KPAO by Dave Cortright

Crisis Text Line involuntarily terminated me for speaking the truth about their racism and lack of meaningful change

I just received the email below from the Crisis Text Line policy review committee. I stand by my opinions in those tweets that are based on the facts that I’ve gathered from the public messaging and that sent to the crisis counselor volunteers. I’m not surprised by their actions here, just disappointed. It shows that the organization is still feeling and acting defensive rather than coming from a place of true contrition and a desire to change for the better.

I’m grateful for what I learned from them and the experiences I had volunteering with them. I’m also grateful they showed me their true colors so that I don’t waste any more time giving to and organization that is fundamentally at odds with my values.

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 11:18, Crisis Counselor Policy Review Committee <ccprc@crisistextline.org> wrote:

Hi, Dave. I am reaching out today with an important message from the Crisis Counselor Policy Review Committee of Crisis Text Line. Our committee consists of senior leaders in the organization. We are tasked with reviewing severe violations of our Code of Conduct and related policies. We're contacting you regarding some of your public activity which came to our attention.

I. Background
The safety and integrity of our community are extremely important to us. In relevant part, to further those goals, our Code of Conduct states that:  “We are a diverse Community made up of individuals of different backgrounds. Anything, including harassment of any kind, that harms one of us, hurts all of us....” and “We will treat all members of the Community with respect.”In short, Crisis Counselors are responsible for maintaining a respectful and inclusive atmosphere in our community.

 

II. Facts
On September 8, 2020 at 7:48 PM, you tweeted: 

• “If you want to talk about suicide, I recommend you go to the experts at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  @800273TALK and skip @CrisisTextLine who's corporate culture is rooted in racism. #NotMyCrisisTextLine.”

• On September 8, 2020 at 12:56 PM, you tweeted: “Anyone who wants to talk through their trauma, DM me. I am a trained crisis counselor and I'd be more than happy using my skills to help assuage the damage inflicted upon anyone from the toxicity at... @CrisisTextLine. #DSWalkout #NotMyCrisisTextLine.”

• On September 4, 2020 at 8:18 AM, you tweeted: “OMG, they hypocrisy… Get your own house in order first if you want to have any credibility whatsoever. What substantial change have you made other than scapegoating your founder and ex-CEO? So many opportunities to do the right thing here wasted. #NotMyCrisisTextLine.”

 

III. Findings
Following a thorough investigation, we have determined you have violated our Code of Conduct as follows:

• Engaging in Disrespectful Behavior with Community Members. Engaging in disrespectful conduct toward members of our community is a violation of our Code of Conduct. Maintaining a safe, inclusive, and respectful atmosphere in our community is critical for our volunteers, and for the integrity of our service as a whole. While we understand that volunteers may have differing views regarding the org or its decision making processes, we offer numerous outlets for volunteers to air those grievances constructively within the organization -- such as through the Talk to Us function on our platform, emailing your Coach, emailing info@, or emailing ccprc@ for alleged misconduct. Here though, where a volunteer instead simply publicly denigrates the organization on social media and indicates that they no longer want to be a part of it, we have a responsibility to act.

 

IV. Conclusion
The policies discussed above are grounded in protecting the safety and integrity of our CC community and the organization. We take those policies seriously, and have determined that in light of these violations, we must dismiss you from our Crisis Counselor community.

 

We hope that you are able to find another volunteer opportunity that suits your interests, and we thank you for your contributions to Crisis Text Line. We wish you the best.

