All of Us Are Learning About Something - #DoctorWhoDay, #DoctorWhoDay60, and Holidaze Saturday Night OT

 

 

I still feel like I know about as much about Doctor Who as I do about football even though I really am trying to learn, y’all

 

And I know we have several knowledgeable fans in our ranks so please feel free to edumuckate in the comments

🙂

(I could not find a TARDIS emoji in the Blogger set)

 

I know a few things about developing technology, sociology, the current U.S. and international political situations, and retrenchment, and Ruta Benjamin and Adam Serwer know more than me, so I’m going to put a few of their things here so that everyone can partake who cares to, since what they’ve spent their professional lives detailing for the rest of us is feeling increasingly urgent

 

RUHA BENJAMIN

 

Ruha Benjamin’s TED Talk 2 weeks ago – on how even (or perhaps especially) with technology a certain class of peoples’ imagination attempts to limit what is possible

 

 

Ruha Bejamin’s TED Talk 8 years ago (IDK which this illustrates more vividly, how little progress has been made as a result in great part of repeated retrenchment going back in this country at least to 1860, or, alternatively, how many times those of us on the side of progress have to repeat ourselves before necessary messages sink in)

 

 

ADAM SERWER

 It’s his book title we are quoting when we say “The Cruelty Is the Point” so I hope people will tune in to this message as well

 

If people have not seen Alex Wagner’s interview with Adam on Republican-appointed judges’ continued attempted destruction of the voting rights of most Americans (one of them judge so racist then-Senator Al Franken tried to blue-slip him and Senator Charles Grassley defied Senate norms (surprise, surprise) and refused to let him do it) – the video, which begins

 

“In April of 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed the 3^rd extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  And  - he did so *reluctantly*”

 

is right here

 

 

and I'm gifting as many people as the magazine lets read it (the Atlantic “gift” feature apparently remains in red-printed BETA) the piece he wrote on the topic with the title

“The Decision That Could End Voting Rights”

and the concomitant opening paragraph

“The right to vote free of racial discrimination was won by blood and sacrifice, those of both the soldiers who fought to preserve the Union and the enslaved and formerly enslaved, and inscribed in the Constitution as the Fifteenth Amendment, so that sacrifice would not be in vain. But that right is also very inconvenient for the modern Republican Party, which would like to be able to discriminate against Black voters without interference from the government.”

here  👇👇

 “The Decision That Could End Voting Rights”

so that was fun