What Now?

[VelociRapture]

I already shared this in the Obamacare thread, but figured it's relevant here too:

True story - I thought this was a hoax. Turns out, it's 100% legitimate. I just called myself and left my vote of support for Obama's plan. If you're concerned about healthcare in this country, then please give this number a call and make your opinion heard.

[formergothardite]

It worked for me too. The line really does sound dead for about 30 seconds. I also got the option to leave a message for Paul Ryan after I voted. 

[bashfulpixie]

Worked for me too

[mamallama]

I voted.  Ryan's mailbox wasn't answering  when I called.  So sad.

[SilverBeach]

18 hours ago, VelociRapture said:

I already shared this in the Obamacare thread, but figured it's relevant here too:

True story - I thought this was a hoax. Turns out, it's 100% legitimate. I just called myself and left my vote of support for Obama's plan. If you're concerned about healthcare in this country, then please give this number a call and make your opinion heard.

Done, thanks for sharing this important information.

[GreyhoundFan]

The Washington Post published an interesting article about coping with the results of the election if you didn't vote for Cheeto.

It includes interesting stories about big and little things different people have done, from just doing things to stay calm to donating to charities.

[Tesseract]

I have a question. What sources are you looking to for news? I'm on a MSM break - just can't right now. I've been reading The Intercept, The Guardian, and AlJazeera English. What else is out there to consider?

[RoseWilder]

19 minutes ago, Tesseract said:

I have a question. What sources are you looking to for news? I'm on a MSM break - just can't right now. I've been reading The Intercept, The Guardian, and AlJazeera English. What else is out there to consider?

Newsweek

Mother Jones

Slate

Daily Kos

Vox 

Huffington Post 

I've been avoiding TV for the most part, but the one show that I do think has been doing a good job lately is The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. He's really been calling Trump and his ilk out on their crap. His twitter page is good too: 

https://twitter.com/Lawrence?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

https://twitter.com/thelastword?lang=en

[RoseWilder]

The Legal director of the ACLU has some advice: 

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/14/way-to-stop-trump-lessons-of-war-on-terror/

Quote

For much of his first term, Bush did indeed get away with such tactics. But much to his dismay, Americans did not sit back and accept that the executive was above the law. As I describe in my recent book, Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law, they protested, filed lawsuits, wrote human rights reports, lobbied foreign audiences and governments to bring pressure to bear on the United States, leaked classified documents, and broadly condemned the administration’s actions as violations of fundamental constitutional and human rights. Human Rights First organized retired generals and admirals; the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve, aided by an army of pro-bono lawyers, brought the plight of Guantanamo detainees to the world’s attention; the Bill of Rights Defense Committee sparked a grassroots protest through local referenda on the Patriot Act; and the ACLU used the Freedom of Information Act to dislodge thousands of documents detailing the CIA’s torture program, which it and PEN American Center then disseminated in accessible form. The academy, the press, and the international community all joined in the condemnation. 

As a result, the course of history changed. By the time Bush left office in 2009, he had released more than five hundred of the detainees from Guantanamo, emptied out the CIA’s secret prisons, halted the CIA interrogation program and extraordinary renditions, and placed the NSA’s surveillance program under judicial supervision. His claims of uncheckable executive power had been rejected, and the Geneva Conventions applied to all detainees. 

Bush did not introduce these reforms because he came to realize his wrongs. His memoir, like that of his vice-president, Dick Cheney, is entirely unrepentant. But Bush was nonetheless checked—by American civil society, international criticism, and, for the first time in history, the Court and Congress. The Supreme Court established that any detainee held at Guantanamo has a right to judicial review (Boumediene v. Bush), that the Geneva Conventions apply to all Al Qaeda detainees (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld), and that the president cannot hold US citizens as enemy combatants without affording them a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). And in 2005 Congress, under Republican Senator John McCain’s leadership, and over the administration’s strenuous objections, adopted the Detainee Treatment Act, a bipartisan prohibition on the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading tactics against anyone in US custody—therefore barring waterboarding and other patently cruel interrogation tactics.

These rules and precedents will rein in Trump, just as they reined in Bush. Moreover, the combined effect of international condemnation of the CIA torture program, Obama’s repudiation of it, and the damning report about it by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will make any effort to revive those tactics extraordinarily difficult. (By contrast, Obama’s troubling use of drones to engage in secret targeted killing far from any battlefield leaves Trump an extremely dangerous weapon. While Obama introduced some reforms to the drone program in the latter part of his administration, they are not binding on a subsequent president, and because the existing guidelines continue to permit secret killing, they defeat any meaningful accountability.)

So if Bush could be stopped, notwithstanding widespread popular support, a large-scale attack on US soil leading to a war footing, and a history of judicial and congressional acquiescence in similar prior periods, Trump is also stoppable. He doesn’t have anything like the popular support Bush had after 9/11. And the recent history of the repudiation of Bush’s abuses will make it harder to repeat them. 

 

[Tesseract]

7 hours ago, RoseWilder said:

Newsweek

Mother Jones

Slate

Daily Kos

Vox 

Huffington Post 

I've been avoiding TV for the most part, but the one show that I do think has been doing a good job lately is The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. He's really been calling Trump and his ilk out on their crap. His twitter page is good too: 

https://twitter.com/Lawrence?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author

https://twitter.com/thelastword?lang=en

Thank you! I've read articles on some of those sites from time to time, but will check them out more regularly. Like you, I can't tune into tv right now. 

There is so much to think about. I've been looking at the support and criticism around Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. It's going to be a major task to rebuild the Democratic Party &/or build a viable alternative.

