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Stacey Abrams: E Pluribus Unum? (Foreign Affairs)
Stacey Abrams: E Pluribus Unum? (Foreign Affairs)
Stacey Abrams, the Democratic State of the Union response speaker, and other authors respond to Francis Fukuyama's Foreign Affairs essay "Against Identity Politics" and discuss the meaning and value of identity politics in the United States and beyond. The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.
·foreignaffairs.com·
Stacey Abrams: E Pluribus Unum? (Foreign Affairs)
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.
·nytimes.com·
Here’s What Ta-Nehisi Coates Told Congress About Reparations (NYT)
Tom Scocca: These Are the Bad Times (Hmm Daily)
Tom Scocca: These Are the Bad Times (Hmm Daily)
The Resistance and the Democratic Party say “Vote,” but the voter purges have already been done, the polling places restricted, the prohibitive I.D. laws put in place. The national press is writing about it after the fact and before the election, when they can seem to take it seriously without changing anything. For the press do anything more would mean moving beyond its crabbed sense of “politics,” to engage with the reality of the situation. The legacy media have been browbeaten into a perpetual terror of being seen as serving as partisans for the Democratic Party, until those are the only terms on which they understand the world and the work they’re doing.
·hmmdaily.com·
Tom Scocca: These Are the Bad Times (Hmm Daily)
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man—giving orders without quite knowing what they mean or how they might be carried out, taunting enemies, beating up the people he can afford to beat up without having to be called to account for it, lying as needed or just for yuks. He hasn’t changed a thing since graduating from punchline to president. It’s been clear for decades that Trump was both an asshole and a dummy; this is now a problem not just for the odd unlucky cocktail waitress and his staff of cheesy apparatchiks but for literally every person on earth.
·theconcourse.deadspin.com·
This Is All Donald Trump Has Left (Deadspin)
Robin James: The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place (LA Review of Books)
Robin James: The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place (LA Review of Books)
Eleanor recognizes that only in The Bad Place would people be forced to treat others as disposable…so they must be in The Bad Place. And when she makes decisions on the assumption that she isn’t in an ideal world, this throws a wrench in Michael’s plan. He has to reboot that world because Eleanor’s behavior has become incompatible with it. Eventually (in “Team Cockroach” S2E4) Michael joins them, realizing that he needs their help if he himself is to escape the ultimately punitive and carceral regime of which he is a part. That’s what the show spends the rest of season 2 doing: season 2 is about mostly white women and people of color (and one white male accomplice who literally is a mostly(?) reformed demon…plus Janet, who I’ll get to later) collectively practicing philosophy on the assumption that the world they live in is not in fact equal but designed to harm and oppress them. [...] Beginning from the assumption that everyone’s on more or less an equal playing field and thus entitled to equal weight in the conversation (and that people generally want to do the right thing, which Mills calls the assumption of “strict compliance”), this is the same “both sides” liberalism that Mills critiques as ideal theory. Despite what Schur tells us the show’s message is, season 2 shows us a very different message, one about the importance of beginning from the assumption that you—especially if you are a white woman, person of color, or non-human person—are in The Bad Place. And you’re there not because of anything you did, but because White Men engineered it that way for their benefit.
·lareviewofbooks.org·
Robin James: The Other Secret Twist: On the Political Philosophy of The Good Place (LA Review of Books)
Briahna Gray, Camille Baker: The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh (The Intercept)
Briahna Gray, Camille Baker: The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh (The Intercept)
Importantly, having “no recollection” of the night in question, or no “knowledge” of the alleged events is not the same as saying it didn’t happen — especially since Ford never alleged that anyone but Kavanaugh and Judge witnessed the assault. So why would a judge, someone presumably familiar with the implications of what it often means when a witness avers they “do not recall,” so grossly mischaracterize the nature of those statements?
·theintercept.com·
Briahna Gray, Camille Baker: The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh (The Intercept)
Thread by @RinChupeco: “Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one.”
Thread by @RinChupeco: “Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one.”
