Red Mosquito

Trag, (this post probably belongs in the local government thread by the way):

I wouldn’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that members of XYZ committee are better equipped to vet a bill covering XYZ topic than the members of a different committee. In my experience very few people in XYZ committee have close working knowledge of XYZ topic. They move very quickly (at least in WA) throughout their day talking about gun laws, then salmon population, then housing, then drugs, then whether or not to tack on $1 to the cost of each Mariners ticket for SoDo neighborhood improvements, to stem cell research, etc. it’s like speed dating from one issue to the next in rapid succession, and again, members of XYZ committee are not necessarily experts on XYZ topic.

tragabigzanda wrote:

B wrote:I don't think anyone should be physically violent, but Trans advocates should be loud as fuck.

i mean this sincerely:

1. Do you actually believe they should be so loud as to functionally crowd out other pieces of legislation that serve to help other disenfranchised or suffering people?

2. Does the calculus change if said legislation stands little chance of having the progressively-desired impacts in a Republican-controlled state)? E.g., does a "loud as fuck," single issue approach to trans rights make more sense depending on the party in power?

Do you think Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis should have stopped marching because the police were too busy beating the fuck out of them to properly serve other people in their towns?

She's not the one fucking the people of Montana. The Republicans in Montana could have just censured Zephyr and moved on as normal, garden-variety bigots, but THEY made the choice to really stick it to her in a way that fucks their constituents.

If she shuts up and takes it, that'll be the strategy going forward to oppress Blacks, women, the poor, those with disabilities, all LGBT+ communities, LatinX, union members, teachers, ... all the groups that Republicans wish didn't exist.

Trag is very fussy about bills the impact him are not being dealt with!!

Okay bye. I don't know politics anymore.

tragabigzanda wrote:Oh I’m not fussy at all. Genuinely interested in learning/expanding my mind around this one. Just not seeing another reasonable response yet.

Truly i dont know enough about it at local levels and we've kind of talked about this before. I know you come from a place where the people/conservatives you live around don't really have take issue with trans issues, and there are more important issues to get through. I think that is totally fair but also in a nice little bubble. I think, or it seems as though, these issues are bigger elsewhere and there are kids/adults who are truly being impacted by 1)rhetoric and 2) laws being passed that make them feel subhuman. So, i think the issues are important, much like civil rights movements that B touched upon.

My partner thinks marching is still the way to go, i think its a waste of time and now dangerous. I think making your voice heard can be done in many different ways these days. But, im not a woman having my bodily autonomy threatened and regulated, so, i just sit back and support.

Its unfortunate that generally speaking, or in particular, the fed gov't is worthless and can't handle that issue along with other important issues that are perhaps more pressing.....

Here we are. I dont know

tragabigzanda wrote:I believe there are degrees of systemic oppression, and there are at least a few between getting beat up by police while trying to gain some basic dignities like bus seats and drinking fountains, and being a democratically-elected representative who’s been assigned to committees,

Sure, but there are less degrees of separation between the current treatment of trans individuals in the current South and the treatment of Blacks in the Jim Crow South. And wrong is wrong. It shouldn't be easy to oppress people.

I haven’t been tracking this situation in Montana at all so I have a question: Was this Zephyr person punished because of what she was saying or because of how she was saying it? Content issue or decorum issue?

Bammer goes deep to see if he can use the "uppity" excuse for ignoring marginalized people

Bammer is actually curious what happened, but only a little and doesn’t want to spend much time on it, so was hoping someone here would quickly answer my question.

tragabigzanda wrote:Oh I’m not fussy at all. Genuinely interested in learning/expanding my mind around this one. Just not seeing another reasonable response yet.

As I’ve said, the specifics of what she said are unremarkable. I agree with you that as the party in power, they have reasonable sway to reprimand that.

I think that by refusing to call on her for the education bill, they antagonized the situation unnecessarily. If they had called on her when she requested to speak on that bill, and she had instead attempted to steer the conversation back or continued to use accusatory language, that would’ve been a reasonable time to take the acts they are taking now.

End of the day, it comes down to: you passed a bill targeting a specific group of people. One of those people was in the room and spoke with emotion about it. That by itself is no different than when a Montana Democrat proposed a bill protecting abortion, and a Republican member of this same chamber compared it to child sacrifice. It is an emotional response by a person whose psychological closeness to the issue outsizes their professional decorum.

By choosing to let your reaction bleed over into the decision-making around whether or not you will call on this person in discussion of other bills, you are unnecessarily antagonizing the situation.

If they had called on her for the education bill and she used her time on mic to demonstrate an unwillingness to move on from the prior issue, that is a different story. That is a demonstration of a willingness to use elected status as a tool to upset regular order on the passage of other bills.

But if you are a ruling party in a government institution, and you first pass a bill that a community feels is directly harmful to them, then silence the only voice they feel they have in the room on not only that but other unrelated bills, then the ignition sequence of the problem that results is you.

I think activists are an unruly, unfocused, and generally chaotic bunch. They are the American politics equivalent of the lizard brain, and political representation is the means by which we avoid empowering the impulses they represent.

I’ll say again, I think whether or not you let her speak should be determined by whether or not it is appropriate for her, an elected representative, to be given time to speak on the education bill she is requesting to speak on. Taking a harsher response because activists is just another way of letting the activists dictate your response. You are attempting to reprimand them by exacerbating your response to her.

Permit me a hypothetical that we both know is impossible. Just pretend for a minute.

Imagine that when Caleb Hinkle said the abortion rights bill his Democratic colleagues introduced was tantamount to child sacrifice earlier this year, in this same chamber, he had been the only pro-life representative in the chamber at the time. Utterly impossible, but just pretend.

Imagine that the chamber then passed the bill and refused to call on him for an unrelated education bill because of the language he used related to the abortion bill specifically. And that pro-life activists were on site protesting. Do you really feel under those circumstances, the right thing for the chamber to do would be to refuse to let Caleb Hinkle, elected official, speak on an education bill?

I have not defending the activists, nor am I speaking in support of them. I am saying that the initial response to what Zephyr said was outsized and antagonistic to the situation, and at every step since then the response continues to be exactly the same, and for no real reason other than that doing otherwise would feel like a political loss.

I blame Social Media. Seems like everything, from both sides, is about riling up their base over the culture war of the week. Lets get rid of the internet.

Honestly yes, within your hypothetical framework, I’d desire to see the same course of action

This is a point we just simply disagree on. That’s fine.

though your hypothetical has introduced one place where I think the GOP fell They should’ve made it a point to communicate that they valued Zephyr’s further input, and that they recognized the divisiveness of the issue and that emotions were running high (or some such comment). I’m just talking about a bit of grace here, some offering to Team Zephyr that they felt it was important to maintain decorum and order given the length of time left in the session, and that they would commit to transparent discussions around how best to navigate this sort of conflict in the future.

And this is a point we agree on. As I’ve said, I think your core point that they have the right as the majority to make this choice is factual. But as with Tennessee, I think there was too much baked-in political temptation to make the response something that felt like victory.