Purple and Black
Taking Independent and Unofficial Back

authoritarian regimes & wannabes grab bag

whittling away at rights of the American people, at the state level. Tennessee, this time. . . . a shaving here, a shaving there. . . this state, that state.

New Tennessee Marriage Law Takes Aim At Obergefell [Talking Points Memo; 2.23.24]

Under this law alone, the country would, should Obergefell be overturned, likely return to the pre-Obergefell patchwork, where couples had to travel to certain states to get married.

Armed with a friendly Supreme Court, a base increasingly invested in culture-war red meat and a protective gerrymander, Tennessee’s Republicans are particularly well-equipped to be the tip of the spear as the right targets same-sex marriage, not long ago thought to be an issue settled both by courts and overwhelming public will.

“There’s a different type of Republican even in Tennessee’s General Assembly,” Akbari said, noting that the “more moderate, business-minded Republicans” are increasingly being sorted out in favor of hard-line partisans. “National trends are completely taking root in the state government.”
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Gerrymandering favors the election of candidates with the most extreme views.

This post doesn't belong here. I'm lazily putting it here because it's a hard lean in an authoritarian direction.
 
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April 15, 2024: Timothy Snyder [The Pell Center;4.23.24]

The above linked video is a little less than a half hour long.

Description beneath above video:
The history of 20th century autocracy seemed to race into the distance with the end of the Cold War. But Dr. Timothy Snyder cautions that in the decades since 1989, the West has seen the rise of new autocratic movements—some in traditional adversaries and some much closer to home. Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He has written eight books discussing issues in Central and Eastern Europe and co-edited three further texts surrounding similar topics. Snyder’s work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. He is currently researching a family history of nationalism and finishing a philosophical book about freedom.
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I read the little book 📚 written by Snyder: On Tyranny. Short chapters, easy to read. Interesting . Each chapter is on a particular sign/aspect of tyranny, very plainly stated w examples in history.
 
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