EMMYdiocracy
Mediocracy is a situation which can occur in a democracy in which mediocre people prevail. The society is then subordinated to a quasi-egalitarian ideology in which words and ideas are redefined by mediocre people, to be convenient for mediocre people. Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a frequent critic of mediocracy in contemporary Western countries. || This where the tag cloud goes if the tag cloud loads:
From Tim Keown’s excellent profile of Sergio Romo:
PUNK. THE WORD still haunts him. He saw it in the faces of the cops in Arizona who pulled him over “a handful of times” as he drove his new BMW back and forth from his home to spring training in 2012. Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the controversial immigration bill, had gone into effect around the same time.As Romo tells it, the first question was always the same: “Is this your car?”
Not, “License and registration, please.”
Not, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”
But, Is this your car?
When Romo said it was, the next question was always: What do you do for a living?
“Why is that any of their business?” Romo asks. “I told him, ‘You’re only pulling me over because you see a guy with a big beard driving (a nice car and the state gives you the authority to discriminate.’
” And so, after the season, during the World Series parade in San Francisco, Romo wore a T-shirt that said, I just look illegal. There was a little something for everyone in the message. There was the prankster and the defiant guy whose stubbornness will never allow him to ignore a slight.
“Part of it was me being silly and goofy — look what I’ve got on,” he says. “Another part of it, legitimately, was that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished in life, people get treated the same. I know what it feels like to be discriminated against.”
Go read the whole thing.
(via badonktos)
Republican legislators in Arizona are attempting to pass legislation that forces transgender people to only use public restrooms, dressing rooms and showers associated with the gender listed on their birth certificate. According to the Associated Press, conservative lawmakers are proposing the legislation in response to a human rights bill passed by the city of Phoenix which prohibits gender identity discrimination in public accommodations. (via Arizona bill would jail transgender people for using the ‘wrong’ bathroom | The Raw Story)
(via spookyhouse)
never stood a chance
(Source: forgifs.com, via harpollo)
VOTER ALERT! If you live in AZ you need to check your forms - In the corner of the document, it says November 6th in English but in Spanish it reads 8 de Noviembre, the 8th of November.
Election day is November 6th, not November 8th. Please make sure to share this with everyone you know.Because this is what voter suppression looks like
SHARE SHARE SHARE
WOW stupid stupid dumb dumb. Don’t bother ‘liking’ this, just reblog reblog reblog!
i feel like this could just be an actual error and if so they’re probably really embarrassed that it looks like they’re trying to suppress spanish-speaking voters
but then again it is arizona
so
it’s maricopa county. i wouldn’t put anything past them.
(via brianlionzion)
accurate depiction of living around here
do people in arizona think the alamo was a sign of arizona’s resiliency and strength as a stand-alone republic and not say… texas’s???
(Source: thechocolatebrigade)
The Arizona Charter Athletic Association state championship baseball game wasn’t played Thursday night because Mesa Prep’s second baseman is a girl.
Paige Sultzbach, a freshman, is playing baseball because her high school doesn’t offer girls softball. But the school Mesa Prep was to face in the final, Our Lady of Sorrows Academy, said its boys would not compete against a team with a girl and forfeited the game - and the state title - to Mesa Prep.
“As a Catholic school, we promote the ideal of forming and educating boys and girls separately during the adolescent years, especially in physical education,” Our Lady of Sorrows said in a statement, according to CNN affiliate KTVK.
“It takes tremendous moral courage to stand by what it is you believe, and they are doing what they think is right,” Mesa Prep Headmaster Robert Wagner told KTVK.
But Sultzbach’s mother, Pamela Sultzbach, said her daughter and the Mesa Prep team were being done a disservice.
“This is not a contact sport. It shouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t that they were afraid they were going to hurt or injure her, it’s that (they believe) that a girl’s place is not on a field,” Pamela Sultzbach told the Arizona Republic.
“I respect their views, but it’s a bit out of the 18th century,” Amy Arnold, Mesa Prep’s athletic director, told the Republic.
Mesa Prep and Our Lady of Sorrows played twice during the regular season, but Sultzbach sat out, as they were away games for her team.
“It was on their field, and I felt the need to respect their rules,” she told KTVK.
The final would have been on a neutral field, and Sultzbach wanted to play.
Now, despite being hailed as state champions, Mesa Prep will feel like they’ve missed something, Pamela Sultzbach said.
“This team has worked so hard,” she said. “They’re undefeated. They had one game left. At our school, we’re taught that when you start something, you complete it, and they weren’t done.”
The Justice Department filed suit Thursday against Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his office for unlawfully discriminating against Latinos, and in turn, disregarding basic constitutional rights.