Internationally, while we've been focusing on the orange, the U.K. just passed surveillance laws giving unprecedented power to the government - power more expansive than ours. France appears to be headed far right. The Netherlands, apparently, not far behind. A lot of interrelated goalposts seem to be moving and it is a lot to keep track of. 

 

[VelociRapture]

For our Texans:

http://www.newnownext.com/konni-burton-texas-senate-lgbt/11/2016/

Start calling up your State Senators and Reps to voice disapproval for this bill. Spread the word online and in person to people who would oppose its passing. This bill is basically trying to legitimize forcing teachers to out their LGBTQ+ students to their parents. Completely disgusting and totally indefensible. All it'll accomplish is destroying whatever trust a student may have for their teachers and parents, while also making it easier for some parents to shame or ostracize their child.

If you need a teacher to tell you your child is LGBTQ, then you have much bigger problems to think about - like why your kid wasn't comfortable telling you themself. 

[VelociRapture]

For anyone looking to be an asshole to someone that truly deserves it - I humbly present them Donald Trump Postcard Avalanche:

I plan on signing mine with, "A very concerned American who doesn't appreciate your promotion of racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, ableist, and xenophobic ideology." Or something like that.

Have fun my lovelies!  

[SilverBeach]

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.go6pNQP1Q#.hgmEo6M56

This is a problem.

 

[FakePigtails]

3 hours ago, SilverBeach said:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.go6pNQP1Q#.hgmEo6M56

This is a problem.

But what can we even do when so many people think any remotely mainstream source can't be trusted? I just don't know how to reason with people like that. I've even seen someone who's normally reasonable claim that FOX is no good!

It also reminds me of this tweet I saw over the weekend, which I can relate to way too much: 

 

[Terrie]

I've also seen the flip side. An article with citations which someone swore up and down was a fake news site, because it didn't agree with their worldview.

[candygirl200413]

My freshman year seminar we spent like 4-5 classes just on sources alone and like after the second one we were all like CAN WE STOP WE GET IT!! almost 5 years later I'm like THANK YOU!! And seeing the few people I'm friends with from that class we haven't posted questionable things so I'm very tempted to email said professor to thank them.

 

Edit: Haven't finished the article, but this still surprised me, in middle school we started writing essays by 6th grade to find sources:

Quote

Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they’re often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find.

Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.

More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo.

Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are taking steps to prevent sites that disseminate fake news from using their advertising platforms, and Twitter Inc. is moving to curb harassment by users. But that won’t get rid of false or biased information online, which comes from many sources, including deceptive advertising, satirical websites and misleading partisan posts and articles.

Evaluating the Credibility of News Sources

A growing number of schools are teaching students to be savvy about choosing and believing various information sources, a skill set educators label “media literacy.” A free Stanford social-studies curriculum that teaches students to judge the trustworthiness of historical sources has been downloaded 3.5 million times, says Sam Wineburg, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the lead author of the study on teens.

However, fewer schools now have librarians, who traditionally taught research skills. And media literacy has slipped to the margins in many classrooms, to make room for increased instruction in basic reading and math skills.

Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise” and founder of Raising Digital Natives, an Evanston, Ill., provider of consulting services to schools, suggests parents pick up on their children’s interests and help them to find and evaluate news on the topic online. Encourage them to read a variety of sources. For small children, Common Sense Media, a San Francisco nonprofit, lists browsers and search sites that are safe for children, including KidzSearch.com and KidsClick.org.

Parents can instill early a healthy skepticism about published reports. Vincent Tran and his wife Christina allow their three children, ages 10, 8 and 6, to research sports, games and other topics that interest them by googling or by asking Siri or Alexa. Mr. Tran, a Web architect, blocks sites he considers inappropriate for his children and doesn’t allow them to use social media.

Link:http://www.wsj.com/articles/most-students-dont-know-when-news-is-fake-stanford-study-finds-1479752576

[VelociRapture]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/willing-oppose-trump-senate-republicans-gain-leverage-110716239.html

We can't know how serious the resistance against the Moldy Orange will be. But it is a bit reassuring to see some prominent Republicans already saying what they will and won't compromise on. I just really hope that they're being serious about standing firm on certain issues.

[VelociRapture]

Dear President-Elect,

I hope you enjoy the postcards I'll be sending you on the 26th! I know I certainly am! 

Spoiler

I had to trim them to hide the name of my town. The picture on the front is from my town - it features a statue of George Washington since he passed through here twice. I thought that was rather appropriate. Because Washington would be much disappoint in Trump. 

 

[Terrie]

Trump mainly cares about Trump and his reputation. He finally gave a minimum standard denouncement of the alt-right in response to constant questions and pressure, but also claimed Bannon is not a memeber of the movement. We need to make it cost more to keep Bannon than the blow to his ego of admiting he's wrong.

[RoseWilder]

I just saw this on twitter: 

 

[JMarie]

^^ Done!  And no busy signal!

[candygirl200413]

I'm going to try again! I called like 10 times a few hours ago and never got through.

[Destiny]

Is there a historical precedent for this? Like, if it's discovered that there is shenanigans, what happens?

[RoseWilder]

Here's an article that talks more about this: 

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html

Quote

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

 

[candygirl200413]

With PA I was completely shocked because as a volunteer and just living in PA for a majority of my life, the HFA was saying if she won my county and the three surrounding it (she was a shoe-in for Philadelphia, and with the surrounding suburban counties she would basically be able to win the state, which I wonder was that due to population?) They also said that 4 counties that have traditionally been blue for years alongside the state turned red.... plus some of the margins were just a little too close.

 

Also I've tried another 10 times to call and it's still busy!