 

Sincerely,  

Crisis Counselor Policy Review Committee

 

 

 

Learn | Volunteer | Press | Careers

 

 

My tactics when voting for down-ballot offices

Here are the tactics I use when voting for down-ballot offices that I’m not as familiar with:

1. bring up each candidate’s web site and search for issues I care most about—e.g. SEL, mental health, the environment, civil rights (Google’s site: search is a great tool for this)
2. when in doubt, vote the incumbent out
3. when choosing between multiple candidates, lean towards Greens, Independents, and Democrats—in that order
4. when choosing between multiple candidates, lean toward BIPOC, women, and non-politicians—in that order

Out-of-control wildfires in SF Bay Area (Big Basin) were inevitable because State Parks weren’t doing proper forest management

We know that fire is an integral part of forest ecosystems. We know that our previous policy of “complete fire suppression” is a recipe for disaster. And yet parks still screwed up and was at least indirectly responsible for the blaze that eliminated most of the structures in the park. And one of the park’s environmental scientists saw it coming:

Nine months before Big Basin Redwood State Park suffered its worst fire in recorded history, one of the park’s environmental scientists gave a podcast interview revealing that a prescribed burn had not taken place within the park in three years… “Given the right conditions, we’re poised to have catastrophic wildfires all over California,” says [Portia] Halbert, who works for the Santa Cruz District of the California State Park System. 

And it looks like bureaucracy was to blame. The government doesn’t have the fortitude to publicly stand up and say that being overly cautious regarding moisture, wind, and air quality has its own risks, the consequences we are seeing right now.

The fact that prescribed burns have not taken place in Big Basin for years is a surprise even to people who work for the park and partner organizations.

“We haven’t done a large burn in Big Basin in the last three years because the weather hasn’t lined up,” Halbert says in the podcast. She brings up other bottlenecks to prescribed burns including permitting issues, staffing, and a short — or nonexistent — window for favorable weather conditions.

Big Basin burns can only happen in the fall. The fuel, composed of vegetation and plant material that burns easily, can’t be too wet or too dry. There must be some rain, but not too much. Winds must be blowing away from populated areas. If the winter rains come, the opportunity is gone.

Strict guidelines established by the Clean Air Act and enforced by air-quality districts can also prevent burns. “It’s a great thing to protect public health, but it makes it challenging for us to actually implement prescribed fires,” Halbert says.

For these reasons and more, prescribed burns have been underutilized not only in Big Basin but throughout California, according to a recent Stanford study published in Nature.

Just received a social security scam call from 918-820-3352

I was expecting a call from someone in this region so when I picked up I thought it might be from them. It turned out to be scammers claiming there was a problem with my social security number. When he asked me to verify my SSN, I said I don’t feel comfortable giving that information out over the phone. He insisted I needed to in order for him to help me fix the problem. I said, this feels like a scam to me. I’m not giving you my SSN. Please fix the problem without it. And he said “fuck you” and hung up.

Wresting back control of your Facebook news feed

A month ago I nearly quit Facebook altogether. But on further consideration, I realized that there was still value in it for keeping in touch with some friends and acquaintances in my life. So I focused my efforts on optimizing my experience for that, and that alone.

This means unfollowing nearly every non-friend organization, artist, musician, influencer, and brand I had mindlessly “liked” over the years. Here’s the page where you can do the same:

Pages you’ve “Liked” on Facebook

 

Next, I cleaned out left most groups I had joined, either turning off notifications, or leaving the group altogether. You can do both of these things in the ••• menu at the far right side of the header when viewing a group.

Your Facebook Groups

 

I also became be more selective with who I allow in my feed. I unfollowed (but remained friends) for many folks in the long tail of my friends list (available in the ••• menu in the upper-right of one of their posts), or even unfriended a few where I felt like—even if we had had a closer connection at one point—we don't have what I would consider a friendship at this moment.

Finally, I started making ample use of the “Hide post” option. Even for people I like, sometimes they get a bit… spammy with their postings. I have a family member whom I love dearly, but they post way too many links to political stories with no additional comment or manipulative memes (“I bet this won’t get one like or share” 🙄) and I just won’t tolerate those in my feed anymore.

