It’s nuts how short people’s memory is. It was just a few years ago that yahoos were invading our nation’s Capitol and Trump was orchestrating a coup. Now Republicans are trying to convince everyone that wasn’t really a coup, and have you considered BLM and scary trans people? Meanwhile the Trump camp has their 900 page plan to efficiently make the federal government into a right wing arm of the Republican Party.
There shouldn’t be another Linus. The model of a single maintainer holding so much importance is fundamentally flawed, especially for a project with the size and importance of Linux. Responsibilities and decision making should be distributed among stakeholders and volunteers. It will take time to rebuild around that sort of structure.
I’ve also heard tell that the linux-kernel mailing list has become extremely toxic, especially to newcomers. A professor that I have a lot of respect for has stopped teaching his kernel drivers course because one of his students received death threats related to her involvement. If a change in the tenor doesn’t happen, less and less of the fresh blood that Linux needs will join.
I’m familiar with Housing First. I mostly just didn’t want to see a misleading use of statistics left unchallenged. Statistics around housing are difficult to grasp, so I often see them used in a misleading way, usually unknowingly.
Take one statistic, the rental vacancy rate in my city, Portland. It has lately been around 4%. Given the number of homeless people in the city, that feels like a travesty. But when you start to do calculations, that turns out to be an average of 2 weeks every four years. If you have tenants moving out after four years, that’s barely enough time to do a few repairs, let the paint dry, and finding new tenants. What seemed like a loose market turns out to be a very tight market.
According to the Census there are a lot more empty houses than homeless people. Let that sink in and you start to realize all is not what it seems.
This particular statistic needs to be handled carefully. There are problems with both its definition and its nature. Empty housing has a fairly broad definition that includes housing that is unfinished, in the middle of repairs, or unfit for habitation.
The nature of housing with relationship to homelessness depends a lot on where the homeless people are and where the housing is. Empty housing in towns and cities that are depopulating is unlikely to be all that useful. Simply taking people from cities with high levels of homelessness, ripping them out of their communities, and plopping them down into communities that other people are leaving is not a favor.
Also, you shouldn’t just warehouse unhoused people in whatever housing is available. Many of them have mental illnesses that need good access to mental health services, transit, and jobs. Just because they’re under a roof doesn’t mean the job is done. The housing should be tailored to the various populations that it will be serving.
Any legislator can introduce a bill, so “blue” and “red” don’t really indicate much. You have to look at who is sponsoring the bill. In Minnesota, that is Republicans and it’s going nowhere. In New Jersey, that’s Democrats and it got into law.
Rereading the thread, I think we’re in agreement. I was more adding onto your point, that building strong institutions and norms is important along with political activism. Institutions and norms slow the rot from the inside, political action slow it from the outside.
If you’ve never met or contacted your representatives, that’s likely by your own choice. They generally make themselves fairly available to some degree.
I live in Oregon, which has had all-mail elections since the 1990’s. It’s so great being able to sit down with my husband, some endorsements, the voter’s guide, and a computer to make my decision. So much better than scratching my head over half the ballot (well at least the title sounds good) and voting straight for the other half (vote blue no matter who).
How so? Fascism is rarely a matter of a single election. It’s usually a slide. Providing a bulwark against that slide means you have several election cycles to snuff out fascism and return to liberal democracy.
Super-delegates had the their role in the nomination massively reduced, with no role whatsoever in the first round of voting. Bernie is not a viable contender at the moment because he represents only the left flank of the party. He’s also toxic in the general election. Praising Castro and honeymooning in the USSR just aren’t great things to have on a president’s resume.