On The Left Side of Things

Over the past couple of days, the sky here has been overcast and hazy. Most days, the sun isn't visible, and the entire sky is gray. All of this is because of Sahara dust clouds that come over the Atlantic and move through the Americas, making each country gloomier. I had heard about Sahara dust clouds before, in some video about the Amazon rainforest and how the dust from the Sahara provides the nutrients that the Amazon needs, but I don't remember ever experiencing them like this. One dust cloud came about a week ago, but it eventually left and there was one day with sunlight before a new one came along. It's strange that, even though I've stayed inside for over one hundred days in a row at this point, I'm seeing things that I haven't seen before. I wish I had happier things to notice, but at least a dust cloud is something to talk about and marvel at. Novelty is often the only thing that keeps me from hating everything about the world, because when everything...

One of my favorite artists making music right now is Dominic Fike. I found out about him from a video that he did with Brockhampton last year, and I've been listening to his music ever since. My favorite song has been his 2018 song "3 Nights", and I love the chorus that he sings on Kevin Abstract's "Peach", but this song that he just came out with is my favorite thing that he's made.  Today, Dominic Fike released the song "Chicken Tenders", and I've already listened to it about fifty times. I love his voice on everything that he does, but this particularly sounds incredible to me, with the ambient feeling instrumental and his melodic vocals. This song just has a feeling that Dominic evokes perfectly in his music that other singers don't capture for me. The vibe is perfect. I feel like I don't have enough to say about this song to warrant a blog post, but it is honestly one of my favorite songs right now, even though it only came out...

The Star-Spangled Banner is a bad national anthem. It sucks. Every time I hear it I shudder. It's a bad song. You want me to stand and put a hand over my heart for a bad song? I think not. The Haitian national anthem is a billion times better, and there's a reason why I sing along to it and not to the American one. It isn't necessarily because of a difference in patriotic feeling, it's because the American one is objectively worse. We can change that. Here is a list of songs that we could replace the American National Anthem with. Party Rock Anthem - LMFAO Come on, the word "anthem" is literally in the name. My patriotism would increase greatly if every football game started with Redfoo telling me to have a good time. Make this the national anthem and I will fly an American flag and say "God bless America" every day. Party Rock Anthem - Kidzbop Version Same as the last entry, but for the kiddos out there who don't want to hear about butts in thei...

The second season of The Politician came out on Netflix recently, and I watched it, even though I hated the first season, because I had nothing else to watch. Unsurprisingly, I hated this season too, and it was possibly one of the worst things I've had the misfortune of watching. One reason I hated the first season was the overdramatization of a high school student council race , which I assure you, as a high schooler, nobody cares about, so at least this season had higher stakes, as it was a New York State Senate race. Another reason I hated the first season was the fact that there was a Haitian character, played by a Ghanaian, who sounded nothing like a Haitian (although he did a West African accent), was named Pierre Toussaint, and was introduced to us in the middle of what plays as an AIDS joke (I assume anyone reading this knows I live in Haiti, and I'm sure non-Haitians won't even notice how tone-deaf this character is). This will only make sense if you have watched s...

It's been a few days since I made my last post. The last thing I wrote on here was my Juneteenth post, so three days ago. That was my eighth day in a row writing a blog post, and for the past few days I haven't been writing because I haven't really had much to write about. I've been stressed out a lot recently, both with the world issues like the pandemic, the crisis in Yemen, the continued white supremacy and oppression in America, etc. It's hard to think of a blog post, political or not, when your brain is just focusing on stuff like that. I can't even write about that stuff because it feels too heavy for me to come here every other day with a post about how the world's on fire and you should be scared. It's funny that I'm writing this at all, because I know people aren't going to read it, and it's not like anybody was waiting, wondering why I haven't updated my blog. In a lot of ways, this is just something for me to do, like a journal...

Today is Juneteenth, also known as African-American Independence Day, Black Independence Day, or Freedom Day. A year ago today, I didn't see much about Juneteenth on social media, maybe a few tweets. In school, I never learned about Juneteenth, and I didn't know anything about it until very recently. In U.S. History classes, you're taught that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and then slavery was abolished and everyone was happy. I of course now know much more of the nuance of the history concerning the Reconstruction era and how racial oppression, slavery, and white supremacy have continued on, just wearing different masks. The truth is, the Emancipation Proclamation did nothing and was purely symbolic. Lincoln signed it on January 1, 1863, and it did not free a single slave. It was directed towards slaves in the confederacy, but the confederacy did not obey the United States government anyway, so essentially it freed nobody. In fact, Lincoln's chief goal w...

