We Live in a Shithole Country

 

Matt Yglesias is often at the forefront of discourse as it's put forward by pundits. He is somewhat respected as a liberal contrarian with opinions that - whether you agree with them or not - do represent a general consensus amongst other liberals in power. He's also an asshole. 

I follow Yglesias on Twitter because his opinions can be used as a guidepost in semi-useful ways. When I was writing about the Defund the Police movement and Alex Vitale's book "The End of Policing", I used Matt Yglesias' defining article on the issue - in which he scorches the idea for its lack of popularity and political pragmatism - to frame a lot of my arguments. 

It was truly shocking to see his tweet the other day, the day in which 18 **school children** were gunned down in Texas, which ultimately defended the United States as The Place to Be in spite of its problems. Even setting aside the fact that the message is so poorly timed it borders on evil, it's not hard to point out the myriad of ways this sentiment, though obviously not an uncommon one, is wrong. 

Yglesias was likely seizing on the deluge of Tweets and commentary all extolling some version of "This Is America" or "this is a uniquely American Problem" or "This was entirely predictable here in America". He ultimately decided that everyone using this unimaginable tragedy to discuss the regularity of such tragedies in our country was illogical and it was important to set the record straight.

To Yglesias, the USA is a good country. Why? Two main reasons; some elusive measure of all of human history (life expectancy maybe?) and the fact that people around the world want to live here. 

Both of these clauses make for a favorite rhetorical move for pundits in the Take Factory. Simply take a couple of objectively true statements like higher quality of life measurements or the fact that some immigrants want to live here and then extrapolate a premise that doesn't necessarily stem from the true statements: America is therefore good and we should avoid criticizing it as a bad place where uniquely bad things happen.

Yet even the apparently true statements Yglesias banners around have some problems. Consider the "all of human history" comment. This could very well be true, Modern America is certainly a better place to live than 14th century Spain by any metric. The question is why this is important to bring up. Measuring quality of life based on how someone might have lived in the past isn't useful because that person could never exist in the past. The true measure would be how many people are living the best possible life now, which means considering the lives of people relative to the lives of other people who exist. 

Two great examples of this are mass shootings and the uninsured. It's preposterous to look at someone who is uninsured or the victim of a masshooting and tell them that if they existed in in another time period they would be more likely to be uninsured or killed. Imagine telling an uninsured person that insurance didn't even exist in the 1920s so they should be thankful it's at least a possibility! The real point to understand is that there are people all over he world that do not suffer these things because they do not have the problems that America has. You could take school children or working adults with identical conditions in America and put them in other countries and they would not suffer the same issues they suffer here.

So "anywhere in human history" is an irrelevant and unnecessary measuring stick. But to be fair, Yglesias also brings in the more relevant point when he says "all over the world". We're unsure what he's referring to as he doesn't mention any particular metric. He would be incorrect if he were referring to a whole host of things from gun violence, to paid maternity leave and the maternal mortality rate, to the rate of uninsured and outcomes in healthcare, to the number of incarcerated citizens etc etc where the US lags behind many, many other countries.

Yet people do clamor to move here! Of course no one cites our mass shooting or terrible healthcare outcomes as they reason why, generally they're moving here for "opportunity". This can mean different things for different people, opportunity for wealthy Northern/Western countries could be harder to pinpoint than countries in the so-called "global south" whose residents who want to move here are looking for a better life. 

For the former, it's not likely our lack of free university education or dwindling public education institutions, it isn't likely our for-profit health financing industry, it's not our affordable housing, it's not our lack of violence and public safety. It's most likely because of their employment or because they married an American citizen spouse. Which there is of course nothing wrong with, but one would hardly call a country the best place to live because it has interesting places to work and Europeans find the love of their lives here.

