A new study has exposed the startling lack of access to sexual healthcare in the UK. After testing the healthcare resources across Great Britain, the researchers nearly half of all requests for doctor’s appointments concerning sexual health were denied.
The study was conducted by Terrence Higgins Trust, a nonprofit focused on HIV and sexual health services, with support from British Association of Sexual Health and HIV. In the UK, the National Health Service is funded by the government, and the researchers wanted to examine “the state of sexual health services after a decade of austerity.”
Under the persona of a ‘mystery shopper’ called ‘Gabriela,’ the researchers contacted 57 clinics in England, Scotland, and Wales to try to book a sexual health appointment. ‘Gabriela’ was described as being in her mid-20s, having recently had unprotected sex with both men and women, and as experiencing no symptoms. The researchers chose this persona in order to test whether clinics prioritized symptomatic patients, given that asymptomatic patients are common in STIs like chlamydia.
What they found was that 49% of appointment requests in all three countries were denied. The remaining 51% did offer face-to-face appointments, but with wait times averaging 13 days (19 in rural areas).
While these appointments were successfully made by telephone, online booking proved challenging. In England, only 10% of clinics offered online booking, none in Wales, 44% in Scotland.
Only 11% of clinics offered walk-in appointments without exceptions. Postal STI testing, meanwhile, varied wildly. All clinics in Wales offered mail-in testing, but only 56% in Scotland did.
In consequence, the researchers are calling on all three countries to provide free year-round postal testing, easy access to online appointment booking, and to reduce wait times to no more than 48 hours.
“The sexual health of the nation has consistently been ignored by Central Government,” said Richard Angell, Chief Executive of Terrence Higgins Trust. “A wake-up call is needed. If more than 1,000 new STIs being diagnosed each and every day does not incentivize policy change and renewed investment, it is hard to see what will.
“Ultimately, you get what you pay for – the lowest real terms spending on sexual health is matched by the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections.
“The Government should guarantee long-term funding settlements for sexual health services at a rate of inflation plus 1 percent so as to address years of consistent under-funding.”
Category: Political / Governments / Nations / Countries /
The bad samaritans: How a lack of empathy among Republicans is a threat to us all
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD – MARCH 6, 2014: Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).Photo: Shutterstock“Under the Hitler regime…the most important thing that I learned…was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.” -Joachim Prinz, Rabbi of Berlin, exiled in 1937 to the United States, from his speech August 28, 1963 in Washington, DC
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” –Voltaire
After engaging in the games for a while, one of the friends, Jeremy Strohmeyer, walked toward the restrooms. Seeing that he entered the women’s room, the other young man, David Cash, walked in to see what Jeremy was doing. He noticed that Jeremy was playfully throwing wadded paper towels at a young black girl, who seemed at first to have enjoyed the attention.
But then the scene turned violent. Strohmeyer grabbed 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson, placed his hand over her mouth, and spirited her into a toilet stall as Cash watched by the sinks. He entered an adjacent stall and mounted the toilet edge allowing him to peer down as he saw Jeremy continuing to muffle the girl’s screams and warning Sherrice to keep quiet or he would kill her.
Not wanting to get involved, Cash returned to playing video games. He did not attempt to stop his friend from attacking the young girl. He did not seek help or call law enforcement officials. He calmly played games and waited the 20 minutes it took for Jeremy to return. David asked Jeremy what had happened.
“I killed her,” Jeremy asserted with a certain serenity in his tone on that summer evening in 1997. Soon thereafter, the two friends coolly entered nearby casinos where they enjoyed mechanical rides and continued to play video games until it was time for them to return home.
With the assistance of the video security system implanted at the casino, Strohmeyer was eventually caught, tried, and convicted to life imprisonment for rape and murder. Cash, on the other hand, was never indicted because inaction was not a crime in Nevada at the time.
In reaction to the case and the lack of charges against Cash, Richard Perkins, Speaker of the Nevada Assembly, sponsored the Sherrice Iverson bill requiring Nevadans to notify law enforcement if they witness violent acts committed against a child. The law took effect in 1999, and a similar measure passed in California one year later.
Asked on a 1999 CBS 60 Minutes segment, The Bad Samaritan, whether if given a chance, he would do things differently, Cash said, “I don’t feel there is much I could have done differently.” Asked a similar question during an interview on a Los Angeles radio station, Cash gave a similar reply and added: “How much am I supposed to sit down and cry about this?” he asked. “The simple fact remains that I did not know this little girl. I do not know starving children in Panama. I do not know people dying of disease in Egypt.”
