#sj ref

In the years since Michelle Obama first uttered her now-famous catchphrase, “When they go low, we go high,” during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, she says people always ask her if the strategy still works today.

Her response: It’s “the only thing that works.”

During Obama’s keynote speech during Monday night’s Democratic National Convention, the former first lady said that by going low and using tactics like “degrading and dehumanizing” others, “we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else.”

“We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight,” Obama said Monday.

But Obama made it clear that “going high” doesn’t mean overlooking the negativity. ”[It] does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty,” she said.

Instead, going high means “taking the harder path” — a path she describes as “standing fierce against hatred.”

″[G]oing high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth,” she said.

[...]

On Feb. 8, Obama told Oprah Winfrey during Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour that most people resort to “going low” because its “easy.”

“It’s easy to go low. It’s easy to lead by fear. It’s easy to be divisive. It’s easy to make people feel afraid,” Obama said.

It’s also short-sighted, she said.

“For me, what I learned from my husband, what I learned from eight years in the White House, this life, this world, our responsibility in it is so much bigger than us. When I want to go low, it’s all about my own ego. It’s not about solving anything.... It’s about seeking revenge on the thing that happened to you.”

Instead Obama has learned to think about the “bigger purpose” before making a decision on how to respond to something.

him: Ha this is probably super offensive in its own right, but I wonder if there's an oppression heirarchy. Sometimes you get people arguing about who's more oppressed on Tumblr or some dumb shit

him: Like

him: Who's more oppressed

him: A black man or a white woman

him: Shit like that

me: oh man yeah

me: i call that shit the oppression olympics

him: Alliteration

him: Nice

me: and its stupid because like. look, the only people who benefit from oppressed groups getting competitive are people who are not oppressed

me: there is not a limited amount of oppression to go around

me: both people are oppressed

me: they are oppressed in different ways

me: and based on different things

me: its pointless to try and compare them

me: and it doesnt help either person to compare them!

me: stoppppppppp this

him: People's attention can only be divided so much

him: Oppression shouldn't have to compete with itself but when you're trying to make a statement

him: Who gets first dibs?

me: man thats what the oppression olympics is based on though

me: that sort of presumes that there's a line

me: a queue of people waiting to get equality and there's an order people are going to recieve it in, and that that order is based on merit

me: the fact of the matter is that we have to fight for all of this stuff simultaneously

me: the whole system that got us here was a system based on the idea that some people deserve to get things before other people

me: or to get more things than other people

him: Seems like a pipe dream

me: maybe so. but what we have now is kind of a nightmare

me: so i will fight for that pipe dream for as long as i am able

me: like...teleportation and hologram technologies exist

me: is it really too much to think that eventually i will not have to be in danger just by the benefit of being born as the person i am?

me: again, i think nihilism is a privileged position to take

me: and that its a mindset that only benefits the structure as it exists right now

me: giving up is easy. fighting is hard

me: there was a time when things were not like this. there will be a time after things are like this

me: things have changed to be as they are

as I could but she keeps posting pro-cop stuff and degrading the efforts of protesters, and I'm just so done with her...would you have any good posts to recommend as a good 'screw you and your bigoted ways, cya later ignorant trash' that I can post on her wall before saying goodbye to Facebook and the stupidity there forever?

oh man babe this is a tough one. stuff like this is never pleasant, and around the holidays, it's bound to crop up for all of us with greater frequency. here's some choice phrases to shut down the racist, hate-mongering cop lovers in your life.

these protesters you're fighting so hard to degrade are the same people [your officer] swore to protect and serve. either that oath means something to [your officer], or it doesn't. there is no in between.

worried about [your officer's] safety? it is safer now to be a police officer than it's ever been. when it comes to the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the country, police officer doesn't even make the list. meanwhile, police kill upwards of an average 400 unarmed americans every year, and that number is on the rise.

even police officers know how racist and violent their fellow police officers are. if [your officer] were "one of the good ones", they would be protesting too. staying silent or standing by their fellow officers makes them complicit in their heinous actions.

from the beautiful princeowl: "you know what it’s called when you use ‘he was just doing his job’ to excuse people’s actions? it’s called a ‘nuremberg defense’ because that was literally the excuse nazis tried to use during the nuremberg trials"

would you call the protestors "terrorists"? funny... the actual kkk said the same thing. so good to know where you stand.

the economist found that in 2 years, police officers in england and wales fired their guns only 4 times. that means that, over the course of 2 years and while policing 57 million people, officers in england and wales fired their guns fewer times than darren wilson did in a single afternoon.

why darren wilson is guilty of murder: a ppt

valuing police lives over the lives of unarmed civilians is literally the exact opposite of what we pay the police to do.

"not all cops"? to quote america-wakiewakie: "by saying 'not all cops' you perpetuate the fallacy that there is a case of 'bad apples' among police departments and if we just get rid of a few 'bad apples' police terror against communities of color will end. this could not be further from the truth. policing as an institution in america is rooted in white supremacy and is directly contradictory to any notion of justice divorced from punishment and retribution." (full post here.)

if you truly respected the justice system, you would be outraged that nationwide, police officers have elected themselves judge, jury, and executioner of american citizens who haven't even been convicted of a crime.

"[murder victim] was a petty criminal?" we don't execute people for petty crime in the us. you're thinking of pre-revolution france in les mis.

there's a word for executing black and brown folks without a trial. it's called "lynching". 

ever wonder what it would've been like to live during the civil rights era? congratulations: you are. how does it feel to know you're NOT siding with the oppressed (aka MLK, malcolm x, rosa parks)?

Gender Inequality:

http://www.summer.harvard.edu/blog-news-events/gender-inequality-women-workplace

http://gender.eserver.org

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/gender-society/occupational-gender-segregation-pay-differences#

http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/gii

http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/examples-gender-inequality-around-world.htm

Femininity:

http://homeliving.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-importance-of-feminine-dress_2.html

http://femininedarling.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-importance-of-independence-in.html

http://missturdle.tumblr.com/post/46471029695/on-the-importance-of-magical-girl-heroines

http://www.andrews.edu/~tidwell/bsad560/HofstedeMasculinity.htm