The latter portion of people who want to live in the US are coming from countries that do not have the same material conditions or rights. Yet this seems a strange metric as well since someone's desire to move to a place with better material conditions or freedom should not logically matter when the best material conditions and rights aren't delivered. The US has treated people who want to come to this country - people from countries like Haiti or El Salvador - with flagrant abuse. Those that come here to work - legally or not - remain one of the most exploitated labor forces in the country. What's worse, many of the countries where people are fleeing totalitarianism or poor standards of living have those things because of an active or passive role the US played. Even countries like India or China where people come to work in tech on H1B visas for better pay still have to enter a beauracratic hellscape where being forced to uproot isn't uncommon. 

Which is all to say that comparing a life in Modern America to a theoretical life in human history or another part of the world fails to imagine what that life would be like if the US didn't exhibit such a horrible set of unique problems. It's exactly because we can and should imagine an America in which children are not murdered in school that we critize the version we're currently living in where this is a terrifyingly common occurence. 

In short, we should not be measuring someone's life around what that life would look like in the past or in another place on earth, but what that person's life should look like if the society they were in treated them with dignity.

When I heard about this mass shooting in a school hundreds and hundreds of miles away I clutched my daughter close and listened to her heartbeat in a state of pure despair. Amazingly, Matt Yglesias telling telling me Modern America was better than any time period or place I could theoretically exist offered no comfort.  

Dune by Frank Herbert

 

I recently listened to Dune on audiobook after being thoroughly impressed by the movie. The action/thriller sci-fi novel depicts a sort of Gulf War in space. Where oil is the essential commodity here on earth, powering our entire society and forcing unending conflict due to its finite nature, "spice" is the resource at the heart of Dune. It's what makes space travel and cosmic civilization possible, the parallels are uncanny. 

So in some sense, you can almost imagine an obnoxious allegory taking shape; the spice is mined on the desert planet of Arrakis (hard not to hear in all its audiobook glory as pronounced like "Iraq - is"), which is inhabited by a fanatically religious desert people known as Fremen (get it, like Free MEN), who are leveraged against a Soviet Unionesque former hegemony society and ultimately against the very embodiment of imperialism itself; the emperor. 

So...yes, it's the Gulf War in space.

Yet there is a lot to make Dune more interesting than the sum of its borrowed political plot. The action in Dune is truly exhilarating. Action scenes in books have been hard-pressed to excite since movies got extremely good at them. Yet the various fights and battles in Dune don't disappoint. The cast of combatants has a range of often discussed reputations, very Game of Thrones reminiscent, that has any reader looking forward to the eventual clash. 

The other really interesting component of the action in Dune is how all of the fighting is done entirely with knives, not swords; knives. There is zero explanation for why this is the case, but it works. The fighting is intimate and Herbert writes riveting engagements whether they're one on one duels or epic skirmishes between armies. I feel like a kid again writing about this, but it really is fun!

The politics of Dune is also more interesting than the Gulf War it's modeled after and the lesson is far from a contrived regurgitation of the status quo. Protagonist Paul Atreides; a prodigal son trope who eventually leads the Fremen in their "Jihad" (actual word used) against the empire, clearly struggles with waging a holy war and it's not very clear at the end of the novel that he has made the right choice, a quandary the reader is likely to share.

The Fremen are also written in a refreshingly complicated way. Many of their brutal traditions are unforgivable, even as you're forced to acknowledge they're born from a life in an almost uninhabitable, incredibly hostile desert planet. But they also have ecological ambitions, hoping to turn Arrakis into a green planet, which would likely mean an end to spice production. The dynamic political conflict that's ultimately set up is the Fremen raging against the empire's colonial rule, desiring to end their extraction of finite resources so they can reverse the destruction of their planet on one side and Paul on the other trying to harness this power with the reader guessing if he's helping the Fremen, using them for his own revenge, or just accidentally causing untold destruction/bloodshed/end of civilization. 

Herbert works intricately to dismantle the reader's usual reliance on the idea that the protagonist, even a "chosen one", is always right. Imagine if Luke Skywalker's destruction of the Emporer caused inter-planetary economic devastation and unleashed bloodthirsty Ewoks who committed eco-terrorism to protect their forest planet. Imagine if, in Avatar, society could not function without unobtanium, and Sully + the indigenous population of the planet caused cataclysmic destruction by preventing people from mining it. 