The Long Beach Press-Telegram quoted Cash as saying that he wanted to sell his story to the media. One movie company offered him $21,000. He added. “I’m no idiot,” he declared. “I’ll (expletive) get my money out of this.”
In not taking action to intervene on behalf of Sherrice Iverson, David Cash colluded in her death. “Enabler” is the term given to those who fail to act to help abusers. “Passive bystander” or “bad Samaritan” is the name for people who are conscious of bad actions developing around them but fail to intervene.
Though I have studied the Holocaust and other genocides, until I discovered this case, I always had the gnawing and seemingly unanswerable question pulling at me, “How could these incidents have taken place throughout the ages”?
David Cash taught me that mass murders happen on the macro level when people on the individual and collective levels let them happen, when witnesses– so-called “bystanders” – do little or nothing to intervene. When people either allow their fear or reluctance to “get involved” and supersede their empathy.
David Cash refused to see, hear, and stand up to do the right thing in the face of evil around him.
For the past eight years, the not see Republican Party has continually refused to see, hear, and stand up to the would-be authoritarian dictator, Donald J. Trump. By burying their heads in the political sand, they have permitted Trump to grab, assault, and ravage our governmental institutions physically and figuratively.
I now fully understand the process in the rise and takeover of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
Staying silent
Empathy, that special and majestic human quality, has always been a vital life force of our humanity. As we understand in psychology, unless there is developmental delay, infants demonstrate the rudimentary beginnings of empathy whenever they recognize that another is upset and then show signs of being upset themselves. Very early in their lives, infants develop the capacity to crawl in the diapers of others even though their own diapers don’t need changing.
Though empathy is a part of the human condition, through the process of socialization, others often teach us to inhibit our empathetic natures with messages like “Don’t cry,” “You’re too sensitive,” “Mind your own business,” “It’s not your concern.” We learn the stereotypes of the individuals and groups our society has “minoritized” and “othered.” We learn who to scapegoat for the problems within our neighborhoods, states, nations, and world.
Through it all, that precious life-affirming flame of empathy can wither and flicker. For some, it dies entirely. And as the blaze recedes, the bullies, the demagogues, and the tyrants take over by filling the void where our humanity once prevailed. And then we have lost something very precious.
David Cash represents the termination of empathy on the individual micro level, resulting not only in the possibly preventable rape and murder of a young girl, but the death of his own soul. And when the demise of empathy comes to people who are around powerful leaders and their willing subjects, the consequences, on the macro level, become exponentially deeper, more toxic, and more tragic.
Jeremy Strohmeyer and Donald Trump were cast from the same mold with their narcissistic, sociopathic personalities. Cash comes from the same mold as many current members of the Republican Party in that they lack sufficient empathy, which overrides their actions.
For example, Trump knew early of the deadly potential of the Coronavirus, but he decided to lie to the public while failing to mobilize any discernible national policies and actions due to concerns for stock markets over the health and safety of the people. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
Trump has referred to our military personnel as “suckers” and “losers” for joining the military, for being captured, for dying, and for receiving meager financial compensation. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
Earlier, he carelessly blamed the mayor of London for being incompetent after a terrorist attack on his city. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
He accused the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico of playing politics and being ungrateful, and the Puerto Rican people of being lazy and expecting everything to be done for them on their “bankrupt” island after a “500-year” storm virtually shut them down and people clung desperately to life. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
He referred to white nationalist neo-Nazi terrorists in Charlottesville, Virginia, who showed up for a so-called “Unite the Right” rally, as well as the counter-demonstrators, as “Good people, on both sides.” Regarding his reference to the white nationalists, many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
He mocked a disabled reporter, took away the rights of trans students to use bathrooms most closely aligning with their gender identities, demonized Latinx people, Muslims, and women, ridiculed Gold Star parents who sacrificed so much while Donald Trump sat on his gold-plated toilet and attempted to take away affordable health insurance from an estimated 20 million low-income people. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
And he behaved as if the series of package bombs sent through the mail to leading Democratic politicians and activists was nothing more than an inconvenience during the closing days of the midterm election season. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
Trump separated young children from their refugee parents and placed them in cages as if they were feral animals. Many Republican leaders failed to speak up.
