, were children. For those with a mind to absorb these lessons, they were around us in abundance. How else did you imagine we learned to recognize these abominations when they showed up here?

How can you imagine that the issues we have known all our lives are not still with us each day in 2023? I find that curious indeed.
Book burnings — my mom’s high school classmates included a Jewish refugee who witnessed first hand that horror in Germany. Photos abounded…
I’ve been conscious of overpopulation since at least 1970, over 50 years, and as a result, I determined to have 2 and only 2 children, and so it was.
I’ve been conscious of the importance of fresh water to the islands of the Pacific since, say, 1961, middle school, when my Science teacher described the lens of underground fresh water floating above the waters of the sea in our Hawai’ian islands. So fragile.
I studied what were then the Trust Territories of the Pacific in the 1960s, another remnant of our parents’ late war, and contemplate the utter fragility of the existence of Micronesia, the tiny islands and atolls — and decades later when the first signs appeared of the rising seas my heart broke for the coming extinguishment of cultures that had existed for millennia.

Nothing is wasted. Nothing is forgotten. You want something posted — post it. If you don’t want it to sink too fast, do a few self-kicks. If you really want it to hang around, pick a forum other than GD.

But don’t blame the rest of us for failing to make every post one of your choosing.

With the installation of BushCheney into the presidency by the SCOTUS, we were facing a national crisis. When 9-11 occurred, the crisis ratcheted up, as the PNAC crew took advantage of the opportunity to ram us into an oil war.

A lot of us were in what I think of as robust middle age at the time. There were some very young people here as well, and iirc they were welcomed and we shared what we knew about resisting fascism in these times. We brought a ton of experience to the table.

But you know what happens when you add a quarter-century to the young? They become middle aged, and have the concerns of the middle aged. And what happens when you add those same years to the middle aged? They become old and have the concerns of the old — like illness and death.

It doesn’t mean we have forgotten about the world and the country, about the environment and democracy. Where have you ever gotten that idea? We talk about these things all the time, and all of us are politically active to one degree or another to this very day, as we have been all our lives.

By all means bring in a coterie of high school and college age kids. We don’t bite, but we also don’t handle people with kid gloves in a serious debate. We have our TOS and don’t tolerate the trollery that goes on in a lot of places on the internet — I mean the misogyny and racism and anti-semitism that are so popular elsewhere will get called out.

If they want a special forum to talk about issues they think only they comprehend, I’m sure that can be accommodated under the usual DU rules.

As for calling young climate activists terrorists, I guess it depends on what they choose to do. Destroying priceless works of art to make a statement is as stupid when a white European or American kid does it as when Isis and the Taliban do it. Mm?

…and our parents. Every single school had its share of kids in heavy leg braces — and if they couldn’t manage stairs, they weren’t in public school. You could become a quadriplegic or die of it, too.

Then came the polio vaccine and parents lined up around the block to make sure their kids got the jab. Only a very few religious nuts refused.

As for diseases we’d already been vaccinated for, the ravages of smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, and lockjaw were within living memory of our parents and grandparents. Public schools required proof of vaccination, and no responsible parent would try to duck out.

The 20th century, especially the second half, now looks like a triumphal march of public health.

Then… we failed to teach our children and their children? It wasn’t in any of the school textbooks? WTF did we do to ourselves? How did public health become a weapon in the culture wars?

…the rest of the country struggles with it as well.

I have watched Hillary Clinton being used as a GOP punching bag since the 1990s. By the time she ran for President in 2016, the contagion into the Dem party was so bad that we at DU ( !!! ) had knock-down drag-out fights and pitched battles over both her fitness for office and whether anyone in the country would vote for her at all because the GOP had made her so toxic. And let it be remembered that she still won the popular vote by 3,000,000 votes.

I think VP Kamala Harris is qualified and if we do our jobs and GOTV people will indeed vote for her. But WE have to believe in her and not waste time fighting each other. WE have to recognize the toxicity of American misogyny and be upfront about it. As Shirley Chisholm so notably pointed out, of the obstacles she faced in life, misogyny was worse than racism.

… had an abortion. She was born in 1924, just to give you an idea of her era.

When I was in high school it was all before Roe, as I mentioned in another post — but the argument was all over the back sections of TIME magazine, which I read avidly. The Pill was a big deal in the same magazine. I talked to Mom about things I didn’t understand and she was usually very informative. But when I asked her what “abortion” was she said tersely, “It’s murder.”

