Re: Applebaum

by

by liberal japonicus

I’m not going to dig thru comments to find out who discussed Applebaum and what folks said, and I can’t remember when I have cited her, but I will say, knowing all this about her make me wonder how I would reconsider things.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/anne-applebaum-how-my-old-friends-paved-the-way-for-trump-and-brexit

575 thoughts on “Re: Applebaum”

  2. To be honest, I’m not sure, but I didn’t know the depth of her relations with figures in Eastern Europe. I had her in my mind as a historian, (I read her book Gulag) and didn’t ever imagine that she would have been married to someone in the Polish government. Her departure from the US right was timely (the article says she stopped voting Republican in 2008, but I didn’t really analyze her politics when I read Gulag in 2006 or so?) and I never clocked her as being a right idealogue. I’m not saying that she was, I think the only way I can explain it is if you are talking about some world famous event with someone and they speak knowledgably about it and you go away and then discover that they were actually in the room when the event took place. For both good and bad. Perhaps I’m the only one who didn’t realize this.

  3. lj, when Nigel first posted his link (on collaborators), I read it and thought it excellent, and important. Everyone I shared it with IRL thought so too. I speculated that Mattis’s long overdue open break with the Trump regime might have been partly in response to her specifically naming him as one of those who had been more cowardly than examples she gave of brave Eastern Europeans who had defied intimidation and conditioning to oppose communist regimes. I then had a somewhat protracted fight with Donald, for whom the history of her political attitudes made her inadmissable as someone to admire, even for recent thinking. Neither of us changed our view.
    Thank you for posting this piece, which I might not otherwise have seen. It confirms me in my opinion.

  4. I must confess my ignorance with respect to Applebaum. Prior to the initial posting of the Atlantic article by Nigel, I was not aware of her or her work. I took no great issue with it, and thought it had some good insights. The Guardian piece cited by lj is also pretty good. Wry historians are usually good ones.
    As to her political “awakening”, I am reminded of the flight of many intellectuals from the Left during the 50’s and 60’s (Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, et al). Theirs was a path toward ideological opposition to socialism, and some of them wound up in another ideologically ugly place. Her political transformation is, um, a bit more restrained.
    But I’ll take (almost) any resistance to authoritarianism where I can find it.

  5. …Her political transformation is, um, a bit more restrained…
    One might even say that she grew up, while many in the social/political circle her husband once inhabited – including our current PM – remained stuck in perpetual adolescence.
    Looking at Wikipedia, the attraction to right of centre politics is entirely understandable:
    …She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School (1982). She earned a BA (summa cum laude) in history and literature at Yale University (1986), where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in autumn 1982. While a student, Applebaum spent a summer in Leningrad, Soviet Union in 1985 which she has written helped to shape her opinions…
    And in that context, the difference between the Britain of Attlee and that of Thatcher, or the between the US of FDR and Reagan, is immeasurably less than that between either and the Soviet regime.

  6. Applebaum’s latest on the depraved, disgraceful, fascist Republican Party-supported conservative movement in Poland:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/polands-rulers-manufactured-a-rainbow-plague/614113/
    I won’t link to it, but today the ridiculous, orthodox fag-hater Dreher at TAC ridicules Applebaum on the way to going full-in for Duda’s victory, as he does for Hungary’s Orban, and as he does for Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church’s treatment of LGBT in Russia.
    Dreher, of course, elides the underlying anti-semitism of all three regimes, as he does the underlying subhuman rank racism of his hero Tucker Carlson, the latter of whom must be canceled in every sense of the word.
    Must I add “F*ck Antifa, too” to show proper obeisance to the canceling rhetoric of the great both-sides-do-it fence sitters?
    By the way, Applebaum’s history of Stalin’s genocide in the Ukraine, “Red Famine”, is a bracing read at well.
    It is interesting to contemplate the minimizing rhetoric of Stalin’s “agricultural” policies in Ukraine with our current US fascist regime’s pandemic denial.
    What famine? These people have TOO MUCH grain is the problem.
    I can, of course, agree with Applebaum in her current incarnation, as I can with David Frum’s remarkable apostasy, without committing to agreement with her (and his) foreign and domestic policy positions in the past or the future, should we have the latter.
    First, we remove the EVIL conservative Trump movement from the face of the Earth, and then, whatever misguided calamities the entirely human and humane Frum and Applebaum have up their sleeves for us can be dealt with on a first come, first serve basis under the messy business as usual in an imperfect world.

  7. I can, of course, agree with Applebaum in her current incarnation, as I can with David Frum’s remarkable apostasy, without committing to agreement with her (and his) foreign and domestic policy positions in the past or the future
    Ditto. Not to mention that this is, as far as I can see, one of the advantages of the liberal, enlightenment approach. All or nothing seems to me a particularly reductive, or perhaps even puerile, view.

  8. Self-described accountings of political journeys should be taken with the usual cautionary grain of salt (there is no such thing as NO bias, especially in recounting one’s own apostasies …. we are the hero of our own story …. nor is there certainty, unlike conservatives and the KGB would have us believe; I wear my bias on my sleeve and I am frequently full of sh*t, but I try to tailor the degree of my biases and full of sh*tness to the other side’s always final offer of all and nothingness, and even that statement is questionable and self-serving. We can balance, but if you haven’t tipped over, you haven’t lived), but this article reveals something of Annie Applebaum’s journey away from the pure malignity of movement conservatism, of which she was a bit of a salon insider, over the past few decades.
    That Applebaum anchors the article with Laura Ingraham is satisfying, given the faux Christian sadism of the latter’s well-remunerated and country-destroying schtick.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/laura-ingrahams-descent-into-despair/614245/

  9. I was taken by this quote: “…at its best it was energetic, reformist, and generous…”
    It’s difficult now even to remember that as being a possible description of even a small part of the conservative project.
    I don’t exactly share Applebaum’s politics (so far as I have any real idea of what they are), but I will be buying her book.

  10. When conservatism is exemplified by a governor not merely failing to mandate the wearing of masks in public during a global pandemic, but actually prohibiting local officials from issuing such mandates, when his state is in the midst of a surge of COVID-19 cases, there is nothing left but despair.

  13. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/15/trump-appointees-loyalty-interviews-364616?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000016e-c680-d60d-ad7e-cece56620000&nlid=630318
    Biden needs to conduct a thorough purge of all republican filth from my government.
    And it needs to be violent.
    You conservatives want authoritarian government with loyalty to you alone, ya effing cucks?
    Move to Russia, assholes.
    Those “deep state” employees under the gun to lick Trump’s gold-plated anus need to go into those interviews with the subhuman McEntee fully armed.
    Kemp is a genocidal murderer.
    This country does not go forward until full vengeance is employed against its tens of millions of internal mortal enemies.

  20. From JT’s OPB link (emphasis added):

    “It was basically a process of facing many walls and corners as they patted me down and took my picture and rummaged through my belongings,” Pettibone said. “One of them said, ‘This is a whole lot of nothing.’”

    Was the “official” referring to the detainee’s belongings or the situation generally, I wonder? Is there an enthusiasm gap?

  21. From Applebaum, in the Atlantic, on Ingraham:

    This wasn’t the nostalgic conservatism of the English, or the hard-right nationalism found elsewhere in Europe; this was something more buoyant, more American—an optimistic conservatism that wasn’t backward-looking at all. Although there were darker versions, at its best it was energetic, reformist, and generous, predicated on faith in the United States, a belief in the greatness of American democracy, and an ambition to share that democracy with the rest of the world.

    So, a couple of thoughts.
    First, contra Applebaum’s comment comparing the Reaganites to UK conservatism, if there is one word that characterizes the “optimistic conservatism” of the Reagan period, it is nostalgia. Same for the toxic patriotism of the current time, for that matter.
    Second, I generally agree that the collapse of the Soviet regime was seen by conservatives as proof that “we” had “won”. Further, it was seen as something that entitled us to rule the whole freaking world. For its own good, of course.
    It was the End Of History! Right?
    That was an agenda that was destined for disappointment, because the rest of the world wasn’t really interested in being ruled by us. Or probably anybody, really.
    And we weren’t that good at it, in the end, because we weren’t as virtuous as we imagined ourselves to be. Because no-one is.
    And now we are burdened with the Ingrahams and the Buchanans and the rest of that lot, threatening civil war and generally looking for ways to burn the whole place down if their weird ahistorical precious patriotic pipe-dream doesn’t come true.
    It was always a pile of self-serving bunk. We were the epitome and culmination of human history, and our time had come.
    Well, we weren’t. And we don’t need to be, because nobody needs to be.

  22. And we weren’t that good at it, in the end, because we weren’t as virtuous as we imagined ourselves to be. Because no-one is.
    I think the biggest problem was hubris. If we had been willing to grant the rest of the world some respect, even just for those of their traditions which don’t conflict with our ideas about economics and human rights, we’d have gotten further. Still not the total success some expected, but further.
    Because, after all, those things actually work for the good of most people. So they’ll support moving towards them, IF you haven’t got their backs up by disrespecting everything about their culture.

  23. Re JDT @8:54
    The report I read said at least one guy got put in “a Federal holding cell” before being eventually released without charges. (Or even being told why he was picked up.) It seems to me that should have, however inadvertently, left a paper trail which could show who did it. And thus, eventually, who ordered it.
    Probably we don’t get to the bottom of it before the election. But just starting the digging effort may discourage a repeat eleswhere.

  25. World War III has started:
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-21/barr-says-u-s-businesses-part-of-problem-in-battling-china
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-usa-carriers/u-s-aircraft-carriers-return-to-south-china-sea-amid-rising-tensions-idUSKCN24I19W
    Expect an incident in the South China Sea. You’ll get a clue of the timing by watching Trump’s poll numbers.
    Don’t believe a word of the gummint’s propaganda when it happens. Conservatives have desired the irrelevance, and the total canceling of the US government for generations.
    Well, now you’ve got it, assholes. What are you going to do with it, besides count your tax breaks?
    Donald Trump: “I learned everything there is to know about weapons in 90 minutes.”
    As with halting all investigation of his career corrupt business and tax evasion thuggery because the Presidency is his legal Barr-approved hidey hole, Trump has ideas about nuclear war and where would be the best place to try it out: from the Presidency of the United States, which has access to the most fortified and long-term provisioned (Goya produced lining the walls) bomb shelters on the US mainland?
    His lackeys will be forced to pay emoluments to Trump and family to secure shelter from incineration for themselves and their families, if in fact there are any malignant republican lackeys who even give a shit about their families, except as props for one righteous fake Christian grift after another.
    Why is an Attorney General of the United States horning in on State Department and Defense Department functions, if there is not a domestic security offensive, including shutting down access to the voting franchise, which is what the deliberate spread of a deadly virus is designed to do as well, about to go into operation?
    While simultaneously rounding up “disloyal” (not to the country but rather to one psychopathic murderer) American career government employees for harassment and ultimate expulsion, to silence all dissent within our government as full-on fascism is imposed on this country.
    Take a moment to cue some dissonant minor-keyed strains of music for the paranoia and then take a moment to chuckle.
    We’ll see.
    The only limit to what these evil filth will do is our imaginations.