Arpaio said Wednesday that he’ll fight the charges in court. “And then we’ll find out the real story. They’re telling me how to run my organization,” he said. “I’d like to get this resolved, but I’m not going to give up my authority to the federal government. It’s as simple as that.”
Here are some of the disturbing allegations from the 32-page lawsuit about the conduct of Arpaio and his office. (Read the full lawsuit here, and the story about ithere.)
Maricopa County Employees Call Latinos Derogatory Names
Jail employees frequently refer to Latinos as “wetbacks,” “Mexican bitches,” and “stupid Mexicans,” according to the lawsuit. An email that included a photography of a Chihahua dressed in swimming gear with the caption “A Rare Photo of a Mexican Navy Seal” was widely distributed by sheriff’s office supervisors.
MCSO Employees Fail To Provide Assistance To Prisoners With Limited English
The failure to provide adequate language assistance caused some female Latina prisoners to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation, alleges the suit.
Others have allegedly been put in solitary confinement for “extended periods of time” for not understanding a command in English.
(via socialuprooting)
BEFORE HE WAS A MURDERER, J.T. READY GAVE US A TOUR OF THE BORDER
When it was reported that a guy named Jason Todd Ready shot four people in Arizona—including a 15-month-old girl—and then himself, our hearts sunk, not just because of the sheer ugliness and horror of the tragedy, but also because we knew J.T. Ready. Or at least, we profiled him as part of a piece on the civilian militias patrolling the US-Mexico border we shot for our MTV show last year. J.T. was the leader of the “Ready Rangers” a group of self-appointed immigration enforcers who go around the desert with automatic weapons hoping to shoot Mexican drug dealers in the face. It was pretty clear from spending even a short amount of time with the guy that J.T. was a racist, a nutjob, and someone who had delusional fantasies about machine-gunning the bad guys like an action-movie hero. Even so, it’s a pretty big leap from that to actually doing what he did. It’s clear now that the guy had more twisted demons inside him than even the average gun-toting militia member. The cops are still sorting out what events led to the senseless death of four people, but in the next few days, we’re sure the shooting will serve to bring up old debates about Arizona’s incredibly lax gun laws (you can basically own a tank there) and the existence of these militias—if that isn’t already happening.
Watch our piece on J.T. Ready here
(via paxamericana)
Anti-Latino Law In Arizona Causes Spike In Latino Absenses
A top U.S. Justice Department official warned Alabama’s education department that the state’s controversial immigration law has had “lasting” and possibly illegal consequences for Hispanic school children, according to a letter released Thursday.
“(The law has) diminished access to and quality of education for many of Alabama’s Hispanic children, resulted in missed school days, chilled or prevented the participation of parents in their children’s education, and transformed the climates of some schools into less safe and welcoming spaces for Hispanic children,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, head of the federal department’s Civil Rights Division.
The legislation, known as HB 56, has several provisions, including one requiring police who make lawful traffic stops or arrests to try to determine the immigration status of anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally.
Superintendent of Education Thomas Bice points to data provided by Alabama officials that, he says, shows that “Hispanic students absence rates tripled while absence rates for other groups of students remained virtually flat.” That includes a sharp drop in those getting schooling through English as a second language programs, meaning they did not “receive the educational services to which they are legally entitled.”
(via socialuprooting)
Arizona Official Considering Banning Ethnic Studies In Universities Too
Two years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of some ethnic studies courses in K-12 schools, and now it may expand the prohibition to universities too.
Just weeks after the state passed its infamous immigration law, it also passed a law aimed at scuttling Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, which critics claimed taught kids to resent white people. The argument, at the time, was that teaching subjects like critical race theory to kids in high school amounted to indoctrination because they were not old enough to question the teaching critically, like university students.
But now, Arizona’s chief education official sees university-level Mexican-American sudies programs as a danger too:
Arizona’s superintendent of schools, John Huppenthal, says Tucson’s suspended Mexican American studies curricula teaches students to resent Anglos, and that the university program that educated the public school teachers is to blame.
“I think that’s where this toxic thing starts from, the universities,” Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said in an interview with Fox News Latino. “To me, the pervasive problem was the lack of balance going on in these classes,” Huppenthal said.
Not surprisingly, a long list of Latino groups and education activists have protested the move, as they did when the state shut down Tucson’s program, decrying the imposition on free speech. “What we’re trying to do is expose children to a much broader perspective, so that we’re not indoctrinating,” said Augustine Romero, the former director of Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Department.
The ethnic studies law, which bans schools from offering courses designed for a specific ethnicity, had far-ranging consequences, including banning books like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other seemingly anodyne works of literature.
And while many call the state prohibitions unprecedented, Devon Peña, the former director of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies said, “There is a precedent, and it’s called McCarthyism.” “It’s just a witch hunt of a different color. Now, instead of going after the reds, they’re going after the browns.”
(via socialuprooting)