But here’s another piece of her life and my observations: in the first 9 years of my life she was pregnant 7 times and had 4 living children (I’m the oldest). One child was a full-term stillbirth that broke her heart. During one miscarriage she almost hemorrhaged to death on the operating table, and had an out of body experience where she watched the surgeons try to save her life and she literally had to decide to return to the cares of her existence so that I and my first brother would not be orphaned as toddlers — as she said, she breathed in. During another miscarriage it was simply that she leaked blood for months until she was pretty anemic and the family doc questioned her and ordered her to go get a D&C, because anemia wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, sepsis was.

I am 76 this month and there are puzzle-pieces I am still putting together. Some of it is in pure revulsion toward the forced birth movement. I realized that #1 they have redefined all the most effective forms of contraception as abortifacients, which is a lie. #2 they have renamed as “abortion” procedures that had been standard of care for miscarrying women certainly as long as I’d been alive — which is another of their lies. A D&C is not an abortion.

I was pretty disgusted about #1, because when I became sexually active I chose my birth control very carefully and understood how each worked. 5 years on the Pill. A couple of years between my babies I used a diaphragm. Several years with an IUD. But according to the forced birthers I was destroying “babies” the whole time.

But what really tore it for me was how after Dobbs forced birth legislatures went batshit crazy all over this country and made it pellucidly clear that they are perfectly fine with women like my Mom hemorrhaging to death or dying of sepsis — because what was standard of care for at least a century is suddenly a goddam abortion. And the extraction of Mom’s stillborn baby? The wanted little redheaded boy? He was dead, he was literally beginning to rot, because that’s what dead things do. But according to these batshit crazy people, that was also an abortion.

Please, please, do not believe their lies.

…. not have cute little babies. It is about controlling women and girls and their futures by any means necessary — using shame as a big part of it. But just to cut to the chase: “pro-life” Republicans lie their socks off. They never have and never will give a flying fig if the women and children of this nation starve to death. They are, however, good at blaming women.

I do not know how old you are, qwlauren, or what your high school years were like, or how your mom pounded home the necessary lessons to keep you safe. So I will tell you what it was like to graduate high school in 1965 and go to college before Roe.

I was a virgin and a very determined one. I wanted to go to college. Girls who gave in were called names — “slut” being one and “mommy” being another. Because contraception was not available to unmarried girls under 21. I was lucky — the boy I was in love with in high school had a best friend who had to get married in his first year in college, and the prospect of that scared the bejeebers out of my boyfriend.

Here were your choices if you got pregnant: a very early marriage at 16 or so, or give up your firstborn to adoption. Keeping your “out of wedlock baby” was really not much of an option, given the extremely harsh social consequences, like having to drop out of high school or college, the end of career prospects, no childcare, welfare which was barely enough to keep body and soul together and came with a hefty dose of shame.

Abortion was illegal as hell, and very dangerous as a consequence.

Which reminds me: did you read Dobbs? Did you notice the antiquated language that schmuck Alito used? You really need to read Dobbs. He thinks women and girls who give birth to out of wedlock babies (he stopped short of calling them bastards) really owe it to childless married couples to give them up for adoption.

After 50 years of watching this battle rage from Roe on thru Dobbs, I can tell you right now that so called conservatives care nothing whatsoever about helping women and their children. Every chance they get, they cut welfare, childcare, food benefits, medical care from prenatal onward through death by old age, and any kind of help with shelter. Sex education for kids or even adults? Not a chance.

Conservatives resent women competing for jobs that rightly belong to men. They are pissed at women having babies and then expecting some kind of governmental help to raise them. They are good at blaming us for everything about our lives and our gender. They want to control our futures as God intended, and as it used to be in the good old days when we could not control our fertility and never knew from one month to another if we were pregnant — again.

…dictators. Before Musk.

Recently I read an Op-ed piece by a scientist who says scientists were using Twitter extensively to share info, have conversations, and even share papers. Before Musk.

Now the scientists are leaving in droves, hounded by trolls they cannot block, hide, or defend themselves from, and by Musk’s decision to make sure the scientists’ factual postings are buried under mountains of anti-science toxic dumps.

I never was a poster on Twitter, and I admit I joined the crew of DUers who reflexively dissed it. It’s only now that we are watching Musk insanely reduce it to rubble, that I am reading how valuable it actually was. The scientist mentioned above acknowledged that Mastodon and so forth have potential, but said nobody as yet has anything like the infrastructure and utility of the original Twitter.

“Rich men in general, and tech bros in particular, are often under the delusion that they have deep insights into monetary economics, usually coming from what they vaguely remember from Atlas Shrugged." ~~ Paul Krugman ~~