This makes Dune a complicated anti-war, ecological-focused novel, one that assures us the victor in any war, whether their cause is to justly protect their lands or greedily prevent societal collapse, is still only the victor of a war. Paul and the Fremen must balance between the liberation of land and resources (especially water, which the Fremon ironically hold in much higher regard than spice) to be used for the good of all people or complete destruction so a few may no longer profit. The message then is that transforming society is a collaborative effort. A thin strain of possibility exists for this outcome in the novel, the reader is certainly hoping for it by the end.

The Rock Warrior's Way by Arno Ilgner

 

A year or so ago I read Training for the Uphill Athlete and learned that it's possible to train your metabolism using exercise. I had originally picked up the book to help improve my endurance, but instead, I learned new levels of training. Since then, I've been looking at other texts on areas I felt were harder to train than just your muscles or lungs. Something I'm sure lots of people can relate to is the mental element in a lot of athletic endeavors, I've often felt hindered in my two favorite activities - mountain biking and rock climbing - by mental obstacles. So I wondered if it was possible to train your mind.

On discussing this with a friend of mine he lent me the Rock Warrior's Way by Arno Ilgner. I was initially skeptical; the title seemed doofy and the concept of a "warrior" is overly fetishized by the self-help grift. Plus there are some nauseating self-help tendencies in the book itself. For example in discussing the power of choice (I mean...come on...) Ilgner drops this gem on us: 

"'I have to work full time,' implies that you have absolutely no choice. In fact, you choose to work. Working produces income for things you've deceied are important, such as food or your children's college tuition. You could also choose to quit work and accept the consequences."

The idea that we have simply decided food was important and not a bodily function to live is comical. The consequence of not working is the inability to afford basic necessities, while Ilgner is technically correct that this represents a choice, basic philosophical concepts tell us it is a false one. I don't want to get too much into the Cake or Death illusion of choice at play here, but rather use this moment to illustrate that Ilgner's book doesn't offer much in the way of philosophical thinking. It's actually filled with the sorts of platitudes that might be heard in the halls of our favorite multi-level marketing schemes.

This likely sounds harsh, but it's only because there are some really good tips on training your mental game in whatever activity you're embarking on and it's unfortunately shrouded in pseudo-philosophical self-help garbage that forces the reader to dig through it. I wouldn't want to recommend the book for its good bits without first warning the reader of the really, really bad parts.

The driving idea behind what Ilgner somewhat erroneously calls being a Rock Warrior (there are approximately zero words dedicated to the conceptual basis of a warrior being to kill others in...you know...war) is that when we're in "the moment" of our chosen sport - on a rock face, dropping into a MTB line, running a race, whatever - our subconscious often takes over our decision-making matrix and if it isn't sufficiently trained to react calmly to potential risk, is unfocused, or more focused on our ego we are going to experience what we often describe as a mental obstacle.

Many athletes don't have this mental obstacle at all, think of renowned free soloist Alex Hannold who has said while climbing the thought of death or failure never once enters his mind. Other athletes might have more trained subconsciousness almost by accident and so their mental obstacles are very small and easily surmountable. Yet a large body of especially hobbyist athletes likely feel significantly hindered by mental obstacles. 

Ilgner's antidote to our subconscious effects on performance is to train our more active thoughts so that when our subconscious takes over it's more likely to respond in the way we've trained our active thoughts. This is how athletes train many other muscles, it's why those who play team sports run plays, the idea is that when you drill something enough times when the moment comes to do it when it counts your body will react reflexively. 

So Ilgner instructs us to "become aware" of our thoughts in our waking life and attempt at every turn to push back on negative thinking, ego-based decision making, and other obstacles forming thought processes. This type of training isn't new - in fact, Ilgner admits himself he's amalgamating other works in the field to be climbing-specific, but the Rock Warrior's way does, at the very least, do a good job couching the language in the context of climbing. 