  26. I think the biggest problem was hubris.
    Agreed.
    If we had been willing to grant the rest of the world some respect, even just for those of their traditions which don’t conflict with our ideas about economics and human rights, we’d have gotten further. Still not the total success some expected, but further.
    So, I have questions.
    In what way does it matter if another country’s traditions conflict with our own, about economics, human rights, or whatever? In what contexts does that call for some kind of response from us, and what kind of response does it call for?
    What is the goal toward which we would have gotten “further”?
    Briefly, what makes us – the United States – the measure of how a nation should organize and run itself?

  27. Briefly, what makes us – the United States – the measure of how a nation should organize and run itself?
    I’m not saying that we are the standard to which others should move. Because clearly we are not — anyone who thinks we are perfect hasn’t been paying attention.
    On the other hand, we could encourage others to provide increased economic freedom, and improved human rights, regardless of whether we have achieved perfection there. And, for half a century, we did. The problem I was trying to address is why we were no more successful than we were. Why, as you put it, we weren’t that good at it.

  30. Btw, I might have spoiled it by making it about Applebaum. It’s not. It’s more of a theory about how the US and Britain got to where they are now and it is generations in the making.

  31. I must have read excerpts from that piece already. Me to myself: “I’ve read this paragraph before.” It’s a good read, though, so reading some of it twice is fine.

  32. The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, is realised nowhere. The fact of economic inequality, not to mention the compromised character of political representatives, makes it unrealisable. More disturbing still, voters have been steadily deprived, not least by a mendacious or click-baiting fourth estate, of the capacity either to identify or to seek the public interest.
    Yes, that was an interesting piece. I found the history (particularly about Germany and Japan) very illuminating. You certainly can’t argue with the final sentence of the excellently expressed excerpt above, and the viewpoint and analysis are valuable, particularly as a corrective to the reflexive triumphalism we are so very used to in the west.

  33. nous pointed out the Mishra in the thread on Weber. I thought his history was a bit off in regards to Germany and Japan (though my take is probably more cynical in regards to the West). Also someone here recommended Mishra’s Age of Anger, which I think does better at discussing Germany and Japan and seeing his name, it reminded me that I had read it (it often takes a few repetitions to have me remember these days)

  34. In many ways, I found the Mishra piece incredibly offensive.
    The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, is realised nowhere.
    Yes? And? The “ideal” of anything is realised nowhere. I guess we humans work with each flawed other, and with our own flawed human institutions. Assuming that we’re “decent” people (as we sometimes like to describe ourselves here), we try to make things better as we limp along.
    Applebaum aside (and I don’t agree with a lot of where she has been in her political history, and apparently she also has some second thoughts), people are now in power who have never believed in even the attempt to attain “the ideal of democracy.” To a certain extent they have used the cynicism and despair among so many to lead the country in the opposite direction. People like Mishra are helping that effort.
    Some other quotes that were annoying:
    “After the collapse of communism, and the moral challenge it presented, the corralling of African Americans was resumed without fear of international scrutiny; the new weapons for this purpose, honed to deadly effect under Clinton, and fully endorsed by Joe Biden in the Senate, were mass incarceration and a militarised police.”
    This rhetoric about the “crime bill!” during the ’90’s doesn’t have much to do with the collapse of communism, it seems to me. Mishra is apparently a Bernie Sanders fan (for example, the silly statement: “Biden, abandoning his Obama-lite centrism, has rushed to plagiarise Bernie Sanders’s manifesto.”) Why then doesn’t he point out that Sanders also voted for the “crime bill!”? Was this also Bernie’s reaction to the collapse of communism? I think he just wanted to get in the Clinton “crime bill!” dig.
    The “they were all bad!” approach to American history is extremely dishonest, and very destructive. It ignores the substantial work that people did during the 20th century (and during Obama’s administration) to make the US more equitable, to establish institutions to make the world more equitable, and to oppose authoritarianism.
    I found the piece tiresome.

  36. What I take away from Mishra is that, in Mishra’s opinion, the tradition of laissez faire economics, running from Manchester liberalism, through to Friedman, and beyond to now in the UK and the US, is proving itself to be insufficient to the demands of the moment.
    Or, of many moments, including the current one.
    I find the argument persuasive.
    Mishra also conflates that with democracy, which IMO is mistaken. It is, IMO, absurd to say that the nations with stronger social infrastructure – Japan, Germany, most of the EU for that matter – are any less democratic than either the US or the UK. The two things are distinct.
    So, that argument, I don’t find persuasive.
    Mishra challenges the idea that a society is merely a collection of individuals pursuing their private interests. Or, more specifically, challenges the idea that a nation organized around the idea that a society is merely a collection of individuals pursuing their private interests is one that offers resources and institutions sufficient to address the kinds of challenges we are facing now.
    Or, really, is one that is sustainable, at all.
    That part, I agree with.

  37. challenges the idea that a nation organized around the idea that a society is merely a collection of individuals pursuing their private interests is one that offers resources and institutions sufficient to address the kinds of challenges we are facing now.
    Whether it was sufficient to the challenges of the day EVER is doubtful. And most people know it. There is a reason, after all, that throughput history all but the most benighted areas of the world have had some form of government, one which (among, admittedly, other things) conducted joint efforts to address the challenges of the day.

  38. I guess what I’m saying is that what I take away from Mishra is that the prevailing doctrine of the last 40 years – that what this country is, or should be, about is unregulated capitalism – has failed.
    For “unregulated capitalism” feel free to read “minimally regulated capitalism” or any variant of the same.
    Manchester liberalism, “classic” liberalism, libertarian capitalism, Chicago School economics, the Friedman doctrine. Whatever label you want to put on it.
    The idea that government’s job is to stay the hell out of the way of money making more money.
    It’s failed.
    And I agree with that.

  39. I agree with that reading, russell, but I’d also add in a healthy dose of post-colonialist critique at the heart of why he thinks it’s failed.
    And I’d say that the Clintons have more than earned the mild jab that Mishra hit them with.

  40. I guess what I’m saying is that what I take away from Mishra is that the prevailing doctrine of the last 40 years – that what this country is, or should be, about is unregulated capitalism – has failed.
    I agree that unregulated capitalism has failed. But you and I weren’t convinced of that by Mishra – we both thought that before we read the article. He may believe that, but he didn’t make that case in the article – his diatribe is incoherent.
    And I’d say that the Clintons have more than earned the mild jab that Mishra hit them with.
    I am not going to convince anyone who believes that otherwise, but what was the point? What was the point of the jab against Biden “plagiarizing” Sanders? And while bringing up Sanders, where was an acknowledgment of his role in voting for the “crime bill!”? The story of crime in the nineties, and that legislation in particular, has been so dishonestly distorted that it really undermines Mishra’s credibility to include it in an article that really had nothing to do with it. Also, did Obama “deserve” to be maligned for being “keen not to be seen as caring too much about black people”?
    Probably my bedtime.

  41. Mishra also conflates that with democracy, which IMO is mistaken. It is, IMO, absurd to say that the nations with stronger social infrastructure – Japan, Germany, most of the EU for that matter – are any less democratic than either the US or the UK. The two things are distinct.
    There’s a lot going on in the article in service of bolstering the social infrastructure thesis (which in of itself, I don’t have a great argument with).
    The eliding of the more inconvenient bits of history of (notably) Germany, Japan and China is pretty blatant – along with that of the considerable role the US played in the early postwar development of Germany, Japan and South Korea ( the latter of which would not otherwise have existed at all).

  42. One might also add his conflation of the polities of the US and the UK, which is not entirely convincing.

  43. I liked Mishra’s book Age of Anger and I thought that the longer format gave him more room and it was more a question of the global environment rather than an analysis of the UK/US.
    I do think that one problem is that he is an outsider to the US political scene and (and this is what I complained earlier about) his attempts to paint the US as one polity, all sharing the same opinion serves him poorly. The discussion of Biden ‘plagiarising’ was something I pointed out in the other thread and it seems that he fails to understand that Obama was quite trapped by being ‘the first black president’ and so was unable to push progressive notions very far (we can argue if he would have, but he and his advisors knew that he could not take his identity too far. For example, the Key and Peele routine about Obama’s anger translator, which Obama liked so much that he used it at a Correspondent’s dinner, shows that he was just as aware of the limitations that were placed on him. Here’s an interesting article about the linguistic aspects of that sketch
    https://wp.nyu.edu/compass/2019/03/28/african-american-english-aae-in-key-peeles-obamas-anger-translator/ )
    But I hope the people rejecting this piece will still take a read of Age of Anger (his discussion of the roots of Hindu nationalism is really interesting)

  44. I’ve been thinking of the piece since my cautious response last night.
    I was grateful to read about the social infrastructure etc history in Germany and Japan, about which I knew nothing and which I found very interesting, but I accept lj’s remark that the version he gives may be somewhat misleading.
    I also agree with Nigel’s two posts above, even more particularly the second, which is something of an understatement in my opinion.
    I understand the wish to emphasise the impossibility of achieving the ideal of democracy, as in the part I quoted, since that is the weapon regularly (and rightly) used to neuter any argument about the utopian intention behind communism.
    But, even while reading the piece last night, I kept thinking of the old Churchill quote about democracy being the worst possible system apart from all the others. Mishra seems to me not to suggest any constructive solution to the problem.

  45. I do think that one problem is that he is an outsider to the US political scene and (and this is what I complained earlier about) his attempts to paint the US as one polity, all sharing the same opinion serves him poorly.
    It seems more than this; it’s also what Nigel said:
    The eliding of the more inconvenient bits of history of (notably) Germany, Japan and China is pretty blatant – along with that of the considerable role the US played in the early postwar development of Germany, Japan and South Korea (the latter of which would not otherwise have existed at all).
    I don’t really trust a writer who distorts history in this way, and whose essay contained all manner of extraneous material simply meant (seemingly) to burnish his leftier than thou credentials. If his book is worth reading, it’s likely that it benefitted from editorial intervention, which perhaps could have also improved the LRB piece.

