hitchhiker

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Take the UAW strikes: for many years, the UAW was an objectively bad union, ruled over by a dirty-tricking clique who sold out the membership. It's normal to blame workers for bad leaders, but the UAW old guard had rigged union elections, making sure that they would stay in charge. It's not workers that like corrupt unions – it's bosses.

Before the UAW could fight back against their bosses, they had to fight back their bosses' minions in the upper ranks of their own union. That's where the the Harvard Grad Students' Union comes in. After years of worsening exploitation and working conditions, the Harvard Grad Students organized under the UAW, then joined forces with reformers in the union to oust the corrupt leadership.

During the leadership struggle, Harvard Grad Students helped their comrades from the auto-sector master the union's baroque constitution, so when the old guard tried to prevent motions from reaching the floor, the grad students were able to cite chapter and verse back at them. In the end, grad students and auto-workers together won the victory that paved the way for the strikes.

In 2013—after enduring multiple professional setbacks, one denied grant after another, and a demotion at the institution to which she’d been devoted for decades—Katalin Karikó, Ph.D., walked out of her lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine for the last time.
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That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible mistake he was making in letting her leave. She didn’t gloat about her future at BioNTech, a pharmaceuticals firm that millions now associate with lifesaving vaccines but was then a relative upstart in the field. Instead the woman who had bounced from department to department, with no tenure prospects and never earning over $60,000 a year, said with total confidence: “In the future, this lab will be a museum. Don’t touch it.”

And I watched as all this happened and companies started back-burnering Pride support and events and sports teams cancelled their Pride night and all the rest, all these internet folk ostensibly on the side of the rainbow angels bellowing from every corner: rainbow capitalism, pinkwashing, fake allies, we don’t need corporate Pride!

Now, I’m not saying we all need to rush out and drink a barrel of Bud Light each for the cause because, I mean, I want rights and all but there’s lines even I won’t cross for the revolution, but saints and ministers of Milk defend us are you actually kidding me we desperately need corporate Pride and we cannot afford to lose it now.

Brandon Brundidge of Cottage Grove, Minnesota, was on a spring-break trip to Houston in March and saw signs with the “Let’s go, Brandon” slogan. Brundidge believed the signs were meant to encourage him. He consequently started trying activities he’d never attempted before, such as learning to swim and removing the training wheels from his bicycle.

His mother, Sheletta Brundidge, used that story to write a children’s book titled, “Brandon Spots His Sign.” [Brandon] Brown had the cover of Brundidge’s book on the hood of his Camaro for his Xfinity Series race Saturday at Road America.