This is all to say I've put some of Ilgner's tips to practice. There is a lot to be said, especially in gravity sports like MTB, for making your subconscious react less on the basis of fear or ego and more in line with learning and appreciation for the sport. While the biking season isn't in full swing, I have noticed some improvements in my climbing. I have always had a hard time with my local gym's bouldering wall, it's pretty high at 15 ft and every climb is a top-out. Where I used to struggle to top out of even easier problems, since putting some of these techniques into practice I've noticed I have had an easier time at the top and developed more comfortability in falling. 

Do I recommend The Rock Warrior's way? I wouldn't dish the name out as often as I talk about Training for the Uphill Athlete, but I would probably suggest it to a friend who might be explicitly lamenting an issue with mental obstacles. I would do so only with the caveat that there is quite a bit of cheesy trash to sift through.

The Woke Mob Under The Bed

Somewhat recently an entire database called Canceled People was launched to document the so-called victims of so-called Cancel Culture - a phenomenon where public (or public-ish) figures are accosted by large, usually online, public bodies calling for their resignation or expulsion from public life. It isn't the first of its kind, but it claims to be bi-partisan and sizable. 

The database includes names like Liz Cheney (allegedly canceled for being critical of Donald Trump) and Donald Trump (whose cancellation was manifested as a permanent Twitter ban), but there are also figures on the left like Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks and Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs. We don't need to focus so much on the database, but more that it represents the latest installation of this trend in the discourse that tries to show the Woke Left to be as censorious and destructive to human life as the Right. The argument is that both sides of the political spectrum fail to value divergent opinions and try to silence them rather than engage critically.

This argument is often seen from the center of the political spectrum, but prominent voices on the left (such as Glenn Greenwald) and right (such as Charlie Kirt or Candace Owens) have also made the argument that the woke left is as authoritarian and censorious as certain elements of the right-wing. However, this comparative analysis is very obviously missing any context about institutional power. This doesn't render it wrong necessarily - people are getting fired or demoted after mobs of people demand it - but without such context, it's hard to take the problem as a major priority in preserving free speech and independent thought.

When we look beyond the culture wars, where it might be common to trade a teacher being fired for teaching CRT with one who does or says something racist, it's obvious that the biggest practitioner of the most concerning effects of "cancellation" is the Economic Right. The Economic Right is a group that might actually hold fairly liberal social views (not necessarily), but also holds and practices economic ideals more aligned with the right-wing of the political spectrum. While the culture wars between the left and right as they pertain to social issues probably do reflect a bipartisan, cancel culture that sees people terminated from their jobs or positions in media, the Economic Right is responsible for more heinous crimes against humanity.

Given the enormous amount of institutional power the economic right wields - be it as direct government officials, wealthy elite, corporate executives, or just sitting directly at the helms of the institutions themselves - the effects of such power are devasting. Unbridled capitalism and the pursuit of markets are clearly destroying the planet at the expense of all of humanity. Wars are waged over the ability to privately hold finite resources, every human causality as a result of such a war should concern our moral sympathies and demand our deepest outrage more than the entirety of college professors fired across all of time. If mobs of socially liberal voices expelling a comedian from their public pedestal disturbs us, mobs of economically ring wing figures overthrowing sovereign leaders, retaliating against union organizers, sending police to brutalize environmental activists, and leveraging mass incarceration for cheap labor should chill us to the bone. Yet such things are rarely given the same moral handwringing as "cancel culture" as we traditionally know it. 

Even when the Economic Right wing of the political spectrum does participate in the sort of petty grievance style "politics" of the more traditional cancel culture, the institutional power being wielded is far greater and the damage far more devastating. Steven Donziger - who is nowhere to be found in the CancledPeople database - is a demonstrative example. After winning a court case against Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorian people whose water source was poisoned by the oil corporation. As what can only be described as retaliation, Chevron partnered with a US judge who was in their pocket and a legal system beholden to corporate power to bring criminal charges against Donzinger for contempt of court, sent him to jail, put him under house arrest, and effectively ruined his life for over a year. The battle is still ongoing and more can be found out about Donzinger here. 