And he risked the very lives of members of Congress and his own Vice President on January 6, 2021, after he lost over 60 court cases in his attempts to circumvent the results of a fair election. While some Republican leaders harshly criticized Trump at the time, they ultimately reversed themselves and got on their knees to kiss his ring.
Empathy can save the world
Quite frankly, I find few differences between the attitudes and actions of Jeremy Strohmeyer on the micro level and Donald J. Trump on the macro level.
I find few differences between the attitudes and inactions of David Cash and the majority of the current Republican Party in their refusal to stand up and act in the best interests of a young girl, in Cash’s case, and in service to the fragile democratic experiment we know as the United States of America in the case of the Republican Party.
Though the Cashes and Republicans are more numerous than we can even imagine, empathy has always been an antidote to the poison of inaction, prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, and scapegoating, and to bullies and demagogues who take power and control.
Empathy is the life force of our humanness, and ultimately it is the key to our recovery during the current crisis in our country.
I often wonder how Trump’s Republican bad Samaritan enablers can sleep at night and get back up in the morning still willing to degrade and prostrate themselves by attacking our democratic institutions and seriously dismantling our country’s standing in the world.
A recent poll taken by The Hill found that 80% of registered Republicans believe that if elected as the next President of the United States in 2024, Trump should be able to serve even if he is convicted of multiple felony charges, including in the case of willingly and unconstitutionally holding onto classified documents. Even in the case of the documents, many Republican leaders either failed to speak up or they are speaking up in his defense.
Each time anyone enables an abusive action or actor, they keep perpetrators and themselves further from the truth and from help, and they diminish themselves and their integrity more than just a bit.
I have been stuck time and time again on the post-factual campaign, transition, presidency, and now post-presidency of Donald J. Trump. I get stuck on the lies, the verifiable lies, big and small that he spreads and on his direct attacks on our democratic institutions, like the entire judicial system, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the State Department, state legislatures and secretaries of state who would not overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
Even more troubling, however, are Trump’s enablers who spin the facts by turning themselves into virtual pretzels in defense of Trump’s attempts – to paraphrase Voltaire – to make us believe his absurdities he uses to give himself permission to commit possible atrocities.
His sustained and vicious attacks on what he refers to as the “dishonest and corrupt” media imperil our very freedom of the press as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Fortunately, many of the outlets within the Fourth Estate, while making some mistakes, fact-check themselves and our politicians, including Trump, and by so doing, exposes his lies for what they are.
Rep. LAUGHED AT For Not Knowing The Law
Germany’s naked truth: the 19th-century nudism movements co-opted by the Nazis
German socialists saw nudism as a weapon of class struggle. George Hull investigates how nudist movements grew out of the crowded, dirty cities of the late 19th century before being co-opted by the Nazis in their quest for racial purity
Published: October 20, 2021 at 7:05 am
There can’t be many sources of genuine culture shock left for a Brit travelling in western Europe. In Germany there is at least one: stumbling upon naked people in the most unlikely places.
On a hot summer day, it isn’t just at nudist beaches on the Baltic coast or in designated zones beside bathing lakes inland that naked sunbathers are to be found. Take a lunch-hour stroll in Frankfurt’s Grüneburgpark or Munich’s Englischer Garten and there they’ll be, a stone’s throw from the traffic and bustle of the city centre, nonchalantly applying their sun cream. Visit a German sauna in winter and, likely as not, you’ll be asked to remove your towel. Go for a dip in the Berlin municipal baths and you may discover it’s naked swimming day.
Beyond noting that the Germans are decidedly comfortable with nudity, the British tourist might be tempted to see in this phenomenon the legacy of an atavistic Romanticism or even the reactionary ‘folkish’ currents in German culture on which the kitsch paganism sponsored by the Nazis drew. This wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but it is only part of the truth. For one thing, far and away the most successful organised nudist movement in German history stemmed from the progressive left. For another, one of the first things the Nazis did upon being elected into office was to ban nudism.
The colourful history of nudism in Germany encompasses the best and worst aspects of this complex nation.
The final quarter of the 19th century was for Germany a time of swift industrialisation and mass internal migration. During the Second Empire (1871–1918) half of all Germans left their place of birth for the city. This vast influx to the new urban centres, mostly in west Germany, gave rise to a burgeoning civil society made up of diverse neighbourhood associations, social and political subcultures and organised movements, in which new arrivals sought to carve a niche for themselves. It also gave rise to crowded, damp and unhealthy living conditions for the majority.