  46. But, even while reading the piece last night, I kept thinking of the old Churchill quote about democracy being the worst possible system apart from all the others. Mishra seems to me not to suggest any constructive solution to the problem.
    This.

  48. But, even while reading the piece last night, I kept thinking of the old Churchill quote about democracy being the worst possible system apart from all the others. Mishra seems to me not to suggest any constructive solution to the problem.
    This.
    Ditto

  49. A piece in the NYT you might have more sympathy with
    Yes, I do like that one.
    The fact that Merkel is smart and competent, and interested in the public good, as opposed to our anti-Democratic, corrupt stooge, who gets his marching orders from foreign strongmen and domestic white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, certainly goes a long way. That Germany had institutions in place to care for workers during this crisis was no doubt helpful, but a competent American government could have retrofit some of our established welfare institutions to the purpose as well. Unfortunately, our not-so-democratic Republicans have instead been devoted to tearing those institutions down.
    Germany’s success is largely thanks to a competent leadership.

  50. Germany’s success is largely thanks to a competent leadership.
    The question is, though, how much does the robustness of German institutions lead to competent leadership being the result of their political process? Why did enough people in the US decide to elect a transparent charlatan to the highest office in the land? What is lacking in our social infrastructure that allows people to behave this way politically?

  52. Neither the German chancellor nor the president are elected directly by the people (not even in the sense of the electoral college). The chancellor is elected by parliament (lower chamber, Bundestag) (and can only be removed by electing another one). The president is elected by the Bundestag and an equal number of people from the federated states (usually the members of the upper chamber, Bundesrat, plus people nominated by the parliaments of the federated states in proportion to population and political makeup).
    So, in order to get a loony head of government one would have to have an absolute majority of loonies in federal parliament and an absolute majority of those in both federal and federated parliaments for the head of state. And that is a wee bit more difficult in Germany than the US due to a number of different reasons.

  53. So, in order to get a loony head of government one would have to have an absolute majority of loonies in federal parliament and an absolute majority of those in both federal and federated parliaments for the head of state. And that is a wee bit more difficult in Germany than the US due to a number of different reasons.
    Thanks, Hartmut. I was going to comment that the political system itself probably has more to with it than social welfare institutions (not that I don’t support stronger welfare institutions). Our political system is hindered by our legacy of division between slave states and free states, and our Constitution still gives too much power to the Confederacy (now in a slightly altered form).

  54. One might also add his conflation of the polities of the US and the UK, which is not entirely convincing.
    I’m not Mishra, so apply grains of salt. But I think the point of discussing the two together is because, historically, the US and the UK have been the primary examples and champions of the kind of deregulatory / free market policies he is criticizing.
    So, polities not the same, but having that in common. Where “that” is a lot of the substance of the piece.
    Germany’s success is largely thanks to a competent leadership.
    hairshirt asks the relevant question here, I think.
    The fact that one of the two major political parties in this country appears to be “devoted to tearing those institutions down” seems, to me, to be telling.
    It’s not some freakish aberration, it’s a collection of policies that are enthusiastically supported by a hell of a lot of people, in and out of government.
    It’s an expression of our social and political culture. We might wish it were not so, but it is so.
    Trump is the freaking POTUS, because a lot of people voted for him. He has the absolute support of the (R)’s in Congress, who make up more or less half of each house. Slightly more than half of the state governors in the US are (R).
    “Tearing those institutions down” is not a fringe position, here.

  55. From the Christopher David piece:
    He found his way to a bench in the park, where a street medic aided him
    “Street medic” is highly likely antifa or a similar organization. It’s one of the things they do. Among other things, they provide first-responder care to people who get hurt. Whether they’re “one of theirs” or not.
    Not my favorite people, they start fights that don’t need to be started. But there’s more than one side to them.

  56. Institutions and social infrastructure are more than social welfare. It’s not simply a matter of safety nets. It’s a matter of economic policies, educational policies, environmental policies, criminal-justice policies, electoral policies (not just the electoral college, but protection of voting rights and funding for electoral infrastructure), foreign policy (including military spending). It’s about letting the market sort most of this out, except when the government intervenes on behalf of the biggest fish (deregulation, corporate bailouts, military spending, tax-rate reductions) and leaves everyone else to fight over the scraps.

  58. It’s about letting the market sort most of this out, except when the government intervenes on behalf of the biggest fish (deregulation, corporate bailouts, military spending, tax-rate reductions) and leaves everyone else to fight over the scraps.
    The idea of “letting the market sort it out” wasn’t as popular before the social infrastructure started including black people. Take schools, for example. wj mentioned recently his positive experience with California public schools in the 1950’s. The educational infrastructure was supported, and its improvement was popular with most people until, what happened? Class? Integration. Same with New Deal policies. All good until … So, yes, big money saw an opportunity, but it wasn’t big money that coopted people; it was racism. And the big turn-around started with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and reached a cultural revolution with Reagan’s anti-welfare-queen Reaganomics. And, yes, then the grift started big time.
    Germany has its own big money problem people. Let’s start with Deutsche Bank. (I guess, by now, we’ve all read the sad news about Esther Salas’s family. I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but her recent assignment to handle Deutsche Bank money laundering litigation seems suspicious and frightening.)

  59. The idea of “letting the market sort it out” wasn’t as popular before the social infrastructure started including black people.
    A capsule history, almost certainly overly simplistic, and perhaps inaccurate. I’ll welcome comments to expand and correct.
    The idea of letting the market sort it out was not the dominant idea in the early days of the US.
    Then, it was, especially at the end of the 19th C. and into the early 20th C.
    Then, it wasn’t, again, with the reforms of the New Deal.
    Then, it was, again, from Reagan to now.
    So, an issue somewhat orthogonal to race. I think.

  60. I don’t dispute the idea that race was used as a wedge to further the smaller-government/trickle-down movement, but I don’t think it’s remotely the whose story. And, even if it were, why would that be? What conditions made that possible?

  61. …, except when the government intervenes on behalf of the biggest fish (deregulation, …
    Except for the big fish often preferring regulation. Especially if they get to craft it. Regulation can make their business environment more predictable, reduce risk, limit liability, lock out competition, and other reasons I haven’t thought of. Big fish can afford to fill skyscrapers with regulation compliance officers. The compliance cost puts smaller competitors out of business.

  62. Whether it’s deregulation, in the strictest sense, or crony regulation doesn’t really matter to me. It’s all of a piece. The government working for those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom. Regulation isn’t something I relish for its own sake. It’s something that needs to serve a worthwhile purpose to be … well, worthwhile.
    But anyone who thinks it’s not very often necessary can save their breath trying to convince me of that.

  63. Then, it was, especially at the end of the 19th C. and into the early 20th C.
    And what else was happening at this time? The rejection of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK, Confederate statues being erected, etc. Not orthogonal, not coincidental.
    Then, it was, again, from Reagan to now.
    It actually started with Nixon, although more nuanced. This piece, written in 1973, explains. Read especially the part subtitled “Civilian priorities …” to the end.
    There was a growing backlash to civil rights legislation and Johnson’s Great Society. White people didn’t want to support public programs with tax money, because it was a handout to “welfare queens”. The shift away was explicitly racist.
    What conditions made that possible?
    The Civil Rights movement was threatening the privilege of white people, who no longer wanted to support the common good, when common included black people.

  64. The compliance cost puts smaller competitors out of business.
    This is true in some industries. The alcohol industry comes to mind.

  65. I think one problem with correlating racism to other event in the United States is that you can always do it, because it’s always there. That’s not to say that it didn’t play a role, because it’s woven into the fabric of national psyche, but it’s a question of whether a given event was particularly a matter of racism within the context of a country seeded with racism.

  66. I’m also not sure what the argument is. Does the role of racism in American politics somehow negate the idea that the weakening of institutions and social infrastructure isn’t also part of the problem? Isn’t it also possible that the two are so intertwined that you can’t untangle them?

  67. Regulation isn’t something I relish for its own sake.
    Who does?
    We live in a context where the only responsibility businesses are seen to have – socially and legally – is making money for their owners.
    So, it’s regulation, or it’s every one for themselves.

  68. a question of whether a given event was particularly a matter of racism within the context of a country seeded with racism.
    I didn’t realize we were talking about a “given event”. I thought we were describing the social conditions that supported building a social infrastructure (which includes social welfare infrastructure because, in the end, it is society’s welfare – generally speaking – that we’re talking about here: health, education, economic means, etc.). Social Darwinism of the late 19th Century coincided with cheap immigrant labor (from Europe – including from Germany, that place that was building the great welfare state … hmmm, suspicious), and black people who were no longer technically slaves. Exploitation of powerless people was obvious.
    We built a strong and lasting social infrastructure with the New Deal, supplemented by the Great Society, which began the process of extending the New Deal to African-Americans.
    That’s when people started working to undermine the whole project. To quote from that 1973 article whose link I posted: “He told his public audience: ‘What is at stake is, your job, your taxes, the prices you pay and whether the money you earn by your work is spent by you for what you want, or by Government for what someone else wants.'” Someone else? Who’s that?
    The rapacious rich people might have designed this program to con the racist masses (as they have more recently), but racism is why it worked out.

  69. We live in a context where the only responsibility businesses are seen to have – socially and legally – is making money for their owners.
    The problem, or at least part of the problem, is that legally the managers/executives of a business can be sued by “activist” shareholders if they give any attention to behaving responsibly instead of maximizing shareholder income. It’s not that they aren’t required to behave responsibly; it’s that they are effectively prevented from doing so. Yeah, they are expected to give lip service to social responsibility. But heaven help them if they actually do much in that direction.

  70. Isn’t it also possible that the two are so intertwined that you can’t untangle them?
    Sure, which is why we have to solve both.