And when you do all that, you know what happens? It’s no longer possible to doom scroll your news feed. When you are only viewing posts from a small group of people you actually like, you can legitimately get to the end. And that is a good feeling. 😊

[Cross-posted to IT4NP]

 

The US agricultural system is headed toward collapse · The Guardian

California needs to shrink its agricultural footprint to match the scale of its water resources, which means other regions of the US should ramp up their own fruit and vegetable production to make up the difference. In the corn belt, US federal farm policy should stop paying farmers to overproduce corn and soybeans, and instead push them to diversify their plantings and keep their land covered all winter – practices known to maintain high levels of production while also preserving soil, decreasing water pollution and slashing the need for pesticides and fertilizers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/26/us-farming-agriculture-food-supply-danger

For the best air quality data, use, PurpleAir.com with LRAPA setting enabled

PurpleAir air quality map
(don’t forget to choose LRAPA!)

 

Here’s why.

 

For best air quality data, use PurpleAir.com with LRAPA setting enabled

Go to the PurpleAir.com map and be sure to change the dropdown in the lower left panel from None to LRAPA.

For more details on why, read this.

Greater Good Science Center video: What Makes Us Happier Than Money? · The Science of Happiness

One of the striking things is that Latinos—here in the United States but also throughout Latin America—tend to report higher than expected levels of happiness. Places that you would think that because of the relative economic disadvantages that you would find less happiness.

This tends to be really surprising to people. I've even seen it described as a paradox of happiness. We think that more money should be linked to greater happiness, and we just don't find that to be necessarily true. We're purporting to understand happiness from just one context and one perspective that tends to emphasize the self over other things, and that's insufficient. So we should instead pay attention to the data that tells us that there's these higher levels of happiness in this part of the world and start thinking about what that means for understanding happiness. Maybe it's not so much that we should be distracted by what money means for happiness, but we should instead be thinking about what are the sources for happiness that people have there.

What you find in the Latinos and the Latin Americans that have been studied is that it's relationships that are really important. This is a culture that doesn't emphasize the self in the same way as American culture tends to. What you find throughout Latin America is greater connections to your relationships, greater pro-social behavior. And it may be that that's what's the key link to the greater happiness that we see in Latin American societies.

The emphasis in these cultures is on managing relationships in ways that put others before the self. So adjusting to the preferences of others via acts as simple as what we're eating, or what we're doing for fun. Or they can be as serious as what career we're pursuing what person we might marry and how we're going to take care of our loved ones during crisis. Things that sound pretty simple—and they are—but that when you get into the details, it starts to be something that is more likely to occur if you're socialized into thinking of it as normal rather than if you're socialized into thinking of it as an effort that you would have to put forth.

So for example: getting together with your family on weekends; being there if somebody's moving; showing up at the hospital if somebody's sick; showing up for all the baptisms and birthday celebrations and holiday events… Those are things that are really prioritized it emphasizes having mutual obligations to others.

There's a definite negative connotation to obligation in English. If you say the same word in Spanish—obligación—it really doesn't sound so negative. It's almost a stand-up quality to meet the duties of what you need to do in your life to be there to for the people that need you.

Bill Burr nailed it back in Jan 2017 on the Hillary Clinton loss: “At what point do you take responsibility?”

I get sick of people making excuses for her. She blew it. [dead silence.] See that? Nobody thinks that. She blew it!

You lost to a guy who said three things a week that would torpedo anybody else's campaign. How do you do that?! That's like you're playing a football game, and the other team throws 20 interceptions and you still figure how to blow it. At what point do you take responsibility?!

They try to say—I love the racist white guy thing—a bunch of racist white guys came out of the forest and they were just going: “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Where were all these racist white guys the last two elections when they could have voted against a black guy? They were fine with that?! “I don't mind a black guy, but this white lady… we got to stop her! She's gonna take our four wheelers! my koozie!”

You blew it. YOU. blew it. You put the wrong team around you; you didn't generate enough excitement to beat this guy. It was unbelievable, the stuff that… he was just tripping over one coffee table after another, and somehow you just couldn't get out in front of this guy?