All this is not to say cancel culture isn't real, but to hear the argument that the left and right are equally destructive when wielding power and using their voice is absurd. The economic right, which can be bipartisan in its own right, is far more concerning in its ability to destroy not just oppositional discourse, but oppositional people. If I am expected to concern myself about cancel culture, I am far more worried about institutional power being exercised by corporations and politicians than I am about a large group of people telling a celebrity to "shut up" on Twitter. 

Everyone's New Favorite Argument

 

Once in a while, a transgender athlete competing in a women's sports league will win a major meet or event and everyone gets excited because they get to bust out their new favorite argument; that trans athletes should not be allowed to compete in women's sports and that all athletes must compete in the sports league aligned with the sex they were born. 

 The premise is that being born and developed as a male delivers an unfair physical advantage over cis women athletes and therefore it is unfair for the latter to compete with the former. This is one of those arguments people love to make because all of the facts seem to be overwhelmingly on their side, almost to the point where they believe it's rendered common sense. I have seen the stats and figures for this argument dozens of times; men are on average across multiple athletic events 9 - 12 % better than women for example or the more favored stat citing how male high school track times beat women's times at the national level. 

Logic dictates then that this argument - trans athletes should not be allowed to compete in women's sports and must compete in the league aligned with their sex at birth - has a sound premise backed up by statistical facts. This is a good example of how the statistical possibility of something might render a premise true, but statistical probability means the practical application and ramifications of such an argument isn't useful. 

If you listened to Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson tell it, the argument is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which we face an epidemic (or will very soon) of trans athletes dominating women's sports leagues, which will of course open the door to the eradication of women's leagues altogether. Even if this is charged as hyperbolic, they believe that even one trans woman beating a cis woman in a sport is deeply unfair. Despite the technical truth of the fact that there is a biological athletic advantage in men over women, both of these resulting ramifications are open to debate.

There is simply not an epidemic of trans women athletes completely dominating women athletes. There are a negligent number of trans athlete champions despite being allowed to compete as trans women for years. There are zero (0) trans women athletes who have never been beaten by a cis woman in their chosen sport/event. Being transgender is actually fairly rare, being a transgender athlete is even rarer than that, and being a transgendered athlete that can compete even at just the collegiate level is rarest of all. One of the trans athlete bans in Utah was vetoed by a Republican governor because there were something like 75 trans athletes out of 100,000 total athletes. While it's possible that a trans athlete could exist in the upper crust of male athletic ability, it isn't likely, and it's far-fetched to suggest this could put the existence of women's sports leagues in any existential danger. 

Yet most proponents of this argument will set aside the likelihood of these problems and declare any instance of a cis woman losing to a trans woman as unfair. The ramifications of such an argument are bizarre. There are lots of cis women who possess a biological advantage from birth, some have increased testosterone levels, others might have greater height or wingspan, broader shoulders or more powerful muscles. A large facet of sports is just losing to people with a biological advantage over you. 

We do not always create different leagues for categorical advantages. We do sometimes, like weight class in combat sports or the para-Olympics for example, but other times we don't; there are no separate running leagues only for Kenyans or professional basketball leagues for short people and tall people. Which is all to say the categories are decided upon for reasons beyond the biological or genetic advantage of competitors; clearly feasibility, team sports dynamics, the range of participant athletic abilities, safety, and even the likelihood of complete categorical dominance play a role. 

This makes our understanding and ultimate decision on sports categories more complicated than those who espouse this argument would like everyone to believe, and it means their argument is far from air-tight. There are certainly good-faith debates to be had especially as it pertains to safety, but the discourse should be a reasoned debate and not an argument in which one side assumes it has complete objective dominance. It also means this should be a decision that sports leagues and the communities they work with make themselves, free of government overreach and legislation that prevents them from coming to a well-reasoned, fair decision.  

Alex Honnold Must Be Stopped

When I worked at a climbing gym in 2012, we used to do screenings of the Reel Rock film tour. We'd hang a giant screen from the overhanging wall and throw the series up with a projector. I remember the first Reel Rock I ever worked featured an Alex Honnold film Honnold 3.0.