  71. Capitalism and our homegrown genocidal fake Christianity don’t have to be like this.
    The genocidal, anti-regulatory state championed by conservatives and libertarians, some here:
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/how-trump-is-helping-tycoons-exploit-the-pandemic
    It’s mass murder. State sponsered but paid for by murderous private capital.
    There are 60 million, give or take, anti-regulatory, anti-union libertarians, conservatives, republicans, many of them fake Christian animals, in this country with the blood from these blasted lives on their guilty hands who reportedly will taste just like chicken in the near to middling future, if you can pick the buckshot out of their plucked carcasses.
    Other countries’ more enlightened regs may not accept the surplus of dicey conservative dead meat as up to snuff for import, given the source: dogsh*t fascist conservative movement America.
    Nationalize all of the meat packers. Retool the factories with the latest safety and environmentally safe technology. Hire all of the workers as federal employees with decent salaries and benefits. Confiscate every cent of the wealth of the murderous owners and pay it out as reparations to the families of the employees the owners murdered and sickened. Then arrest and execute the owners and their families.
    These conservative murderous ilk believe trump is the only thing standing between them and Communism and black, Mexican, Asian, Jewish, and Muslim men raping their white trash women.
    What’s more …. much more and its coming hard and fast and down our throats in weeks:
    https://digbysblog.net/2020/07/as-long-as-im-the-dictator/
    John Yoo. Subhuman. Vermin. Fascist. Republican. Conservative.
    If Trump and Barr, the murderers, decide to declare that all gun laws are contravened and we all may carry anytime and anything we like, here’s the firepower I’m looking for, as coincidentally, apropos of nothing, long range semi-automatic weapons technology innovation advances apace, so that one can social distance from murderous rotting crypto-Christian conservatism while delivering savage justice:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq5ZEwVGVh4
    There are 60 million trump conservatives in America who are planning to murder all of us.
    Trump’s not leaving if defeated.
    Decent conservatives, who ya gonna call?
    The gummint you’ve destroyed?
    It’s not there anymore.

  72. Social Darwinism of the late 19th Century coincided with cheap immigrant labor (from Europe – including from Germany, that place that was building the great welfare state … hmmm, suspicious), and black people who were no longer technically slaves.
    Someone who knows more European history than I do please help me out. Was Social Darwinism strictly a US phenomena? Or did Europe see it too? Because if the latter, that rather weakens the “cheap immigrant labor” feature.

  73. The problem, or at least part of the problem, is that legally the managers/executives of a business can be sued by “activist” shareholders if they give any attention to behaving responsibly instead of maximizing shareholder income.
    This, in my view, is fine, because corporations, not really being people, are morally neutral. But that’s exactly why laws, regulations and enforcement are necessary. There’s often no financial incentive or reward for behaving in a socially responsible manner, so society has to demand it with laws.

  74. Mishra is not criticizing democracy, he’s criticizing the Anglo-American narrative of democracy. The crucial paragraph is this one:
    The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance about both foreign countries and political and economic realities at home – can no longer be avoided as the US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ground for the pandemic’. Profit-maximising individuals and businesses, it turns out, can’t be trusted to create a just and efficient healthcare system, or to extend social security to those who need it most. East Asian states have displayed far superior decision-making and policy implementation. Some (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) have elected leaders; two (China, Vietnam) are single-party dictatorships that call themselves communist. They share the assumption that genuine public interest is different from the mere aggregation of private interests, and is best realised through long-term government planning and policy. They also believe that only an educated and socially responsible elite can maintain social, economic and political order. The legitimacy of this ruling class derives not so much from routine elections as from its ability to ensure social cohesion and collective well-being. Its success in alleviating suffering during the pandemic suggests that the idealised view of democracy and free markets prized since the Cold War will not survive much longer.
    He’s contrasting Germany and Japan to the US and UK specifically because of 1 – this notion of social welfare and 2 – the difference between early-developing and late-developing nation states, where the early developers amassed wealth and power through displacing the worst of the violence and exploitation onto other nations and peoples and thus being able to sustain themselves despite a weak central government and widespread inequality by plunder.
    What made Germany such a compelling prototype for Japan? It is that Germany was a classic ‘late developer’ – the archetype of all nation-states in Asia and Africa. It unified only in 1871 and began to industrialise nearly a hundred years after Britain. Its leaders had to cope with the simultaneous challenges of rapid mechanisation and urbanisation, the disappearance of traditional livelihoods, the growth of trusts and cartels as well as trade unions, and an intensifying demand, articulated by a vibrant socialist movement, for political participation.
    Buffeted by socio-economic changes and rising inequality, Germany faced early on what Japan and every other late-developing nation was forced to confront – the ‘social question’. Max Weber put it bluntly: how to ‘unite socially a nation split apart by modern economic development, for the hard struggles of the future’? Weber was among the conservative German nationalists who saw the social question as a matter of life or death. Military and economic rivalry with Britain was a daunting enough prospect for their fledgling state. But, as disaffection increased among the classes uprooted and exploited by industrial capitalism – a political party representing the interests of the working classes emerged in Germany decades before it did in Britain – the fear of socialist revolution also preyed on the minds of German leaders.
    He’s not excusing Germany and Japan for their imperialism, he’s saying that both of those countries have had to find other ways to develop a strong economy and central state because their imperial designs were thwarted by established imperialists and thus had to find a different path to a global economy. And he’s saying that both the US and the UK became global nations despite the weakness of their central government and their deep rooted domestic inequality because the head start they had was relieving pressure on the bottom of their society.
    But now, lacking a strong central government built on the notion of social welfare, the US and UK are struggling to deal with collective problems and are also beginning to have to confront the deep societal inequality that they had relied upon to drive economic growth.
    His shots at Blair, Clinton, and Obama arise out of this specific context.
    He’s not saying Obama was a bad person, he’s saying that, good or bad, Obama could not be a transformative figure absent deep structural change in America’s social contract and view of government.

  75. legally the managers/executives of a business can be sued by “activist” shareholders if they give any attention to behaving responsibly instead of maximizing shareholder income.
    Yes. Which is why I am saying that the basic dynamic we’re discussing here is reflected in law.
    It’s an ethos, a culture. It is expressed in social norms, law, in everything.
    This issue is about who we are, as a nation and a national community. It’s about what we value, and what we don’t value.

  76. John Yoo. Subhuman. Vermin. Fascist.
    You left out war criminal. Which his opinion on torture qualifies him for.
    Does anyone know if a formal action on that is before the International Criminal Court? I realize that the US isn’t a member. But it would at least make manifest that he cannot travel internationally. And who knows, someone might manage a little “extraordinary rendition” just for him.

  78. There’s often no financial incentive or reward for behaving in a socially responsible manner, so society has to demand it with laws.
    But even before you demand it, you could at least stop effectively forbidding it. Sure, your way would be preferable in many cases. But even a half measure would be a big improvement.

  80. But even before you demand it, you could at least stop effectively forbidding it. Sure, your way would be preferable in many cases. But even a half measure would be a big improvement.
    It’s not effectively forbidden. Corporations have a purpose: to make money for their shareholders. No one has to be part of a corporation. If you’re a good person, and you want to be a sole proprietor, make a little money and do good in the world, no one is stopping you. If you ask other people to invest money so that you can make more money for them, that’s your job instead. It’s also your job to comply with laws and regulations. That’s how it works. We make corporations be good citizens by imposing duties on them by law.

  81. And yet it is, or was, possible to run a socially responsible corporation. One which, for example, didn’t dump waste into the local water supply. Sure, the stock price would be lower, but the ROI would actually be comparable.
    People who didn’t want the reduced return that created were free to invest elsewhere. But others couldn’t invest in the company and then sue to force it to be less responsible. And thus make big capital gains for themselves.

  82. But now, lacking a strong central government built on the notion of social welfare, the US and UK are struggling to deal with collective problems and are also beginning to have to confront the deep societal inequality that they had relied upon to drive economic growth.
    His shots at Blair, Clinton, and Obama arise out of this specific context.
    He’s not saying Obama was a bad person, he’s saying that, good or bad, Obama could not be a transformative figure absent deep structural change in America’s social contract and view of government.
    Even if I accept your interpretation, I think his reasoning is shallow and incorrect. Trump is not an inevitable outcome of our pathetic social decadence. He was helped obtain office by a hostile foreign government that preyed on some peculiarities (bad ones) of our political system, as well as complicated social divisions caused in part by inequality, but also by massive technological and demographic change. He seems to miss all of this. I have no interest in delving into his psyche by looking into his other work, so that I can grant him a generous reading of his cheap shots. His article told me enough about his thinking.

  83. The idea of Social Darwinism was very common in Europe (Darwin himself was a strict opponentr btw) but it did not necessarily inform policy too much. The German military officer corps at the time of WW1 was extremly SD and hoped to spread it far and wide as a result of victory.
    The colonial administration was a mixed bag. Quite a number of officials in the colonies were no actual fans of it but were often overruled by fanatics who had the backing of the higher-ups at home in the Reich.

  84. Trump is not an inevitable outcome of our pathetic social decadence. He was helped obtain office by a hostile foreign government that preyed on some peculiarities (bad ones) of our political system, as well as complicated social divisions caused in part by inequality, but also by massive technological and demographic change. He seems to miss all of this.
    I think you’re making it too much about Trump. He’s one symptom (an especially nasty one, though) of the disease afflicting us socially, politically, and economically. The rot being described is much bigger than Trump’s presidency.

  85. Off topic – more on the shooting at Judge Salas’ home:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/gunman-ambushes-nj-federal-judge-esther-salas-husband-mark-anderl-and-son-at-home?source=articles&via=rss?ref=home

    The gunman who shot the husband and son of a federal judge in New Jersey is believed to be a lawyer and men’s rights activist who was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound hours later, two law-enforcement sources told The Daily Beast.
    (…)
    Hollander described himself on his website as an anti-feminist. “Now is the time for all good men to fight for their rights before they have no rights left,” it said.
    (…)
    In 2016, he also filed a ludicrous suit against reporters from CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, PBS News Hour, The New York Times and The Washington Post, claiming their stories on President Trump amounted to a violation of the anti-racketeering statute used to prosecute mobsters.

    Sounds like a real swell guy…

  86. Corporations have a purpose: to make money for their shareholders.
    To my point, this understanding of the purpose of for-profit corps, and in particular this understanding of the scope of their responsibilities, is not universal.
    Not historically, and not in terms of modern governments that sanction and recognize corps.
    We can go around and around with this all day, and probably not say much more than what has already been said.

  87. He’s one symptom (an especially nasty one, though) of the disease afflicting us socially, politically, and economically. /I>
    No, he’s not a symptom. He’s a nasty part of the disease.

  92. Corporations have a purpose: to make money for their shareholders.
    Corporations are licensed by the state and as such are part and partial of an overall public social policy to advance the social good.
    One may disagree about the soundness of such a policy, but a policy it is.

  93. Corporations are licensed by the state and as such are part and partial of an overall public social policy to advance the social good.
    I have incorporated several organizations. There is nothing in my state’s law about advancing the social good, whatever that is (and, of course, I have my own ideas, and they’re not that different from yours).
    There are, however, requirements that corporations abide by the law. So what I expect of our society is to pass laws that require corporate responsibility (to its workers, to the environment, to its customers, etc.). I don’t see any problem with that. What’s the problem that you see?