Many of the associations and subcultures grew up precisely as a response to these substandard living conditions, which they saw as creating a public health crisis. The ‘life reform’ groups experimented with a variety of measures to confront the perceived crisis, ranging from vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and nicotine, natural healing and Buddhism to the building of rural communes and ‘garden cities’. Some of them embraced what the Swiss physician Arnold Rikli called ‘Lichtluftbäder’ (‘light and air baths’) – naked sunbathing – as an effective natural therapy.
Classical inspiration
Karl Diefenbach was the first life reformer to advocate nudity not just as a therapy but as a way of life. A strict vegetarian, he moved with his family to live in an abandoned quarry not far from Munich, naked, or wearing just a hair tunic in winter. In 1888 he was taken to court for being naked in public with his son. Undertaking his own defence, he persuaded the jury to acquit him. Diefenbach was an influential painter, for whom the summit of beauty was represented by the nude sculptures of ancient Greece. In his mind the benefits of nudity from a life-reform perspective coincided with an ideal he felt had been attained in ancient Greece, but which modern Europeans fell sadly short of: a perfect harmony between body and mind.
In urban artistic circles secret societies with a handful of members began growing up and strove to realise precisely this ideal. The members of Deutsch-Hellas, for example, went out into the woods and photographed one another naked in the poses of discus hurlers and Greek goddesses. Otherwise they held ‘beauty evenings’ in town, where they would pose nude as living statues or watch visiting celebrities such as Olga Desmond dance naked. They published their photos and musings in the magazine Die Schönheit (Beauty).
Diefenbach’s most famous pupil, Hugo Höppener, known as ‘Fidus’, took his inspiration from an idealised version of, not the Greek, but the German past. The Roman historian Tacitus had written of the German tribes that had fought the imperial legions fiercely – and often with success – in mixed ranks of men and women, all fully nude. It was these naked warrior ancestors of the German people whom Fidus depicted as an ideal Nordic type in his popular etchings, which blended the erotic with the esoteric and were published in nudist magazines.
As the years went on Fidus also wrote articles calling for a new disciplined German culture founded on pure racial descent from these Teutonic warriors. This resonated with people who had themselves concluded that the current public health crisis was a symptom of racial degeneration.
A lifestyle formula
While the living conditions of urban workers undoubtedly caused sickness and death, overall the second half of the 19th century had seen life expectancy and quality of life for most Germans increase to unprecedented heights. People who would once have been worried about survival were, by the turn of the century, more concerned with success. A new middle class was emerging, made up of those who had not received a classical education at a ‘gymnasium’ (selective, academically focused schools). Such people would probably not have read Tacitus and would spend little, if any, time thinking about ancient Greece. Die Schönheit would leave them cold.
They were impressed, however, by life reformers such as Richard Ungewitter, who had made a success of themselves against the odds and were offering a lifestyle formula that would give anyone who followed it an edge on the competition. Ungewitter’s bestselling autobiography told how a combination of veganism and nudism had allowed him to overcome his natural frailty and become a strong, successful man, able to “hike for 10 to 14 hours” and “perform daily the most strenuous mental work”.
Ungewitter performed nude gymnastics every day and worked naked at his desk, standing up, as proved by plentiful photographic illustrations in his numerous books.
On his epic hikes, Ungewitter became increasingly preoccupied with the health of the German race, which, he thought, had been “poisoned” by Jews, Africans and other “inferior racial riffraff”. Nudism was the answer to this problem, in his opinion, because in their naked state superior breeding partners would recognise one another straightaway and genetically inferior types would not be able to disguise themselves. The challenge, he thought, was to overcome the hypocritical prudery of Wilhelmine Germany of the late 19th and early 20th century.
He is at his most sympathetic when pointing out that the elaborate dress worn by bourgeois women, putatively out of natural modesty, was not just cumbersome and physically deforming but positively calculated to ratchet up sexual desire by exaggerating the bust and bottom. He suggested a law be passed prohibiting tight corsets on penalty of flogging.
