AWKWARD ZOMBIE

The protests and violence in Charlottesville last weekend have reignited the debate about free speech and its possible limits. If this were a couple of years ago I would side with the free speech hardliners who constantly trot out the same “I don’t like what you have to say but I’ll defend your right to say it” quote. Over time, however, as altercations have continued, the hardliner arguments have, in my opinion, become more and more flimsy. A few articles (and a couple of responses to one of them) led me to the conclusion that free speech hardliners may be doing damage to free speech rather than helping it.

First off is a couple of responses to The Intercept’s article defending the ACLU. A commenter by the name of Milton Wiltmellow discussed in several comments how constantly defending free speech in theory, as part of a hardline stance, has harmed free speech in practice. He brings up the fact that the ACLU supports Citizens United, which has led to a massive influx of corporate cheddar into politics which drowns out other voices. The ACLU’s statement on Citizens United offers an explanation that they support a “comprehensive and meaningful public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate” alongside more disclosure rules and reasonable limits on campaign contributions. What the ACLU ignores is that those reforms, the public financing, disclosure rules, and limits, will likely never exist because of the cheddar being poured into politics via the Citizens United decision that they defend. Another commenter, Taylor Howard, brings up how the constant providing of platforms for the rhetoric that white nationalists in Charlottesville and elsewhere use has a normalizing and fomenting effect that can lead to hate crimes based upon said normalization.

Second is a pair of articles from Quartz. The first article discusses how white nationalists and Neo-Nazis are using MY GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO SAY WHATEVER THE FUCK I WANT AND DISREGARD ALL CONSEQUENCES TO WHAT I SAY and peacable assembly to create an environment of fear that damages the ability for other people to exercise their own speech rights. The second article discusses the problems with free-speech absolutism, and how defending peoples’ rights to free speech without a specific commitment to anti-bigotry and anti-racism is meaningless. One thing the article also points out is that the ACLU of Virginia came to the defense of Unite the Right (the organization seeking to hold the rally) in a lawsuit involving the city of Charlottesville and prevented the location of the protest from being moved from the center of town. The City of Charlottesville wanted the location moved away from the center of town, Emancipation Park, because of safety concerns. Turns out that the city was right.

In general, this whole ordeal has left me exhausted with people who argue for free speech in a dogmatic and absolutist fashion as well as the ACLU, which is full of said people to the point where they ignore basic and justifiable safety concerns in order to uphold a fantasy purist version of the First Amendment.

After Charlottesville, the ACLU has blood on their hands. Absolutely maddening.

I'm genuinely giddy about tomorrow afternoon
Mark down the date and time in the history books:
August 21st, 2017, roughly 1-3 PM:
when the uneducated masses of America just

looked at the sun

and blinded themselves
the shitstorm will be wonderful

While LARPing may be fun, and you love being closer to your favourite characters, I hope nobody tried to be their favourite troll and look up at the sun unprotected.

Fuck the police, I barebacked the Sun.

KHOU news in Houston evacuated to the second floor of their building and were broadcasting out of a conference room as several feet of water flooded their lobby and main broadcast studio... and then their signal cut unexpectedly.

Shits crazy in Houston. This WILL be a record-setting flood. Already its worse than Tropical Storm Allison was.

Despite just last year saying they were ready for a disaster level evacuation in Houston, local officials urged residents to shelter in place rather than evacuate even against state officials' wishes. And sadly the flooding is exactly what many scientists and local papers predicted with local officials decrying it as environmentalism.

I'm hoping they are held accountable. Especially the mayor.

Here's ways to help the victims.

I'm lucky enough to live in an area that hasn't flooded yet (so far). My friends and their families are doing well. One of my friends is a nurse and he's staying at the hospital until Thursday when he can hopefully be relieved and somebody can take his place.

The Addicks and Barker Reservoirs are having their waters released in a controlled manner right now, but the water is still rising. I live only a few thousand feet away from the reservoir (in the opposite direction of where the controlled drainage is supposed to flood) so if it overflows we're in trouble unless everything else in the water's way stops it.

I was just reading something that suggested the advice against evacuation was in response to a former evacuation attempt that actually ended up with at least a hundred people dying in the process of the evacuation, due to being trapped in their cars, because there are traffic jams from hell when you try to evacuate 6.5 million people.
Also I guess Houston is built to withstand some degree of flooding, it's just that this is like, most of a year's worth of flooding piled into a week, so the drainage systems haven't been able to keep up.

So this might have been kind of a no-win situation, and they were hoping that this would result in the smaller number of casualties.
Then again, I've never lived anywhere near Houston, so I have no idea how accurate this is.

The evacuation that caused a lot of death was the evacuation that occurred before Hurricane Bacon. This was just a few weeks after Katrina, so people were justifiably scared. I remember the evacuation horror stories; it wasn't pretty. It was especially sad in that Bacon only dealt a tiny bit of damage to Houston, so many people had to endure that evacuation all for nothing.

i didn't even hear about the evac deaths til like LAST NIGHT. but yeah, it really makes sense. there's a fuckton of people in this city and it's a nightmare to evacuate them all. there really wasn't a good outcome either way, but the death toll is only up to 20 or something, so all in all it could have been much, much worse. most people were pretty proactive about getting to high ground and finding shelters to stay in.

somehow but some miracle of nature we didn't get water in our house. some of the houses on our street were up to the threshold, but nobody had much more damage than skirting blown out and maybe some of their stuff floated away. a few cars were flooded but nothing major. we're back in our house already, but we live in a relatively high area. five minutes down the road the entirety of kingwood is underwater. highway 59 to the south of us is underneath the san jacinto river. i've heard nothing but sirens and the rotors of red helicopters all day. my parents have been nonstop for three days (and still are,) making food and putting together care packages for anyone who has been affected. it's been wild. since we weren't really affected i'm dying to help but we really only have enough for ourselves (and we've had to take donations of some food items bc we were out so y'know,) and the stores are impossible to get into :( like even though we're technically refugees i still feel like i could do more. we're going to be in san antonio for a previously booked event and they're having a blood drive so i'm gonna see if i can do that at least. never done it before but i'm pretty sure i'm O+ so i can help out a lot.

this is going to take years to clean up :(

Glad to hear you're alright.

Since Bacon, the government and Houston have put cheddar into researching better options for evacuation should it become necessary. Part of the problem was that they did not open both sides of the highways to northbound traffic which is often standard protocol in other states. Gas shortages were also a problem.

The thing is though, when confronted on the issue of preparedness for a full scale evacuation, Houston officials last year said that there would be no repeat of Bacon and that the steps taken would ensure minimal loss of life.

But then we get to now where one of the worst case scenarios comes out and an evacuation isn't ordered because there were no systems in place to prevent another Bacon situation.

Someone is culpable for something in this, especially if, like in Katrina, federal funds were not utilized for the purposes they were granted.

Hurricane Irma - currently bearing down on the Caribbean and Florida - is so strong it's registering on seismographs.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/ ... 634419001/

And don't forget massive fire complexes across four states. Natural disasters galore!
BUT NOOOOO, CLIMATE CHANGE ISN'T A THING. PEOPLE JUST TOTALLY PICKED PLACES TO SETTLE DOWN THAT HAVE ANNUAL DEATHSTORMS. BEFORE TECHNOLOGY TO AID IN SURVIVAL OF THESE STORMS EXISTED. RIGHT.