It was a short time after the viral 60 Minutes special featuring his terrifying solo of El Cap and the film fleshed out a lot of those details. Watching the film, one thing was clear: this dude makes soloing look cool as hell. After the screening, no less than half a dozen climbers started immediately trying to solo the slab wall. People were coming into the gym to buy books about free climbing (which of course probably disappointed them) citing Honnold as inspiration. Among the climbing community there exists a meme wherein any time you mention to a non-climber that you climb they immediately ask if you've A) seen the movie Free Solo and B) ever soloed. This is barely a joke. 

This isn't to say that the attractiveness of soloing portrayed in many of the films featuring them is going to necessarily bring in an influx of people to the activity. That free soloing has grown in popularity is a difficult thing to measure. It's not as though there are regular Gallup Poles conducted of the climbing community. 

The argument is instead that there is this attempt to legitimize free soloing as the "next level" in a rapidly commercialized sport. It's getting to the point where, seemingly, climbers are as strong and as good as they're going to get and the sport needs a new height to reach toward. Things like riskiness or sketchiness have long been a new way to push yourself in climbing beyond what everyone else is doing. So the question is whether or not the sport should include free-soloing on a list of legitimate activities that you are in no threat of losing sponsorship over.

The idea is that when feats of strength are no longer capable of producing interesting, often sponsor-worthy content you can also increase what I call the Probability of Death Factor. Every extreme sport has some version of this. Mountain biking has Red Bull Rampage, downriver kayaking has crazy river runs, backcountry downhill sports...exist, heck even backpacking has some treacherous options. All of these sports create a multiplier in the probability of death and for better or worse make the sport more interesting.

People love to point out when defending free soloing that there is already a probability of death factor in climbing, alpinism, base jumping, and other climbing adjacent sports. This creates a necessary ask; what is an acceptable probability of death factor for any given sport? We can certainly agree that a guaranteed probability of death is a no-brainer, this is literally just suicide and no one is landing sponsorships or cool documentaries for this (I hope). 

Free soloing does not have a guaranteed death probability. Marc Leclerc, the featured climber in the movie the Alpinist, died (uh...spoiler alert) not from his solo ascent, but in an avalanche on his rap down, which would have happened had he soloed the whole climb up or not. Other notable soloists have died in rappelling accidents or base jumping accidents. Obviously, Alex Honold and other lesser-known solo climbers are still alive. 

So what makes free soloing any more unacceptable than the other dangerous corners of other extreme sports, or even just...climbing? It's actually pretty simple, it's not whether the activity guarantees death since any successfully completed activity would guarantee you live, it's whether failure does. When you fail in many of these extreme sports - you don't land right, you fall, you fall out of your kayak, you trip, you bail etc - there is a chance you will die, but failure does not necessarily mean death. What we're actually measuring is the death probability factor in failure, which in free soloing is as near to100% as one can get. 

Imagine if every NASCAR crash meant invariable death or if every loser in an MMA fight was killed on the spot. There are very few legitimate sports in which failure means death almost 100% of the time. To be clear a lot more people might watch a sport as a result of this and it may even promote a widespread interest in the less dangerous pursuits, but this only serves to more rapidly increase the profit motive and subsequent participation (and therefore the death) in the activity. This is why the push to legitimize an activity with a 100% death probability rate in failure is irresponsible.

The larger climbing community and - most importantly - the industry sponsors that prop these athletes up should wholly reject this push and move to immediately delegitimize free soloing. Alex Honnold should not have sponsors, no one who regularly does publicized soloing should. We also need to stop making movies glorifying the practice as some sort of spiritual journey that allows socially awkward narcissists to become beloved ambassadors of the sport. 

Why We "Defend Rashida"

 

Rashida Tlaib is up for re-election in a new district in Michigan this year. It's a great time to reflect on what it means more generally to have a democratic socialist in congress and why "Defend Rashida" has become so important to Detroit DSA. 

When determining the value in any elected official the first thing you should start with is what that elected position actually does. For a member of congress it's clear; they vote on legislation, they propose (and ideally pass) legislation, they sit on committees, and they participate in hearings. There are a lot of other things a congressional office might do, constituency work and the like, but those are the four big pillars. 