Ungewitter’s nudist colleague, the former pastor and mystic Heinrich Pudor went one better. (His name, the Latin word for ‘a sense of modesty or shame’ was adopted to make a point.) For a start, he encouraged nudists to hiss at corset-wearers in the street and call them ‘whores’. What he thought was really needed, however, was a revival of the ancient German punishment for unchaste behaviour: being sunk alive in a bog. But then, for Pudor, more was at stake. As he explained in volume 3 of his book, Nacktkultur, if people started living naked this would ultimately allow humans to become immortal.
A lake in the March of Brandenburg, Motzener See, within easy reach of Berlin, became a centre for the naked scene after the First World War. On the east bank there gathered bourgeois nudist groups of the Ungewitter/Pudor persuasion. South of these were Freisonnland, founded by Fedor Fuchs as a dedicated area for naked sport, and Charly Strässer’s Birkenheide, a naked area exclusively for young people – measured, as he used to stress, “not in years, but in vitality”.
Strässer himself had been involved in the Wandervögel (literally ‘hiking birds’) before the war – a camping and hill walking youth group bearing some resemblance to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, except that it was a rebellious movement with no adult supervision.
It was the spirit of the Wandervögel (who recognised themselves in Fidus’s etchings of youthful Nordic warriors) that Strässer tried to recreate in Birkenheide. The boys and girls who met there to swim naked and play ball had nothing but scorn for the prissy vegetarian moralism and ‘light and air baths’ of the bourgeois groups further along the lakeside.
They also had little to do with the rapidly growing League of Free Men, a nudist group founded by Adolf Koch that met on Motzener’s north-east bank. Whereas Charly Strässer’s group was formed largely of rich kids from west Berlin, the League of Free Men comprised workers from the squalid housing blocks in the city’s eastern half.
A fitter proletariat
Koch had started as an elementary school teacher in Berlin where he encountered first-hand the worst effects of industrialisation and urbanisation on the young. Like many life reformers before him, he thought that sunlight and gymnastics were needed to improve the health of the workers, but he realised these on their own would not be enough. What was needed, in his opinion, was for the growing proletarian class to take collective action, removing the societal causes of poverty and disadvantage. But for this to happen, he thought, individual proletarians would need to become fitter, better-informed and more rational – particularly in their approach to sex and reproduction.
So Koch began keeping his class behind after school for nude gymnastics, political discussion and sex education. One fateful day a Catholic cleaning woman told her priest she’d “happened to catch sight through a keyhole” of what Koch and his pupils were up to. The priest informed the press and a scandal erupted. This experience radicalised Koch, who thought it was just one example of how vested interests like the Catholic church were preventing the self-development of the working class.
In 1924 he set up his own private School for Healthy Pedagogy and Body Culture in Berlin. By the end of the 1920s, 13 Koch schools had been established in cities around Germany for working-class people of all ages.
Members of the Koch schools performed two hours of nude gymnastics weekly, regularly took part in political discussions and received a full medical check-up every three months. American observers Frances and Mason Merrill reported as many girls as boys at Koch schools, respect between the genders and hygiene standards equal to those of “the most up-to-date hospital clinic”. Unlike any of the bourgeois nudist associations, Koch schools never barred entry to anyone because they were fat, ugly or disabled. The membership fee was also much lower than that of the bourgeois associations. Koch set it at five per cent of an adult’s yearly income, but his schools were free to children, the unemployed, pregnant women and mothers of infants.
Though the various bourgeois nudist associations published more literature and have consequently left a larger documentary trace, membership numbers at the Koch schools were far higher: so much so that his socialist nudism was by far the most popular nudist movement in German history. By 1933, 3,947 people had gone through the Berlin Koch school alone. In the early 1930s there were around 80,000 practising nudists in Germany; 20,000 belonged to the bourgeois nudist groups and the remaining 60,000 or so belonged either to Koch schools or to affiliated socialist nudist groups.
Nazi appropriation
On 3 March 1933 Hermann Göring passed a decree abolishing the “naked culture movement”, which, he said “deadens women’s natural feelings of shame and kills men’s respect for women”. The Hitler Youth was despatched to wreck the grounds of nudist clubs. Koch tried a variety of strategies to keep his schools open, including renaming them and himself joining the ill-fated SA, but in the end he was forced underground. It is rumoured that, like a Catholic priest in Elizabethan England, he travelled secretly from town to town, gathering adherents in a safe house for a session of nude gymnastics where he could.