  94. Anyone offended by Mishra’s tone, but wanting to understand where he is coming from should read more about Modernization Theory and criticisms of Modernization Theory coming from Post-Colonial scholarship. Mishra is not the originator of any of these criticisms, he’s just a frequent voice for it.
    R. Radhakrishnan would be a lovely person to start with.

  95. So what I expect of our society is to pass laws that require corporate responsibility (to its workers, to the environment, to its customers, etc.). I don’t see any problem with that. What’s the problem that you see?
    The problem, to the degree that one exists, is whether such laws are passed, and what they are.
    Different places, different laws.

  96. nous, kudos for going through the Mishra to precis and clarify some of his message. On the occasions I have chosen to do stuff like that, I usually find it tiresome and time-consuming, and these days in particular I have to be really pissed off to undertake it!
    Much of what you say is right, and there is a great deal in the piece with which I agree, but it is sprinkled with highly questionable, tone-deaf little assertions which in my opinion do his his argument no favours.

  97. To my point, this understanding of the purpose of for-profit corps, and in particular this understanding of the scope of their responsibilities, is not universal.
    I would really like to see a link that supports your understanding of what corporations’ duty to shareholders is other than returning money on their investment.
    In addition, I would like to better understand why you think that laws and regulations aren’t enough to make this problem go away. After all, “the public good” can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. My vision of what that is would be strongly opposed to the one held by, for example, Stephen Miller.
    That’s why the concept of “positive law” rather than some squishy “let’s do the right thing” seems more appropriate in this context.

  98. nous, kudos for going through the Mishra to precis and clarify some of his message.
    Seems that putting words in a writer’s mouth is not ideal, assuming that the writer has any talent for writing.
    Perhaps it’s just a really bad example of Mishra’s work; over the years, I have seen a lot of articles in the LRB with which I’ve had similar complaints, which is why I don’t read it (although it has good poems quite often).

  99. From the link I posted earlier:

    Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization or as the shareholder value model, which implies that the ultimate measure of a company’s success is the extent to which it enriches shareholders. It became popular during the 1980s, and is particularly associated with former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch.

    There’s more. It’s not simply a general proposition that publicly traded companies are supposed to make money for the shareholders. It’s an extreme and distilled version of that proposition and one that didn’t hold sway until relatively recently.
    I don’t think anyone is arguing against laws that keep corporations in line. But it seems they’re needed more than ever and it’s harder to get them passed because so many people in power buy into the extreme and distilled concept of maximizing shareholder value above all else.

  100. There’s more. It’s not simply a general proposition that publicly traded companies are supposed to make money for the shareholders. It’s an extreme and distilled version of that proposition and one that didn’t hold sway until relatively recently.
    I read the link, and thanks for it. It states that the concept is relatively new, but doesn’t mention what existed before.
    In addition to returning money to shareholders, corporate officers and directors have various fiduciary duties (no self-dealing, no stealing, etc.). But mostly, “for-profit” corporations are about being “for-profit”.
    Obviously, if you’re a mom and pop corporation, you can have whatever corporate values you want. But if you’re a large corporation, that is controlled by the SEC, and people invest money in order to get a return, money is what it’s all about.
    I don’t happen to think that’s a bad thing. If laws are hard to get passed, it’s not because “so many people in power buy into the extreme and distilled concept of maximizing shareholder value above all else”. It’s because people don’t care about the values that you are expecting corporations to hold, that not enough people do.
    Corporations are not supposed to be our societal representatives. Politicians are. If you want your investments to make less money, and do more good, own your own. If you want other people to do what’s right, vote for people who will pass the laws you want. Sorry that it’s hard.

  101. I would really like to see a link that supports your understanding of what corporations’ duty to shareholders is other than returning money on their investment.
    What I’m trying to call out here is whether corps have a responsibility to a broader set of stakeholders than their shareholders.
    In addition, I would like to better understand why you think that laws and regulations aren’t enough to make this problem go away.
    Since corps are a creature of law, laws and regulations are, precisely, an appropriate mechanism for “making this problem go away”.
    The question is what laws can be passed, or even imagined, in a given society.

  102. Four articles/op eds gleaned from the postings of three of my college friends. One is an editor for Market Watch, one is a certified investment manager for sustainable investing, one is a business school professor:
    https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/
    https://hbr.org/2012/08/hows-that-shareholdery-valuey.html
    https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/opinion/nocera-down-with-shareholder-value.html
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/

  103. …from the postings of three of my college friends.
    My friends are not the authors of the pieces; my friends linked to those articles on their own blogs or on their class pages.

  104. What I’m trying to call out here is whether corps have a responsibility to a broader set of stakeholders than their shareholders.
    Then pass a law.
    The question is what laws can be passed, or even imagined, in a given society.
    My answer would be that people need to understand the role of corporations, the role of government, and make the proper legal adjustments. It’s a good conversation to have, and I am on your side in it.

  105. I don’t think anyone is arguing against laws that keep corporations in line. But it seems they’re needed more than ever and it’s harder to get them passed because so many people in power buy into the extreme and distilled concept of maximizing shareholder value above all else.
    Perhaps, before any new regulations are created, the politicians and bureaucrats should clear out the underbrush of nitpicking micromanaging non-sensical counter-productive existing regulations.
    “Considering all federal regulations, all sectors of the U.S. economy, and all firm sizes, federal regulations cost $8,086 per employee per year in 2008,” according to a 2010 study from the Small Business Administration (SBA). “For firms with fewer than 20 employees, the cost is $10,585 per employee per year. The cost is $7,454 in medium-sized firms, and $7,755 in large firms.”
    “Costs per employee thus appear to be at least 36 percent higher in small firms than in medium-sized and large firms,” the SBA concluded.
    Revisiting the issue in 2016, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation study found “federal regulations alone are estimated to cost the American economy as much as $1.9 trillion a year in direct costs, lost productivity, and higher prices. The costs to smaller businesses with 50 employees or fewer are nearly 20% higher than the average for all firms.”
    Small Businesses Benefit From Deregulation But Remain Stymied by Trump’s Trade Policy: Dump intrusive trade policies to give a real boost to consumers and entrepreneurs.
    Never mind all the state and local regulations.

  106. Thanks, nous, for those links. Lynn Stout’s article (the late Lynn Stout – she died a couple of years ago from cancer) is intriguing (although her footnotes are mostly Lynn Stout’s). Also, some of the other articles rely on her work. I will definitely read more of her work.
    That said, I don’t know how one understands corporations to be owned by anyone else but shareholders. I mean, they own a share, right? And the corporation’s equity is divided into shares, right? So forgive me if I went to law school understanding corporations as they were understood in 1980, but I also read some corporate history, and I don’t know how else to think about them, which is why I’ll read more, but so far I don’t get it.
    I do understand that there are other stakeholders. Having mostly, myself, been either an employee or customer, I get how a corporation is there to serve the customers, and needs to have employees to do all the work.
    But customers either buy it or don’t buy it, and assuming the corporation isn’t a monopoly, the customer can go elsewhere.
    Worker rights are trickier, and (again) laws should ensure fair employee wages, non-discrimination, benefits, etc.
    And, obviously, for enlightened people, there are other business entities, and businesses can create their own organizing structures, so the sky’s the limit for people wanting to opt out of public corporations (but most people don’t because that’s where the money is, am I right?).
    So, I still don’t get the problem with laws being the answer to all of this.
    But I will read more of the work of Lynn Stout. Thanks again.

  107. Then pass a law.
    Do the words “begging the question” mean anything to you?
    Anyway, enough from me on this. Peace out, have a nice day.

  108. Do the words “begging the question” mean anything to you?
    Someone has some persuading to do. I don’t think it’s me. You’ve not really articulated a plan for how your [whatever it is you’re asking for] happens. I don’t oppose it. I just don’t get it.
    So, yes, please be happy – today and always!

  109. By the way, corporate law is state law. russell, I know you’re out, but your very enlightened state could pass some kind of law requiring corporations to “do the right thing” anytime. There’s no red state barrier here.

  110. You’ve not really articulated a plan
    Above my pay grade. I write code, and I play music. We should be able to discuss these things without having to present a grand plan to fix them all.
    The grand plan, if there were one, would be to change the culture. That’s well beyond my abilities.
    I’m observing that, in the US, we lack the ethos that would make it possible to create the kind of social infrastructure that Mishra seems to be calling for. The value system that would support that is simply not a part of who we are, at least not in a broad-based way.
    It seems a fairly obvious point, to me. We could make other choices, but we don’t.

  112. I’m observing that, in the US, we lack the ethos that would make it possible to create the kind of social infrastructure that Mishra seems to be calling for.
    I would opine that it’s not the ethos. It’s that we need a supermajority of Americans to go for it, not the majority that we already have. We are stuck in a difficult situation, but our current failure at addressing the pandemic could be a turning point if we make it so. So let’s work together to do that.
    By the way, I disagree with nous’s channelling Mishra’s actual views about Obama. Nous himself thinks that Obama wasn’t transformative. I think he was. I think we’re experiencing a blowback which might be permanent unless we keep fighting and win.
    People resented the hell out of the transformative act of electing an African-American president. That’s all they care about – to negate it.
    This is about hope and change, not corporate governance.

  113. Can states pass laws?
    There’s a reason corps like to be registered in DE.
    To no small degree, questions about corporations are kind of a side issue. Corporate law reflects the society in which the corporation exists.

  114. Corporate law reflects the society in which the corporation exists.
    Do you think there are no foreign shareholders of Delaware companies? Do you think that Delaware companies are only owned by US persons? This isn’t about the United States.
    Also, you have a vote. Do you have a 401K or other savings plan, and invest in public corporations? Don’t, if you don’t like them. Take your money out and do something else. Buy a rental property and run it on your own terms. (Or not – there are probably laws.)

  115. Obama was not transformative. His election may have been the awakening of a political consciousness that could become transformative in time, but that is not at all the same thing.
    Lincoln was transformative.
    FDR was transformative.
    Reagan, gods help us all, was transformative.
    Clinton was a product of Reagan’s transformation.
    Meanwhile, if the last 3.5 years have taught us anything, it’s that years of policy and international coalition building can be torched to the ground in four years of concerted ratfucking.
    Whatever seeds the election of a black man might have planted, we are going to be years trying to rebuild before those seeds bear fruit.

