The Politics Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

Uh, he's an actor. Is that who you thought was on this list?

Adewale Adeyemo otoh, is the Deputy Secretary Of Treasury for the U.S. 

[I Am A Swede]

Of course I know he's an actor!  

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Like I said, I was just skimming through the list and saw the name Adewale, and he's the only Adewale I had heard of, so for a split second, no more than that, his image popped up in my mind.

[DramatistDreamer]

Oh okay. 

I am familiar with both, so there was no confusion in my mind. 

Lately, I have been seeing a lot of people mistake Black folks for each other and I guess it's starting to get on my nerves, tbh.

[xtr]

I'm not a fan of Daylight Saving Time possibly being permanent, but it looks like that may be where we are headed. I don't like the thought of kids having to go to school in the dark, and I don't want or need it to be sunny late in the evening all year round. I like dark winter evenings and I dislike other things about it as well. I would rather it be Standard Time All Year Round. I'm glad that I decided to take most of my annual/vacation leave off in Fall. Not only is it my favorite time of the year, but if this passes, I can at least try and enjoy one more fall before it becomes permanent. Though if it is made permanent I wonder if it will actually stay that way or if it will fail like it did in the 70's.

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by xtr

[marceline]

I can already tell that this Daylight Savings thing is going to turn into civil war. I mean literally the north vs. the south. I keep seeing people say that they don't want kids going to school in the dark but that's literally the reality for kids who live above a certain longitude. In winter, you end up having to do stuff in the dark.

[Vee]

 

[JaneAusten]

Millions of Kids already do this as you said in certain longitudes. It's stupid frankly. The main reason to do it is to save energy. The experiment in the 1970's for permanent daylight savings time was tried to save energy in an energy crisis and we couldn't suck it up then. I'm frankly sick of leaving for work in the winter when it's dark and having it dark when I leave work. I'll take dark in the morning every day if needed to have some daylight when I leave work to enjoy for a short time.

Since suburban parents can't really suck up anything to make our lives better, I don't expect this to last. It will likely be rolled back.

Edited March 16, 2022 by JaneAusten

[Vee]

I went to school in the damn dark for years in DC. It happens.

[DramatistDreamer]

And if you have extra-curriculars that surround winter sports, you're often leaving for school when it's still dark and coming home when it's already getting dark.

They need to decide on one way to stop messing with people's circadian rhythms and seasonal mental health issues.

 

On another topic, politicians have to stop (mis)using and abusing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

[Khan]

Same.

[janea4old]

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses US Congress.
March 16, 2022

Annotated transcript of Zelensky's speech to Contress:
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/03/politics/ukraine-zelensky-congress-speech-annotated/

Edited March 16, 2022 by janea4old

[Juliajms]

This is why Biden is probably right, but I find it hard to take.

[marceline]

This is the real issue. I understand why some people would prefer we stick with Standard time rather than Daylight. That's a perfectly legitimate debate to have. But the "children going to school in the dark" argument falls apart under even the most basic pushback. All day I've been watching this debate on Twitter and it always comes down to some assertion that kids will get run down by cars en masse. Which leads to my followup questions...

Does your neighborhood not have streetlights, traffic lights, school zones, crosswalks, or crossing guards?

If your children walk to school then you have to live fairly close, what mechanisms have already been put in place to ensure the safety of children? (This is an excellent chance to remind people about the existence of school zones.)

Does your school system have a program for teaching kids about safety? (Cleveland schools have one. I don't know how common this kind of thing is though.)

As we've seen over the last few years people love to use children as rhetorical human shields. Masks become "child abuse." Teaching accurate history is "indoctrination." But the truth is that children handle this stuff much better than many of the adults in their lives. Kids were fine with masks. It was their parents who couldn't handle it. Kids learning about slavery and the Holocaust doesn't harm them. It gives them context and teaches empathy but it's the parents who don't want little Dakota and Heavenleigh to learn that their ancestors enslaved people.

Sorry, I'm on a bit of a tear. I just really need the generation growing up now to be stronger than the one before them.

[DramatistDreamer]

Yeah, I have even heard some people start to complain that DST will be dangerous for the bus drivers on the roads, as if they really care about bus drivers who are subject to bad roads, terrible pay-- many drivers suffered from lack of pay during the pandemic while they waited for unemployment.

Whether it's ST or DST, I can deal with it personally but I have no use for the backwards and forwards. I used to work with someone who suffered from acute SAD, so much so that he was on medication and ultimately decided to move to another state that would provide more sunshine during the winter months.

I don't know what the suicide rate is lately but I feel as if I have been reading a lot of news about suicides among people in their 30s and I wonder whether this is a factor behind the push and no one really wants to admit it.

It does seem like everyone is ultra concerned about children, which is strange considering how money for education usually gets cut first and there are still issues with overcrowding and I just know that not all of these schools are properly ventilated despite Covid still being around.

Also, a lot of these same people who claim they want to protect children from the dark, also claim to be protecting the children from CRT, bilingual education and whatever else seems to close to the real world that we live in

 

[marceline]

That's a whole different conversation. The state of mental health in this country has become critical among people of all ages but I think social media has been a molotov cocktail of fuel for narcissists, psychopaths and nihilists of all stripes. 

History is filled with how populations have been taken down by diseases they had no immunity to. I feel like millennials and Gen-Z don't have any immunity to propaganda/disinformation.

Yes, this is basically me telling the kids to get off my lawn. I said what I said. 

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Edited March 17, 2022 by marceline