A few nudist associations under the umbrella title, League for Body Discipline, were ultimately tolerated by the Nazi regime after an SS major, Hans Surén, won them over to it. Surén had been in charge of physical training in the German army, where he’d introduced such innovations as caber tossing and naked cross-country running. In 1924 he published a book, Man and the Sun, in which he outlined the benefits of his trademark gymnastic regimen, the mystical rewards of nudity and the advantages of oiling oneself all over when naked. The official justification for the oil was that it enabled one to withstand low temperatures when nude, but the illustrations in his book suggest it was at least partly a pretext for Surén to be photographed naked holding a spear or discus, doing an impression of a gleaming bronze statue.
Man and the Sun was reissued in 1936 – with racist additions – as Man and Sun: Aryan-Olympian Spirit, and was something of a hit in Nazi circles. By the end of the 1930s Richard Darré, Reinhard Heydrich and Rudolf Hess had all concluded that the nudism advocated by Surén was in line with Nazi thinking. In 1942 Heinrich Himmler introduced an ordinance officially permitting nude bathing. Surén’s own fortunes took a turn for the worse in the same year, however, as he was expelled from the Nazi Party for masturbating in public.
After the war Adolf Koch re-emerged and was instrumental in revitalising a liberal, denazified nudism in the new Federal Republic. But even in this changed political climate his ideas did not fit into the mainstream. His socialist emphasis on preparing the working class to claim what was theirs became an embarrassment to German nudist associations, as did his insistence that sex education should have a central place in nudism. Despite his decades of inspiring dedication to working-class nudism, he was expelled from the German Association for Free Body Culture in the early 1960s.
In any case, the era of organised German nudism was coming to an end. Himmler’s 1942 ordinance remained in force in both East and West Germany, meaning that people no longer had to join a club or enter a special enclosure to be nude outdoors. It is ironic, given the Nazis’ initial attitude towards nudism, that this law accounts in no small part for the widespread informal nudity in Germany today.
George Hull is currently completing a PhD in the history of philosophy at UCL. He has written for The Economist, The Spectator, Left Foot Forward, Time Out and The London Magazine among others
Florida History Curriculum To Note “Benefits” Of Slavery
Remember these racist bigots are a minority. They have been so since they lost the war to keep black people as property. Think about what the reporting says the majority turned out against this, yet the Board of education did it anyway. Der DeathSantis handpicked board. Think of what he would do if president. They are driven white supremacists who want real history erased and a fake nice version of slavery taught instead. Ask why? What is the gain, to not feel guilty? That is stupid, no current white person should feel guilty of racism unless they are promoting / practicing racism. And that is the point. These white people want to keep practicing racism, and a lot of them want to make it worse by returning to a time before the civil rights act that gave people of color a voice and a right to some equality in the country that the constitution says they are equal citizens. Seriously scary how deeply racism is in the red states and especially Florida and Texas.
As a side note when we first got to Florida we had a black friend visit us. I mention the skin color only because when we all went out to eat, the waitress at the restaurant refused to take his order, instead asking both Ron and then myself what the other (pointing to our friend) wanted to eat. This was in 1994. We complained but our friend who was experienced in the south did not want us to make a scene, so we agreed when management only offered to change the waitress. It was the first time I had experienced / seen that, and it really stuck in my mind. Totally horrible any person had to go through that dehumanizing experience that our friend did. I can not image how it makes one feel to be treated that way in front of friends. Hugs
The Tallahassee Democrat reports:
The Florida Board of Education approved a new curriculum for African American history on Wednesday, but not without pushback.
After more than an hour of public comment, with a majority of speakers opposed, the board voted unanimously to approve the social studies standards for African American history for kindergarten through 12th grades. Opponents say the curriculum leaves out Florida’s role in slavery and the oppression of African Americans, victim blames Black communities and uses outdated language.
In a letter to board member Ben Gibson, a group of 11 organizations, including the NAACP and the Florida Education Association, criticized the state for omitting or rewriting “key historical facts about the Black experience.”
The Washington Post reports:
More than a dozen speakers at Wednesday’s board meeting opposed the changes, including state Sen. Geraldine Thompson (D), who helped pass a law in 2020 that requires schools to teach lessons about the Ocoee Massacre. The incident in 1920 began when several Black residents attempted to vote, and ended with as many as 60 people dead, making it the deadliest instance of Election Day violence in U.S. history.