  117. And if you don’t think there wasn’t fallout after Lincoln, nous, you’re not paying attention to what’s happening now.

  121. Obama wasn’t transformative for you, nous. He was probably transformative for this guy. Time will tell who else.
    Probably, God help us, he was transformative for Trump, too. Not to mention his fanboys. Transformative in that it rocked their world to see a black man, even one as non-threatening as Obama, in the White House.

  122. Probably, God help us, he was transformative for Trump, too. Not to mention his fanboys.
    To me, “transformative” doesn’t mean that we’re all raptured to the better place. So Trump definitely is the depressing, and possibly soul-crushing blowback to the transformative nature of the Obama presidency (for people, not nous). But there were the 2018 Congressional elections, and a lot of people with hope for 2020. Unfortunately, Trump has done a lot of damage, and the pandemic is epic damage on top of horrible damage already. So, yeah. The Civil War was damage, post Reconstruction was damage. Let’s deal with the damage as best we can while moving forward.
    We just lost two civil rights heroes. Transformative, if we keep it up. If corporations are the problems, sell your stocks. I sold most of mine. Just saying. It may not have been wise, but now I can talk (theoretically at least). I have very little skin in that game.

  123. Speaking of symptoms and diseases, a slightly different take from Dahlia Lithwick via LGM
    Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.” Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15th book about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-book-psychoanalysis-enablers.html

  124. Obama was a historic president. Obama was an inspirational president. He was more historic and more inspirational than most other presidents.
    Yet his accomplishments were slight. Not his fault. Congress was set against him, and the Democratic party was completely anodyne and toothless behind him. Most of what he did, he had to do by executive order. Those orders have largely been swept away in a single term.
    He’s accomplished a lot more as a public figure than he did as a president. Yes, I separate those two things – the king’s two bodies and all that.
    FDR, Lincoln, and Reagan (to a lesser, subtractive extent) all transformed the federal government at the structural level to go with their personal accomplishments.

  125. A fascinating thing in the book, to me, was that Trump apparently tried to slip papers for signature to his already dementing father, the effect of which would have been to put Donald himself in sole control of his father’s estate after death, such that his siblings would have been entirely dependent on him and he could have effectively disinherited them from the $1 billion dollar estate (I hadn’t known it was that big). The scam was only thwarted because his mother happened to be present when the lawyer came with the papers, and also it happened to be one of his father’s more lucid days. And so his siblings were told about it. Yet they still all cooperated after the death to bilk Mary and her brother. What an astonishingly rotten family they are. Rotten through and through.

  126. FDR, Lincoln, and Reagan (to a lesser, subtractive extent) all transformed the federal government at the structural level to go with their personal accomplishments.
    LBJ should perhaps be added then.
    In terms of inspiring people and moving us on, I think Obama will rank highly, assuming we’re not ground to dust.

  128. WRT the events in Portland, Cleveland, and now possibly in Chicago, what think people here of any analogy to the Preußenschlag?

  129. WRT the events in Portland, Cleveland, and now possibly in Chicago, what think people here of any analogy to the Preußenschlag?
    Worrisome as hell.

  130. It is not an analogy. It is the thing itself.
    We ain’t seen nothing yet.
    Meanwhile, as Trump’s niece and Mishra (his book, Age of Anger, was historically interesting) try to explain to us the root of the problem, Trump jumps ahead straight into mass murder and genocide, followed right along by all of his malignant, sadistic staff and family and his cynical gummint-hating republican operatives busying stealing the fillings out of every decent government mouth:
    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/no-testing-for-you
    Meanwhile, Chris Wallace, who is a FOX News grifter, after all, why would a professional journalist remain with that outfit, cancels any effectiveness his interview with trump might have had by now challenging Biden to sit down with him for some hard-hitting bullshit, like maybe Biden could do anything … eyes rolling up into his head, drooling, masturbating on camera, gargling cologne, god forbid, promising to raise taxes .. that would somehow make this election, should it occur and be observed by the lawfully defeated, anything other than a starkly binary choice between outright murderous EVIL and a ham sandwich who gets us stumbling through four additional years while the conservative movement is wiped off the face of the Earth for good and forever.
    What happens after that, liberal, conservative, whatever, is not relevant to this moment.
    Kill this monster.
    It’s either bomb Hiroshima or lose millions of lives in a prolonged savage Civil War.
    First things first.
    Yes, Obama was a good man.
    A time for good men will come again after evil men and women are eliminated by ruthlessly determined men and women.
    Drove up to Wyoming yesterday and caught sight of the comet, thru binoculars.
    It looked like it was getting the hell away from us as fast as possible.
    By November, all of us will wish we had booked seats on the comet and were nuking from space.
    As it is, I can’t even book a flight to the Bahamas because republicans and conservatives are super-spreading diseased livestock, enlisting the very children on the effort to murder us, and purposefully so.

  131. WRT the events in Portland, Cleveland, and now possibly in Chicago, what think people here of any analogy to the Preußenschlag?
    Portland is an unusual place. It seems to be the preferred venue for anarchist vs. white supremacist cage matches, going back decades.
    What I’d really like is for the anarchists to stand the hell down and let peaceful folks do their thing.
    It would also be good if the state and city got on the same page, and if both of them got on the same page as the local cops.
    Trump appears to be determined to sell it as the left run amok, with weak-kneed local (D)’s caving in to anarchist demands. Which, of course, requires him to step in with the feds.
    Better the feds, I guess, than the Oath Keepers and the III’ers, but it’s a mess nonetheless.
    I have no idea how it fits into any kind of master strategy, because I don’t think there is one, and I don’t think Trump et al are really capable of crafting one. It’s just a chance for him to play a tough guy on TV.

  132. WRT the events in Portland, Cleveland, and now possibly in Chicago, what think people here of any analogy to the Preußenschlag?
    For a tiny state (Delaware, Rhode Island), or one with a tiny population (Wyoming), it might be possible for Trump to fake a takeover of a state. But to be as effective as Preußenschlag, he would need to take out a major state government. And even if he had people capable of organizing such an effort, he just doesn’t have the resources to pull it off. It’s a huge step up from having thugs pick up a few dozen random protesters to actually shutting down a state government.
    Which isn’t to say that he won’t try. Mere impossibility doesn’t faze him, after all. But it would, I think, blow up in his face big time.

  133. Have been reading these comments with great interest.
    I had read the Applebaum piece before it was posted about here. One of the things that struck me led back to a reference by Corey Robin (whom I don’t know how many of you know, but is active on Facebook and has written a number of books on conservatism) awhile back on how the shift from left to right proved to be more pivotal in the 20th century than any in the opposite direction (re Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, et al). With Applebaum, it seems that she is an example of a shift in the other direction, though only a partial one – more a shift from the right-of center to center-left.
    As for Obama being a transformative president, I would say that he could potentially have been had he had a Congress that was willing to work with him. But mostly he didn’t, which is why so much of what he tried to do easily got undone under 45. But it’s also instructive to step back and really consider what his core beliefs and locus of policy was independent of a Congress to realize it. Economically he didn’t break from the prevailing paradigm, that he was responsible for more deportations than even the second Bush, and that even if he had a Congress that he could really have gotten business done with, would it have been as radical as some hoped and others feared? The ACA at most only went halfway in addressing the insanity of American health care – it needed a public option for it to really do what it could have done, and that got taken off the table early on.
    As for 45 – I too am freaking out over Portland, and his new threats to reprise it in NY, Chicago, Detroit, and so on. But I also feel an equal and opposite reaction to step back and level my head to see that so much of this is desperation, that it possibly still represents the end of something more than the beginning of something, that it’s creating enough outrage to stop or curtail it.
    I don’t want to be sanguine or Panglossian. But I also think that freaking out over it gives him exactly what he wants, and we should not be giving him the satisfaction. This is a new civil rights moment that white people never though they would be the objects of. How did blacks react? Run away? No, they didn’t. Nor should we.

  134. No insignia, no badge, no nametape: no authority, and no right not to be shot on sight.

  135. It does seem like others in the area should be reporting it to the police as a kidnapping. And the the license plate number of the van. Just like you would if you witnessed any other kidnapping.
    Maybe it’s my ignorance showing. But I am under the distinct impression that standard protocol, for all police agencies (local, state or Federal) is to announce, loudly, who they are when making an arrest. Precisely to make clear that they have some kind of formal authority and are not engaged in kidnapping, mugging, etc. Because without said authority, resistance (even with deadly force) would be justified.

  136. Surely 2nd Amendment enthusiasts will not let this government tyranny stand unchallenged.

  137. More great and frightening changes to outrage Trump and company:

    • Before last night’s exhibition game, several members of the Giants team, and the manager, knelt for the national anthem. Well, they are the San Francisco Giants, so what would you expect?
    • Late in the game, Giants assistant coach Alyssa Nakken became the first woman to coach on the field (at first base) during a major league game. Next they’ll be letting women actually play with the guys.**

    Surely the end of days is upon us when even baseball isn’t sacred.
    ** Most sports give advantages to certain physical characteristics. For example, basketball favors height. Baseball is unusual in that the characteristics it favors, excellent eyesight and fast reflexes, are not sex-linked.

  138. This is the year kneeling will become mundane, every player, every team in the NBA will be kneeling, most of baseball will be, I suspect we wont have ssb at football games. Protest has become movement, now if anyone can define a goal it might have all been worthwhile.
    Getting Kaepernick a 0job wont accomplish much.

  139. Protest has become movement, now if anyone can define a goal it might have all been worthwhile.
    Convincing more people that systemic racism exists, particularly in the criminal justice system, and getting them to appreciate how wrong it is?

  141. Who is “we”? If something remotely approaching everyone ever is truly convinced and appreciates the wrongness of it, I imagine the political will to correct it will be more than sufficient, and we can have a more just society.
    How do suggest people who want to see change go about making that widely known?

  142. Actually I should not be so flip. Can we point to one thing that we can change to solve that problem? What action or law allows that to exist, or encourages it? What is the actual goal of convincing more people? Will we reach a point where it is even a dialogue?
    Movements need a goal to maintain momentum, once everyone kneels then it is a meaningless act participated in by all to no purpose, having solved nothing.
    We are now in the less community policing cycle, 30 years ago the complaint was the police didnt have enough presence, now it’s too much. The problem is there is no desired outcome to measure success against.

  143. The problem is there is no desired outcome to measure success against.
    Fewer incidents of police violence, particularly against Black people. See Camden, NJ, the city I am in at this very moment.

