Either Blogger or Opera has been weird for about a week. I'll get to a lot of stuff as soon as that stops. Meanwhile, have some links while I'm hunting for
socks all those tabs I opened and forgot I wanted to
footnote blog about:
- First and foremost, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been remarkable these last two weeks:
- "The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness"
There is not a single word in this response relating to race and racism in Western Europe or anything remotely closely to it. Instead, Johnson proposes to bait with race, and then switch to class. He swaps “labor conditions and daily lives of working people” in for “victims of white supremacy” and prays that the reader does not notice. Indeed, one might just as easily note that the advance of indoor plumbing, germ theory, and electricity have improved “the labor conditions and daily lives of working people,” and this would be no closer to actual engagement.
This pattern—strident rhetoric divorced from knowable fact—marks Johnson’s argument. Reparations, he tells us, do not emerge from the “felt needs of the majority of blacks,” a claim that is hard to square with the fact that a majority of blacks support reparations. Instead, he argues, the claim for reparations emerges from a cabal of “anti-racist liberals” and “black elites” seeking to make a “territorial-identitarian claim for power.” In fact, the reparations movement runs the gamut from the victims of Jon Burge, to those targeted by North Carolina’s eugenics campaign, to those targeted by the same campaign in Virginia, to those targeted by “Massive Resistance” in the same state, to the descendants of those devastated by the Tulsa pogrom. Are the black people of Tulsa who suffered aerial bombing at the hands of their own government“black elites” in pursuit of “territorial-identitarian claim?” Or are they something far simpler—people who were robbed and believe they deserve to be compensated?
- "The Case for Considering Reparations"
With that said, I concluded that the next-best step was to back John Conyers’s H.R. 40 bill, which proposed to study slavery and its legacy, and to determine whether reparations were feasible. This seemed intelligent, given that is the exact same path taken by one of the more successful reparations efforts—those awarded to Japanese Americans interned during World War II. It was also actionable—a bill in Congress that could serve as a rallying point—as opposed to merely rhetorical. Finally, although studies certainly end up in the dust-bin of history all the time, without some sort of official document tallying up the specific costs of some three centuries of injury, it seems relatively useless to argue for a plan for payment.
- "Against Endorsements"
The point is to get people to question, not to recruit them into a religion. Citizens are not sheep. They do not need shepherds, and even if they did I would be poorly qualified. I have thought quite deeply about the problem of racism in American society. I have thought somewhat deeply about inequality and the social safety net. I have though only modestly about foreign policy and the environment. And I haven’t thought much at all about net neutrality. I voted for the first time in 2008, following years of skepticism about electoral politics. Whatever. The point is that this is not the record of someone who should be telling other citizens how to vote.
Just bite-size samples. Read them all..
- Part 1 of Lance Mannion's review of The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace and his appreciation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But the foundation for his claim upon the White House was that he knew how to get good things done because he was experienced and prepared.
But many Republicans and not a few Democrats these days not only don’t seem to think a would-be president needs to have experience or to have prepared for the office, they see experience and signs of thoughtful preparation as disqualifications.
Preparing? That’s for losers.
Experience? Just another way of saying you’ve been compromised and corrupted by Wall Street, the Washington establishment, and your husband.
- Terrorists in Oregon and the real stakes.
Let’s remember that “ranchers” are being used as a proxy for every person or company that wants to get its hands on free government land. Despite being relatively big deals at the local level, there really isn’t enough money in ranching to get the kind of legislative support they receive. That money comes from extraction industries like mining and oil drillers and fracking companies, that stand to make billions if they can get the feds to give up its ownership of millions of acres of western land. It would not surprise me if some people hang on to unprofitable ranches solely for the value of the minerals and water beneath the ground in anticipation of the day when a republican administration lets them buy the land for pennies on the dollar. The ranchers are only the most photogenic of the groups that want to hoover up federal land, mining and other extraction industries don’t get the same kind of nostalgic preferential treatment from the public.
- Several days late, but: Trans-Pacific Partnership still opposable, call your congressperson.
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