Thompson said the new curriculum “suggests that the massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That’s blaming the victims. ” State Rep. Anna Eskamani (D) said she was concerned about inaccuracies in the new standards, including instructing that enslaved people “developed skills” that could be helpful. “That is inaccurate and a scary standard for us to establish,” she said.
NYT: DeSantis Worsened Florida’s COVID Death Toll
If you remember Der DeathSantis attacked hard anyone who disagreed with his covid denial. When the vaccines were first made available the governor made sure his wealthy friends got first chance to get them, making sure distribution sites were next to or in wealthy enclaves. Then he held a sort of lottery where the pharmacy / company that gave him the largest donation would have exclusive rights to give out the vaccine. That was the Publix chain of grocery stores, which are found by and run on “Christian” principles. When state officials challenged his views of forcing companies to violate federal guidelines, he fired them and used the state legal authorities to attack and harm the whistleblowers. When the state medical community would go along with him he fired them, and hired one of the Frontline doctors that were scamming the maga by charging $90 or more for a short video medical consultation and then charged them for an Ivermectin prescription. This was led by the “semen doctor” who claimed demons were having sex with people leaving demon semen seed in them causing all sorts of illnesses. His new quack head of the Florida health department is a complete anti-vaccine covid denying fraud who is now raking in almost $600,000 when he first took the position because Der DeathSantis forced a state university to make him their president. Not a bad gig, going from scamming random maga people to making over half a million a year just to parrot and provide pseudo-science reasons for what ever the governor proclaims. Hugs
The New York Times reports:
In Florida, unlike the nation as a whole — and states like New York and California that Mr. DeSantis likes to single out — most people who died from Covid died after vaccines became available to all adults, not before. As the governor’s political positions began to shift, so did his state’s death rate, for the worse.
Mr. DeSantis and his aides have said that his opposition was to mandates, not to the vaccinations themselves. They say the governor only questioned the efficacy of the shots once it became evident that they did not necessarily prevent infection — which prompted him to criticize experts and the federal government.
Tapping into the Republican revolt against scientific authority made him a political star. But that revolt came with costs. “These were preventable deaths,” Dr. Rivkees, who resigned as Florida’s surgeon general in September 2021, said in a recent interview.
Read the full article. It’s quite the deep dive. Gift link.
Jordan Klepper vs. Donald Trump’s Road to 2024 Candidacy – Part 1 | The Daily Show
A short round up as I start a new post to catch the Friday to Sunday bunch.
the Republican infrastructure plan !!
House Bill 245 expands the definition of adult cabaret performers from strippers and topless dancers to include “entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s gender assigned at birth.”
Biden got a Target Letter, too!
Ta-Nehisi Coates Crashes School Board Meeting Over Removing His Book From Class
Thanks to Ali for leaving this link on MPS. Hugs
The writer’s critically acclaimed memoir has become a flashpoint in a small South Carolina town.
Brooke Leigh Howard
Updated Jul. 19, 2023 2:14PM EDT / Published Jul. 18, 2023 1:04PM EDT
A South Carolina school board meeting, in which community members railed against an African American culture writer’s award-winning memoir about racial injustice, featured a special guest appearance: Ta-Nehisi Coates, the famed author in question.
On Monday evening, the Lexington-Richland District 5 School Board met to discuss the outrage concerning Coates’ 2015 nonfiction bestseller, Between the World and Me, which has repeatedly caused political literary mayhem among reactionary right-wing communities and been placed on book ban lists.
In February, after getting approval from higher-ups, an AP Language teacher at Chapin High School conducted a lesson involving Between the World and Me. The book, written as an essay to Coates’ son to prepare him for the life he will live as a Black man, details personal accounts of Coates’ life and his first-hand experiences with racism. However, the lesson was shut down and the book was removed from the course after students filed a complaint claiming the book made them feel “guilty for being white,” local news outlet CBS 19 Columbia reported.
According to footage obtained by CBS 19, a slew of people wearing blue rallied in support for the book and for academic freedom during the board hearing. And Coates sat in the back of the room next to the teacher who assigned the book as a sign of solidarity.
“What matters most to me is that my students have the ability to hear six or seven opinions on one topic and come up with their own thesis, supported with evidence, and come up with an independent conclusion,” said Superintendent Dr. Akil Ross. “Sometimes there’s going to be topics you agree with, and there’s going to be topics you disagree with. Academic freedom says even if you disagree, there’ll be another opinion presented to our children. Our democracy needs that.”