I started this blog and made my first post on June 12. Today is June 18th, and this post is my seventh, so this blog post completes my first week of posts. This week, since publishing my first blog post, I've done more reading than I do most weeks, and so I wanted to go through the books that I've completed over the past seven days. Here's what I've read this week. Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky I didn't start this book this week, I started it a couple weeks ago, but I only finished it a few days ago. It's genuinely one of the most interesting books that I've ever read. This book is about the propaganda model describing American mass media and how what they report and how they report it conforms to government expectations and government policy. The book compares actions taken by the U.S. government to actions taking by the Soviet Union and compares how these actions were reported differently in the American media. It covers the r...

With the current protests and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is a common counterargument used by detractors of the movement: "what about black on black crime?" This is commonly brought up when people mention black people being murdered by police. The argument, is, essentially, that if those who support the Black Lives Matter movement actually cared about black lives, there would be protests for every black person killed by another black person. This is, of course, a particularly bad argument that is pretty irrelevant to the conversation, but I felt the need to write this post to go through all of the problems with this argument. So, here is a list of reasons why "what about black on black crime" is a bad argument. 1. Black on Black Crime is Not Racially Motivated This is the first reason that I'm going through because it's the most obvious reason that automatically shows that this argument holds no water. When protests erupt after p...

A few days ago, I watched the 2017 movie Loving Vincent. It has nothing to do with anything else that I have written about, but it is a piece of media that I can use for content, so its relevance to anything isn't exactly important. This movie is a Polish-British co-production, so while it was funded by the Polish Film Institute, the voice actors are all from the British isles, including an Irish actor that I love, Chris O'Dowd, who I've seen in one of my favorite shows, The IT Crowd, and a short-running show called Moone Boy that I enjoyed while it lasted. Another member of the cast is Saoirse Ronan, the award-winning Irish actress whose name I always have to search to make sure I'm spelling it right. Now, let me just say, this movie is genuinely one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. The entire movie is done completely in oil paint, in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. The movie was shot frame by frame, similar to a stop-motion movie, with artists painting...

A commonly used term when talking about politics is the idea of the "political spectrum". Typically in American politics it is talked about as ranging from left to right, with Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been depicted by much of the American media as "far left" politicians. Democrats are regularly called socialists by conservative critics, and when I volunteered for Text for Bernie, people would regularly reply by calling me a communist. So, the picture of the political spectrum that conservatives want to sell you sounds simple: Republicans on the right, and Democrats on the far left. However, that isn't really accurate.    For this post, I'm going to be using information concerning the political compass, which uses the traditional left-right economic axis and a social axis that goes from authoritarian to libertarian. If you don't already know about this and you want to learn more or find o...

A couple days ago, up-and-coming artist RMR (pronounced rumor), released his debut album DRUG DEALING IS A LOST ART on streaming services. I learned about this project from a Pigeons and Planes post on Instagram the other day, and I decided to give it a listen since there haven't been many new albums being released and I have found myself just playing the same songs over and over again with only a few new albums to enjoy over the past couple months. I also figured that this album could serve not only to be fun to listen to, but to be good content for my blog's first music review. So, here it is: my review of RMR's album DRUG DEALING IS A LOST ART.                                         This album is a short listen, only 8 songs in 23 minutes, so it didn't take that long to listen to it a couple times and start to form a review of it in my brain. It also doesn't really conform to one genr...

Yesterday, on Friday, June 12, the Trump administration finalized a rule that rolls back Obama's nondiscrimination policies in the Affordable Care Act. Basically, the Affordable Care Act says that you can't refuse to give someone healthcare based on a variety of factors, like age, race, or sex. In 2016, the Obama administration had that word "sex" defined to include gender identity as well as biological sex. This particular point is the part that Trump had issues with. Now, the Trump administration defines "sex" as referring solely to biological sex, and they do not provide any further protections regarding gender. Therefore, in changing the legal definition and understanding of that one word, they are essentially making it legal to discriminate against transgender people. The Human Rights Campaign estimates that there are about 700,000 transgender people living in the United States. That's nearly a million people who now, based on how the Trump administ...

Over the past few months, I've been trying to read more, as staying inside due to the pandemic hasn't exactly been filled with fun ways to fill time. Due to the recent protests in the US in response to the tragic murder of George Floyd and the history of violent oppression and white supremacy, I've specifically been trying to read more books on race and politics by black authors. I have been reading more political writing as of recently, and I thought that it was important to include more black perspectives. I had just completed the far-less mainstream and well-known writing Anarchism and The Black Revolution  by Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, which I enjoyed, and I thought I should read something more contemporary and less politically extreme. Therefore, I decided to read Ibram X Kendi's 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist . The book is made up of 18 chapters, and nearly every chapter is dedicated to a specific kind of racism and antiracism. The book goes through topics lik...