[The Philippines’] Ferdinand Marcos' greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered. These white people & journalists talking about being civil? These were the rich people, the Fil-Chinese, the mestizos in the Philippines who knew they won't be affected by many of Marcos' policies, and therefore could ignore them even as the killings started. Marcos was also adept at convincing regular Filipinos that "as long as you don't commit crimes I won't come for you. I'm only getting rid of the 'filth'." He lied, of course. He jailed his most vocal opponents, people whose businesses he wanted to confiscate for his use.
·threadreaderapp.com·
Thread by @RinChupeco: “Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one.”
Albert Burneko: You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers (The Concourse)
Albert Burneko: You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers (The Concourse)
Bullying happens along a gradient of existing power and reiterates it. That’s the difference between bullying and a fair fight: The bully is bigger and stronger and safer, and wields those advantages over someone smaller and weaker and more vulnerable. Michelle Wolf got off some zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s expense at an ultra-exclusive social event entirely filled by people whose livelihoods Sanders holds in her hands. Beyond that, as a basic function of her job, Sanders enjoys access to the water main of American political consciousness unmatched by pretty much any living person not named Donald Trump—a privilege she uses only and entirely for the purpose of pumping poison into it, aided by a healthy plurality of the people in that room but not by Michelle Wolf. I doubt there is a forum in existence in which Wolf could do anything that would qualify as “bullying” the press secretary of the President of the United States, but even if there is, the fucking White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t it.
·theconcourse.deadspin.com·
Albert Burneko: You Can't Bully These Motherfuckers (The Concourse)
Justin Charity: Rachel Dolezal’s Grotesque Idea of Identity (The Ringer)
Justin Charity: Rachel Dolezal’s Grotesque Idea of Identity (The Ringer)
But, crucially, Dolezal does explain what she thinks blackness entails, and what she thinks it means to be black. She talks about civil rights activism and black authors. She talks about hair. She does hair. She brags that none of her black clients dropped her in light of the scandal. Dolezal proudly mismanages her own haggard braids, which she clearly regards as a crucial set piece in her grotesque production of blackness. Dolezal talks about blackness as if it were reducible to two qualities, and only two qualities: scholarship and aesthetics. It cannot occur to her that blackness—a social construction, indeed—is a comprehensive and involuntary realm of experience. White power invented it, and white power enforces it, but, paradoxically, black people own blackness. Throughout the documentary, several black women tell Dolezal as much. Dolezal disputes their authority in the vaguest terms, but nonetheless assuredly. She has decided that she is black, so she’s black. Dolezal
·theringer.com·
Justin Charity: Rachel Dolezal’s Grotesque Idea of Identity (The Ringer)
Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
Ehhhhhhh I’m *real* skeptical of the ‘this is it’ thing ‘cause we‘ve heard it a thousand times now. But I want to save this for posterity. The raid on the offices of President Trump’s personal lawyer makes clear that Trump’s battle with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is entering its final chapter.
·newyorker.com·
Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency
Thread by @RVAwonk on the danger of conspiracy theories
Thread by @RVAwonk on the danger of conspiracy theories
Functioning societies depend on shared, socially-mediated sources of knowledge. It's the glue that holds societies together. Conspiracy theories ask us to give up more & more of our trust in each other, and in our knowledge-generating mechanisms. Conspiracy theories come at a cost. They ask us to give up on our trust in knowledge, in knowledge-producing institutions, and in each other. And so ultimately, they ask us to give up on the fabric of society altogether.
·threadreaderapp.com·
Thread by @RVAwonk on the danger of conspiracy theories
@drvox thread on conservative columnists at NYT
@drvox thread on conservative columnists at NYT
NYT needs "a voice from the right," but not a voice from the ACTUAL right (which is oriented around white resentment, not any discernible governing philosophy). They need a voice from the Conservatism of the Mind, the noble, principles-base conservatism they imagine. [These conservative columnists] are just playing their role in a very old parlor game, where Serious Conservatives tell liberals they are bad and wrong (that's what "intellectual diversity" means to elite center-lefties) and liberals proceed to engage in self-loathing hand-wringing about it. In the name of "exposing readers to diverse viewpoints," NYT is, in practice, obscuring the true nature of today's right. Virtually the entire political elite & most NYT readers are in denial about what the right has become & that denial is increasingly dangerous.