PEN America, a literary human-rights organization, called the book’s removal “an outrageous act of government censorship and a textbook example of how educational gag orders corrupt free inquiry in the classroom.”
“We cannot become critical thinkers without being uncomfortable in some way,” one student declared while directly addressing the Lexington-Richland board. “If students can’t learn these things in a safe space, like school, how are they—we—meant to make good decisions and think critically?”
The board did not conduct a vote after public discussion.
In a statement to The Daily Beast, Lexington-Richmond District 5 wrote that it is “important to understand” that Between the World and Me “is not banned in our school district.”
“Superintendent Ross is committed to providing additional training on how to use books like Between the World and Me,” said communications director Amanda Taylor, referring to International Baccalaureate courses and policies on teaching about controversial and sensitive issues. “This training will cover how to determine if the material is appropriate for the course and the maturity of the students. District administration will also provide training to ensure materials are based on state standards and protect the academic freedom of the students.”
Coates did not respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Tuesday.
Brooke Leigh Howard
PROPAGANDA – They Showed This To High School Kids In 1948! Would They Allow This Today?
Propaganda from all sides was studied including in history or social studies classes. Teachers used examples from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Imperial Japan to illustrate how propaganda was used to control information and manipulate public opinion during the war.
In civics or government classes, students discussed propaganda in the context of democratic values, freedom of speech and the role of the press. This included conversations about the differences between propaganda, misinformation, and the free exchange of ideas. In English or other language arts classes propaganda was discussed as a form of rhetoric or persuasion.
The early stages of the Cold War and the 1948 presidential election were events for discussion in classrooms. Teachers used these current events to talk about the role of propaganda in politics and international relations.
High school clubs and other extracurricular activities focused on debate, journalism and politics.
Many Americans were well aware of political propaganda in 1948. Political Campaigns: Many people recognized the use of slogans, posters, and speeches during political campaigns as forms of persuasion, if not always identifying these tactics explicitly as “propaganda.”
Given the early stages of the Cold War, Americans were being exposed to constant anti-communist messaging from the government and media. Some saw this as propaganda, though others saw it as necessary information or patriotic messaging.
Newspapers, radio broadcasts, and the then relatively new medium of television would were sources of both overt and subtle propaganda. Some media outlets criticized propaganda efforts, thereby making their audiences more aware of them.
The mid-20th century was also a time when public relations and advertising were growing and becoming more sophisticated. Some people recognized that these industries used similar tactics to those found in political propaganda.
The year 1948 was especially filled with political propaganda with the presidential election and internationally with the ongoing Cold War. In 1948 President Harry S. Truman was running for re-election against Thomas E. Dewey. The now-famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from the Chicago Daily Tribune was an example of premature victory claim due to inaccurate polling data which could be seen as a form of propaganda, trying to shape the narrative before the election was even over. Truman’s own campaign used the slogan “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!” to rally the working-class vote and present Truman as a straightforward, no-nonsense candidate.
In the context of the early Cold War, both the United States & the Soviet Union used propaganda extensively to promote their respective ideologies and to denigrate the other. In the US, fear of communism was ramped up with government-sponsored propaganda, including films like “Red Nightmare” warning about the supposed dangers of communism. The government also produced numerous posters & leaflets depicting the Soviet Union as a menacing, totalitarian state that threatened American freedom.
With the establishment of Israel in 1948, there was significant propaganda on both sides of the conflict. Arab nations spread messages depicting the newly formed state of Israel as a colonial imposition, exploiting religious sentiments & framing it as a battle against Zionism. Conversely, Israeli propaganda emphasized the need for a Jewish homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust & cast their struggle as one of survival against hostile neighbors.
In 1948-1949, when the Soviet Union blocked access to West Berlin, the U.S., U.K., & their allies organized an airlift to supply the city with food, fuel, and other necessities. This event was accompanied by extensive propaganda on both sides. The West highlighted it as a humanitarian mission & an example of democratic nations stepping in to help those in need, while the Soviets depicted it as an aggressive act & an attempt to exert control over Berlin.
Organizations & companies advertise on this video clip. It is interesting to see what they are using this for. Search the words Disinformation. Public relations in business. Political advocacy. Political campaign. Public relations consulting firms. Healthcare agency. PR consultant. Best public relations. Media public relations. Political action committee.