Some folks in Detroit DSA will point out that Rashida has never said explicitly that she is a socialist and defined what that term means to her. This might be largely true, but she has never shied away from the term, allowing herself to be identified that way by a large number of outlets. She is also an open member of the org and talks about it, something other endorsed and wannabe-endorsed candidates haven't quite committed to. 

Whenever a Democratic Socialists of America chapter makes the decision to endorse they expect their values to be bannered to the seats of power. This includes not only the day-to-day exercise of that power but also the media appearances and national spotlight that comes with it. This helps grow the power of the organization more broadly, gives a voice to members, and helps advance the Democratic Socialist agenda.

What does it look like when a Detroit DSA member brings socialist values to the four pillars of legislating on the national level? It looks a lot like what Rashida Tlaib does. 

Voting on Legislation

Rashida mostly votes with her party, this can be good or bad for a variety of reasons. However, her stand-out votes are what set her apart from the blind partisans and show her commitment to socialist values. 

Tlaib was one of 3 'nay' votes on the COPS Counseling Act - prioritizing counseling for police officers as some sort of reform - which was tastelessly introduced just one month after Derek Chauvin was put on trial. She has voted against defense funding bills including the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 and the infamous Emergency Resupply for IRON DOME Act of 2021 (with fellow DSA Member Alexandria Ocasio Cortez offering merely a 'present' vote). In a sense, she votes exactly how Democratic Socialists would want a representative to vote.

Proposing/Passing Legislation

Rashida has been a primary sponsor of 2 enacted bills and has proposed 41 total. If two doesn't sound like a lot, consider how few bills are ever enacted and that Tlaib is still a very early legislator. There are some legislators who serve long careers and only pass a handful of bills. 

Tlaib was the primary sponsor of the H.R. 9050 Amendment  (previously known as the BOOST act) that provided additional recovery in the form of $2000 tax credits + $600 for every additional child (yes, this was the $2000 check that you got). The other bill she proposed that was enacted was the Payee Fraud Prevention Act which prohibits those who receive payments for minors or people with disabilities from embezzling funds through a loophole. Many more bills she submitted were designed around public health, consumer protection, standing against facial recognition technology, establishing things like water as a human right, and public banking.

Sitting on Committees 

Rashida Tlaib sits on 3 committees; House Committee on Financial Services, House Committee on Natural Resources, and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. These committees are responsible for issues like banking, housing, insurance, regulation, energy production, mining, oceans, and government accountability. Rashida's presence in these committees allows her to bring socialist values to an important spate of issues. 

In these committees, Rashida gets to participate in hearings (which we'll cover more in the next section) and advocate for legislation. Listen to the language she extolls in advocating for her environmental justice bill, it's absolutely brimming with the spirit of Democratic Socialism.

Sitting on Hearings:

Legislators sit on hearings on important issues either in their committees or the general chamber depending on where the committee is called. The idea is for representatives of the public to ask tough questions of stakeholders in any given issue on behalf of their constituency. To see why having a socialist in these hearings is important one simply needs to watch Rashida at work.

Rashida Tlaib on civil asset forfeiture: 

Here is Rashida going in on a hedge fund CEO in a Financial Services committee meeting:

(start at 2:26)

Rashida asking the census bureau director about the lack of Middle-Eastern/North African representation on the form:

In large part thanks to her political stances Rashida Tlaib is constantly under attack. Whether it's challenges mounted by Duggan-backed establishment candidates or the racist trolling at the mere mention of her name on social media. She's even received death threats.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/rashida-tlaib-democratic-socialism-palestine-israel-michigan

It's clear Rashida sees the DSA as a family, she has spoken at a large number of Metro-Detroit DSA events, even skipped the opening night of the Auto-show in 2019 to protest the closure of the GM plants impacting workers led by the organization. 

It's equally as important for Metro-Detroit DSA to live up to its end of the partnership and "Defend Rashida" every chance we get.