  145. The problem is there is no desired outcome to measure success against.
    People can live their lives without fear. Either of the police or the criminals/gangs.
    Sounds like a reasonable goal. At least a good first cut.

  146. Somewhere upthread, or in another thread, HSH asked the same question that comes up all the time. He asks, in so many words, how in the world can rational adults ever support someone like Trump. I’m pretty much out of the conversations here and in my physical neighborhood because this is the same question the die-hard Trumpers keep asking from their side of the void. They are just as sure about their views as everyone here is about their own. They view the Prog Left as incoherent, authoritarian nuts who, among other things, have lost their collective minds in the aftermath of the Floyd George killing. They absolutely deny that they follow a not-very-bright, full blown narcissist who beclowns himself daily. I’ve concluded both sides are right about the other. Matt Taibbi, once again, lays out the reasons why I–and others–can no more lie in your bed than I can in Trump’s. Taibbi is lucid, factual and reasoned. A rare and welcome commodity in these times.
    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right

  147. We can reduce the number of people in prison and the number of people shot by just going back thirty years and reducing community policing, which is afaict what defund the police means. But then we roll back the positive effects community policing has had on safety in those communities.
    So we start the cycle again.

  150. I mean, you’d think there wasn’t a world out there outside the US and that far less intrusive and violent policing never coincides with lower crime rates. No, it’s impossible. We can’t address our social ills other than by tackling people, beating people, tasing people, shooting people, or throwing people in jail.

  151. Yeah. Screw Taibbi. I’m not giving him the traffic. But a majority of the country disapproves of Trump. Are they all “the left” and out of their minds? What do your Trump-supporting friends say about you, McKinney, for thinking they’re just as bad as the loony left? I’m sure some put you in the same basket as they would put me. Ain’t subjectivity grand? Both sides! Meh…

  152. sapient, if you’re following, I put a comment with a link under wj’s “The Fix” post that might interest you.

  153. We can reduce the number of people in prison and the number of people shot by just going back thirty years and reducing community policing, which is afaict what defund the police means.
    AFAICT, “defund police” (in my opinion a really terrible gloss on what is actually intended) means putting more resources into having government agencies other than the police do those tasks which do not actually require police expertise. For example, mental health issues and homelessness.**
    But it has nothing to do with community policing per se. After all, “community policing” has to do with having the police engage with the people in the community. So as to have established relationships in place when they need members of the community to assist with information, etc. In fact, if the police aren’t doing all that non-police stuff, they will have more bandwidth available for building relationships in the community.
    ** Who knows. We might actually fund and establish the community based mental health efforts which were the rationale for getting rid of the mental health hospitals half a century ago. Better (very) late than never.

  154. “We can’t address our social ills other than by tackling people, beating people, tasing people, shooting people, or throwing people in jail.”
    Maybe we should focus on those social ills and not the consequence of them. What do you propose? See I am not being dense, I have listened to the systemic racism argument for decades and except for what is a very small set of anecdotal data no one can express what systemically we should change.
    If the answer systemically is to just not police then ok, just say that.

  155. Maybe we should focus on those social ills and not the consequence of them. What do you propose?
    One thing we could do is look at what’s worked in other places around the world or in particular places in the US that have had success in given areas. But I don’t think I, personally, have to come up with an all-encompassing solution on this blog to prove that there’s a possibility for improvement. What do you propose?
    If the answer systemically is to just not police then ok, just say that.
    No. That’s stupid, which is probably the only reason you’re suggesting that I would think that. Camden, NJ, the example I’ve given multiple times, still has a police force. Check it out before assuming inane suggestions coming from me.

  156. Sure hsh, let’s talk Camden:
    Since the county police department was stood up more than six years ago, the city has experienced unprecedented private and public investment, more than $2.5 billion, from new corporate campuses, academic buildings and park construction. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau the poverty rate has decreased by 14 percent since 2013, the job rate growth led the nation in 2017 and the high school dropout rate has been cut in half since 2013. Furthermore, Rutgers-Camden has ushered in its largest student body ever, unemployment is at a 30-year low and more than $53 million is being invested into the city’s infrastructure this fiscal year.
    All those things will certainly reduce the crime rate, the incidence of violent police confrontation.

  157. Pretty much none of that investment has occurred in the high-crime neighborhoods. It’s been downtown and on the waterfront, with the vast majority of new jobs going to people commuting from out of town. Atlantic City invested tons of money when the casinos opened, but there was no similar change in crime or police violence.
    Either way, when I point out an example of improved policing, you simply ignore it and imply that I want to abolish police, until I manage to shame you into paying attention to my example.
    Maybe you actually want to discuss what we can do as a nation to improve things. Maybe you don’t. I can’t tell either way.

  158. Improved policing didn’t lower the unemployment rate. In fact, adding a county police force may be a great idea but I’m not sure how you think that addressed the issue of systemic racism.
    I point out that there were something north of 50 billion dollars invested in the city and you argue that since it wasn’t in the high crime neighborhoods it doesn’t count, like they didn’t get any of the jobs.
    Crime is down, great. How was that an effect of the changes in policing? I see lots of other causes. And I would point out that other than “go look at Camden” you haven’t made any assertion about how that addressed systemic racism or improved policing, so my question was valid. I get the answer is no.

  159. Actually I should not be so flip. Can we point to one thing that we can change to solve that problem? What action or law allows that to exist, or encourages it?
    I’ll make the suggestion I always make about stuff like this.
    The Kum-ba-ya stuff is all well and good, I’m sure it will make everyone feel warm and fuzzy if every major league ball player takes a knee.
    And it will probably not amount to a warm bucket of spit.
    If we want to make people stop treating black people as if they are not full citizens of the society they live in, then we need to kick ass.
    If you deny someone a job because they’re black (or Hispanic, or whatever) then you lose your job.
    If you are a banker and you deny someone a mortgage because they’re black (or whatever) you are no longer a banker, forever.
    If you are a cop and you treat black people differently than to treat not-black people, you are no longer a cop.
    Full stop.
    It is a violation of people’s fundamental civil rights to deny them equal treatment, under the law, and in any matter that is touched by the law, or any aspect of public life for that matter.
    I haven’t figured out quite how to go after stuff like all the liberal white suburban folks who can’t abide things like allowing affordable housing to be built in their neighborhood, etc., but that’ll be phase 2.
    That would solve the problem. We won’t do any of those things. So, the problem will not be solved, and we’ll continue to oscillate back and forth between acting like black people are some kind of second-class human, and engaging in symbolic gestures to make us feel better about the fact that black people are treated like second-class humans.
    We’ve been at this for hundreds of years. “Things are better” means you can no longer grab a random black person off the street and murder and mutilate them with impunity. Which, you could do, during the lifetime of many people reading this.
    So, yes, progress. Such as it is.
    Kneel, don’t kneel, whatever floats your boat.
    If we actually want to make a change, we need to put some teeth into it.
    Matt Tabibi
    Matt Tabibi has found a way to make a very nice living pointing and laughing at the hypocrisy that is the common lot of mankind.
    Nice work if you can get it. If reading that stuff is your cup of tea, enjoy.

  160. One more thing. I don not want to have a discussion about how we can “improve things”. We have been improving things since I marched in 1969. I want to have a discussion about how we can improve something specific. “Improve things” isn’t measurable or accountable, either for those that are looking for the improvement or the system that is supposed to be improved.
    Most of what has happened in the last few months is groundless flailing at windmills because everything sucks. 1200 people were shot by cops over a five year period out of 37 million. Do we want to reduce that by 50%, or do we just want the cops not to shoot anybody ever again? Well that won’t happen in a country where the criminals have as many guns as the police.
    If you start with the fact that we have guns so the police have a lot more worry about getting killed going to work everyday the consequence of that is people will eventually die. And most of those people will not have wanted to give up their guns.
    You keep talking about other countries as if we should want to be like them. That somehow that is a given. We, a generic number of people in this country, don’t want to be like the UK, Canada, France Germany, etc. It is really a lousy argument.

  161. Marty, the Camden metro area – including Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester counties – is what saw the big improvement in job numbers. The city of Camden is a city of 74K people and covers about 10 square miles within Camden County. The three counties combined have a total population of 1.2 million and cover more than a thousand square miles. The story you’re telling is not specific to the city. The poverty rate in the city is still 37.4%. The median household income is still $26K.
    If you looked into the policing reforms in Camden, one of the things you would have seen are deescalation techniques. In a city that is about 94% minority, any reduction in police violence can be taken as a reduction in systemic racism. The police do not take an immediate command-and-control posture when interacting with citizens, as is so commonly done elsewhere in poor and minority neighborhoods.
    I’m not sure how detailed of an analysis you’re expecting from me on the reduction in crime and the policing reforms that occurred. What I can say is that they have correlated with each other.
    I don’t know what’s so problematic about my response to your question in pointing out what is an apparent success story in policing reform. I doubt I can jump through enough hoops to satisfy you, so I’m done.

  162. Nope. Gross. Disgusting misogynist.
    Yeah. Screw Taibbi. I’m not giving him the traffic.
    Ok, if the question is asked: why do people support Trump? Or, why don’t people get on board with our obviously superior program?–one presumes the question is not rhetorical but rather in search of a substantive response.
    If the asking party wants an actual answer, it likely will not come from a friendly corner, because that is just confirmation bias. Rather, someone you don’t like may have an observation about you that, if you were to become aware of it, you might begin to understand why, even today, no matter how thin you slice the baloney, it still has two sides. I think both sides are rancid, in large part because of a near-categorical refusal to listen to what others say about them (with an equally hilarious and equally bizarre sense of outrage that the other side won’t listen to you).

  163. I want to have a discussion about how we can improve something specific.

    • No discernable difference in incarceration rates or sentences attributable to race
    • No discernable difference in rates of killing by cop attributable to race
    • No discernable difference in household income or wealth attributable to race
    • No discernable difference in rates of unemployment attributable to race
    • No discernable difference in quality of health and health outcomes attributable to race

    Asked and answered. Anybody here can probably add two or three of their own favorites to the list.
    Pick any three, set a goal for ten years from now. We can go to the freaking moon, we can do this.
    Or, we can’t. And then it’s on us, and about us. All of us.

  164. I want to have a discussion about how we can improve something specific.
    Like what?
    We, a generic number of people in this country, don’t want to be like the UK, Canada, France Germany, etc. It is really a lousy argument.
    Right. It’s also not an argument I’ve made. Looking at specific things (sound familiar) that other places (not necessarily countries, or even places in other countries) have done successfully to see if they might work in the US or in specific places in the US is different from generically “being like” other countries.
    Why don’t you make a goddam suggestion, since you’re so interested?

