I guess that, in a perfect world they would all be in the Squad. Unfortunately, in our version of the world, some of the Dems should be in the Republican Party instead 
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That would suggest that Dem pols’ constituencies are homogenous in the degree of their progressiveness. This will never be the case. The biggest trap of our regretful 2 party system is the regular presumption that there are only 2 socio-economic positions rather than 330 million.
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There’s room for diversity of ideas and approaches within the party as long as the Dems hang on to some basic core principles.
If the Democrats were as rigid and monolithic as the Republicans have become under Trump then “the squad” never would have been able to emerge in the first place.
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Excellent point.
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“The Squad” was always going to be larger than just these four people that the media is focusing on…
118 house Democrats support Medicare for all. 95 are signed up to the Green New Deal, 85 support Impeachment. There’s a whole bloc of house Democrats ready to support a left-wing position, and hopefully they’re also ready to team up for it. “Unity is strength” is also one of our slogans on the left, not that we’ve been living it much, lately.
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And yet, the most common excuse I hear for Biden’s unwelcome handsy-ness is that he’s “old school” and that’s normal for “his generation.”
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Old-school handsy. You know, like groping, but gently, with a smile, because they’re respectful.
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Wait…so people will walk Turkey In the Straw back 100 years to find something problematic with it, but the Playboy bunny emoji is A-OK just because AOC uses it ?
Okay, I’ll bite. Clarification please?
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Well, the post got hidden so it’s a discussion for another time, or not at all, apparently. Didn’t mean any offense, in any case.
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I can still see your post.
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Your post seems to have been unhidden now.
Apparently, World Emoji Day was earlier this week. This piece is rather fluffy but does explain that emoji can mean whatever someone wants them to mean:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/17/world/world-emoji-day-trnd/index.html
From that I conclude that they aren’t particularly useful as communication, except to communicate with people who already know exactly what you mean and who happen to use them in a way similar to the way that you use them. Or to communicate with people who are open-minded about what other people may mean, and who don’t rush to judgement, and who are good at inferring meaning from context. So using them seems kind of risky. But then, communicating at all seems risky. But not-communicating seems risky too.
A couple of times I’ve been discomfited to find out that I’d been using emoji that could be taken to mean the opposite of what I meant. One was the “thinking” emoji—I was using it to mean “Hmm, that’s interesting! You’ve made me think!” and then I found out that people use it to mean “I don’t believe what you’re saying, I’m suspicious of you.” Oh dear!
Thinking Face
A yellow face with furrowed eyebrows looking upwards with thumb and index finger resting on its chin. Intended to show a person pondering or deep in thought. Often used to question or scorn something or someone, as if saying Hmm, I don’t know about that. Tone varies, including earnest, playful, puzzled, skeptical, and mocking.
Come to think of it, the various styles of “thinking face” emojis all seem to have a frown— so I guess what I really need is a thinking face with a smile!
Another is the “slight smile” emoji—I always thought it was a smile…it seemed useful for indicating smiling, you know? But then I found out it can be interpreted to be dismissive—I guess if you aren’t smiling very enthusiastically then it can mean that you’re “damning with faint praise”?
from 🙂 Slightly Smiling Face Emoji
Slightly Smiling Face
A yellow face with simple, open eyes and a thin, closed smile. Conveys a wide range of positive, happy, and friendly sentiments. Its tone can also be patronizing, passive-aggressive, or ironic, as if saying This is fine when it’s really not.
(I guess this is a bit off-topic, but it did kind of naturally go there. This isn’t the first time I’ve been off-topic due to musing about emoji!)
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I think we’re teetering on the edge of on-topic, if we’re discussing the context of AOC’S tweet.
I agree that each image can carry subtexts-- I never knew “slight smile” could be patronizing. (Apologies to anybody I’ve used it with here!) I just guess and pick them based on how I think they look. Which can be another problem with emojis-- different systems and browsers render them differently.
As you can see from the screencaps, my browser renders the emojis as what looks like a little girl with bunny ears. So I didn’t get any “Playboy bunny” context until I did some Googling. I have no idea what tech AOC uses, but from what I know about her, I don’t imagine she meant to reference Playboy… so I figure it’s a context thing that not-quite-Old me doesn’t get, and shrug it off. YMMV, of course.
The whole “Playboy bunny” appears to be an Americanization of the Japanese concept of kemonomimi, or women with animal features. (Emojipedia provided that link for the term.) The fact that so many devices/browsers render them as Playboy bunnies seems to say more about the programmers who “drew them that way,” if you ask me.
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Right! And my point (attempted humorously, but that didn’t translate apparently…) was that the Twitter users immediately shut down any controversy over the Playboy connection, in like one tweet, and everyone’s ok with it (which is cool)
But other things, like the ice cream truck theme controversy, have multiple articles about something 100 years old and long forgotten…I just wonder, is it chaos theory that determines which of these becomes a mini-controversy with near-scholarly digging-into, vs. something people say “well no one thinks of it that way” and that’s good enough?
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I got a note saying it was hidden…i still saw it but figured that now only I could see it.
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Okay. My guess is, the post got enough flags to hide it, but the mods judged it was not a problem and unhid it. It happens. >shrug<
I wasn’t really sure what you were getting at. (Maybe an emoji would have helped? 
)
But yeah, it’s a mystery why some things “go viral” and some don’t. That’s definitely a topic for another thread though. 
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It doesn’t look like the Onion picked this guy at random, or just because he’s old. Gerrymandering means somebody ends up representing “the Muslim district,” and in this case that’s Bill Pascrell.
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