·threadreaderapp.com·
@drvox thread on conservative columnists at NYT
Sarah Jeong: Meet the campaign connecting affluent techies with progressive candidates around the country (The Verge)
Sarah Jeong: Meet the campaign connecting affluent techies with progressive candidates around the country (The Verge)
Meet the Great Slate — a fundraising campaign that raised nearly a million dollars in 2017, mostly through Twitter, for eight seemingly random Congressional candidates from across the country. The Great Slate has no splashy slogans, no slick logos: just a bare-bones website, a donate button, and a lot of jokes on Twitter.
·theverge.com·
Sarah Jeong: Meet the campaign connecting affluent techies with progressive candidates around the country (The Verge)
Longreads Member Exclusive: 'The Nature of Social Evil'
Longreads Member Exclusive: 'The Nature of Social Evil'
Maria Bustillos picked Ernest Becker’s ‘Escape from Evil’. Becker won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Denial of Death, but this one, published posthumously and building on ideas from that earlier work, is far, far better, to my mind, more compact, more advanced, more compelling. This book is pragmatic synthesis of multiple disciplines in the science of man, the place where humanities and science collide. Theories about Becker's work abound, but for me his great gift was the way he seemed to have led us to the threshold of a new enlightenment, clear-eyed, undeceived, ready to take the next step. It's a step the reader may be able to intuit, and perhaps even gain, and make practical use of in his or her own life: '[W]e have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism.'
·us2.campaign-archive.com·
Longreads Member Exclusive: 'The Nature of Social Evil'
A thread by Asad Haider
A thread by Asad Haider
Yo here's my rant. Words like "prison" or "capital" aren't just names for things in the world that have existed since the dawn of time
·tinysubversions.com·
A thread by Asad Haider
Emmet Penney: Lectureporn: The Vulgar Art of Liberal Narcissism (Paste Magazine)
Emmet Penney: Lectureporn: The Vulgar Art of Liberal Narcissism (Paste Magazine)
This belies an important distinction between liberals and conservatives, lectureporn and the ubiquitous tirade in conservative media. It’s the Nietszchean distinction between contempt and hate. You can hate an equal or someone with power over you. So conservatives hate liberals (hence their paranoiac victim narrative), whereas liberals have contempt for conservatives, which means they’re arrogant. Arrogant people are lazy in general and inept when it comes to empathy. If you can’t empathize with people, you can’t understand them. And if you can’t understand their worldview, you can’t hope to either win them over or defeat them. You’ve played yourself. No one cares if you’re right and ineffective. That’s called being an impotent loser. For all the talk about “bleeding heart liberals” who vote with their tears, they’ve proven to be staggeringly emotionally incompetent.
·pastemagazine.com·
Emmet Penney: Lectureporn: The Vulgar Art of Liberal Narcissism (Paste Magazine)
Joe Soss: Food Stamp Fables (Jacobin)
Joe Soss: Food Stamp Fables (Jacobin)
What also makes O’Connor’s article so troubling is that he wraps the usual scurrilous myths about SNAP in a veneer of health promotion — a framing that’s sure to win over some left-leaning readers who’d otherwise recoil at the usual trumped-up claims about food stamps. Yet in the end, O’Connor’s health paternalism doesn’t just run aground morally, but empirically: the study provides no evidence that SNAP encourages soda purchasing, and no evidence that SNAP funds (as opposed to personal funds) were used to buy soft drinks. O’Connor writes a lot about sugar, and not much about social policy. So perhaps his main target here is the sugar industry. If so, he has thrown millions of food-insecure Americans — most of whom work or have significant disabilities — under the bus to advance his agenda. Just as political attacks on social protections are on the rise, the article panders to the worst stereotypes of “welfare,” ignoring the SNAP program’s many successes. In the process, it tells people who imagine the worst about food stamps that they’ve been right all along. Facts be damned.
·jacobinmag.com·
Joe Soss: Food Stamp Fables (Jacobin)