  165. I think both sides are rancid, in large part because of a near-categorical refusal to listen to what others say about them (with an equally hilarious and equally bizarre sense of outrage that the other side won’t listen to you).
    You’re so above it all. Golf clap.

  166. Matt Tabibi has found a way to make a very nice living pointing and laughing at the hypocrisy that is the common lot of mankind.
    Nice work if you can get it. If reading that stuff is your cup of tea, enjoy.
    Taibbi takes it a lot further than pointing out the left’s hypocrisy. Again, some variation of “the question” gets asked here over and over. Until the prog left–or Trump’s nationalist, nativist right–start taking other’s answers seriously, it’s going to be the same old shit show, just a different nasty smell. Put differently, the progressive left is pretty awful in a lot of ways too. It looks ridiculous to those who aren’t drinking the koolaid.

  167. We, a generic number of people in this country, don’t want to be like the UK, Canada, France Germany, etc. It is really a lousy argument.
    A generic number of people in this country couldn’t name three specific things that are different about life here, as compared to life in the UK, Canada, France Germany etc.
    If what makes an argument lousy is the ignorance and lack of interest of the counter-party, I’m not sure the argument can be faulted.

  168. why do people support Trump? Or, why don’t people get on board with our obviously superior program?
    Two completely different questions.
    I can think of 1,000 reasonable answers to the second.

  169. Taibbi takes it a lot further than pointing out the left’s hypocrisy.
    To be honest, I’m not seeing it.
    I read lots of people whose point of view I don’t share. Lots. Now, and for years.
    I didn’t really read Tabibi when he was “on my side”, and I don’t read him now, and for the same reason in both cases.
    I don’t find him constructive. There are lots of people like that, left right and middle, and I don’t read them or listen to them.
    Since he doesn’t bring anything constructive to the table, I lose interest after the first couple hundred words. I find him depressing. It’s like listening to an angry smart-ass teenager going off on what a bunch of fakes everybody is.
    Could be my loss, maybe there are some gems in there. But I doubt it.

  170. The question we were discussing earlier wasn’t so much what makes an individual person support Trump, or “why they won’t listen to us?” It was about what overall conditions allowed our electoral process result in such an obvious steaming pile of crap become president, or even the Republican nominee for president.
    You don’t need to involve the “progressive left” (however defined). What about Republicans who can’t stand him? Why did enough people diverge from them to nominate a horrible human being to be the GOP’s presidential candidate? There were plenty of conservative Republicans on offer. I didn’t like them, but they weren’t the absurdity that Trump is.

  171. Just to backtrack a bit on this discussion:
    I really appreciated the suggestion to read Lynn Stout, so I started with this article: The Problem of Corporate Purpose, by Lynn Stout, in which she answers a lot of the questions I had regarding the foundation of her thinking, and her approach. I also read The Dangers of Denial: The Need for a Clear-Eyed Understanding of the Power and Accountability Structure Established by the Delaware General Corporation Law, by Leo E. Strine, Jr. (a scholar and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Delaware) which is basically an argument against Strout’s view. It reflects my understanding of corporate law, and the role of the board and its duties to shareholders, and suggests that the best way to impose social responsibility onto corporations is through external laws and regulations.
    It’s a very interesting conversation, and well worth reading two eminent scholars on this subject. I admit to preferring the approach by Strine, because it accords with my understanding of how things work, but having read both papers only superficially, I may take the time to look up footnotes, and develop a more thorough understanding of the history. Anyway, thanks, nous.

  172. “We, a generic number of people in this country, don’t want to be like the UK, Canada, France Germany, etc.”
    Well, in regard to law enforcement brutality, the subject at hand, you, a generic number of people in this country, have fully succeeded in NOT being like countries whose law enforcement seems to beat the crap out of and kill fewer of their citizens.
    Fewer of their law enforcement personnel get scragged too, but we don’t want to tone down our gun ownership fetish among the citizenry, like those countries have either.
    McTX: Your Trump friends are free to listen, along with assembled Democrats, to John Kasich speak at the Democratic National Convention.
    Maybe he’ll drag Annie Applebaum along.
    John Kasich, one of Newt Gingrich’s henchmen back in the day and with whom I agree on very little, is now, of all people, grade-A RINO persona non grata in the now fully-owned Trump Republican Party.
    I don’t think he made the speakers list at what even the Republican police chief in Jacksonville is telling us is going to be a logistical sh*tshow in Jacksonville .. the
    Republican National Convention.
    I nearly posted the Taibbi piece here this morning because I thought he made some well-phrased points about the far Left now beginning to get too big for their britches in the intolerance game … but the far Left is just now feeling its oats, whereas the Trump Republican catastrophe your other friends have turned to, and way before AOC and company made the front pages, lost their minds permanently decades ago.
    Bouncing off sapient, here’s the story regarding Taibbi’s misogyny.
    https://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2017/10/27/twenty-years-ago-in-moscow-matt-taibbi-was-a-misogynist-asshole-and-possibly-worse
    It’s Limbaugh-level stuff, with the same Limbaugh excuse that, hey, I’m just an entertainer over here.

  173. Decriminalize marijuana. Release everyone who is in jail for a pot bust. Restore their voting rights. Expunge their record so that it does not prevent them from getting a job.
    Get cops out of schools and replace them with actual counselors. End zero tolerance school discipline and convert them to a restorative justice framework. Two free meals a day for all students.
    Abolish for-profit prisons and bail imprisonment.
    De-militarize the police and put all that money into schools and public health (including mental health).
    Get rid of drug testing for welfare. Put the money spent on testing schemes into drug treatment programs.
    Make broadband access a civil right.
    Make prison labor pay the same as regular labor, Put whatever part of that is pay over and above what a prisoner makes now into savings to be available to the incarcerated person upon release.

  174. Well, in regard to law enforcement brutality, the subject at hand, you, a generic number of people in this country, have fully succeeded in NOT being like countries whose law enforcement seems to beat the crap out of and kill fewer of their citizens.
    Fewer of their law enforcement personnel get scragged too, but we don’t want to tone down our gun ownership fetish among the citizenry, like those countries have either.
    This here is the biggest problem. How to make the police more humane, and less “militaristic,” when they are outgunned. Obviously, I would promote gun control, but …
    When we talk about what’s broken, I would start there.

  175. nous, I can get behind most of this. I do have one note, however. You say Release everyone who is in jail for a pot bust. Restore their voting rights. Expunge their record so that it does not prevent them from getting a job.
    Presumably what we are expunging are just their recorded pot bust(s). Are we also going to expunge any pot dealing busts? Just minor (as opposed to wholesale) ones? How about financial crimes tied to managing funds from pot dealing?
    As so often, the devil is in the details.

  176. It’s a very interesting conversation, and well worth reading two eminent scholars on this subject. I admit to preferring the approach by Strine, because it accords with my understanding of how things work, but having read both papers only superficially, I may take the time to look up footnotes, and develop a more thorough understanding of the history.
    My friend the B-school prof says that he and others are working to change B-school culture by emphasizing long term strategic planning and emphasizing that the goal of a corporation is not to deliver shareholder value, but to produce and sustain customers for their products, which puts slow growth back on the table.
    Also, they are talking a lot about benefit corporations and writing values into corporate charters. Of course that approach has begun to run afoul of banking demands for loans, so there is the next target for reform.

  177. Off the top of my head I’d say that if the pot dealer has been convicted of other crimes, then those crimes do not go away. If the courts plea bargained away those other charges for the dealing charge, then that’s on the prosecutors.
    Money laundering is money laundering. Those charges stick whatever the source of the money.
    I can be persuaded otherwise if there is good reason or if my reasoning is flawed, but that is something to work out after we empty out our jails by a significant amount. We are a carceral nightmare.
    Oh, and we need to end the police’s ability to seize property involved in crimes and sell it for funds.

  178. Thanks nous, your 3:32 is a list we should be discussing. I don’t agree with all of it but it does move the discussion in a measurable and actionable direction. I don’t have time to walk through it right now but I will try to tonight.

  179. Also, please end the racket across the country of repeatedly jailing citizens for being unable to pay their fines for prior and relatively petty offenses, including charging the individuals ridiculous amounts of money for the pleasure of being jailed, until the debt is so high that there is no chance of getting out from under it, especially for folks who work two jobs just to f*cking exist.
    That has got to cause absolute simmering fury among people, which then finds its outlet in even worse behavior.

  180. On the subjects of prisons and observing how things are done in other countries.
    “In Norway, fewer than 4,000 of the country’s 5 million people were behind bars as of August 2014.
    That makes Norway’s incarceration rate just 75 per 100,000 people, compared to 707 people for every 100,000 people in the US.
    On top of that, when criminals in Norway leave prison, they stay out. It has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%. The US has one of the highest: 76.6% of prisoners are re-arrested within five years.”
    Why Norway’s prison system is so successful
    More in-depth.
    “What is the point of sending someone to prison – retribution or rehabilitation? Twenty years ago, Norway moved away from a punitive “lock-up” approach and sharply cut reoffending rates. The BBC’s Emma Jane Kirby went to see the system in action, and to meet prison officers trained to serve as mentors and role models for prisoners.”
    How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours

  181. End routine traffic stops. Find a way of enforcing public safety that does not require fraught confrontations.
    End stop-and-frisk.
    End Broken Windows policing.

  182. I made a comment which went straight into the spam trap because I forgot I had to post as GftNC when I add links. It doesn’t need rescuing, because it doesn’t really deserve the light of day.
    Matt Taibbi, once again, lays out the reasons why I–and others–can no more lie in your [sic] bed than I can in Trump’s. Taibbi is lucid, factual and reasoned. A rare and welcome commodity in these times.
    Suffice to say that if McKinney insists on making an equivalence between Trump supporters, and “us” (i.e. the majority of the ObWi commentariat), it is, to put it in as understated a way as possible, an illegitimate move. In the past, almost every time McKinney has brought up excessive instances of “woke” PC, none of us have approved of them.
    There is a solidly based ethical and moral objection to Trump, his followers, and all his works, on various parts of the political spectrum including here, to almost none of which do Taibbi’s objections apply. And as to McKinney’s approval of him, above, it made me laugh to read the Taibbi and see how very carefully he was avoiding criticising “woke” ante-sexism, given that this would only have made the conflict of interest behind his general argument only too explicit.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html

  183. I just heard a radio interview with a psychologist who looked at the much better outcomes in Norwegian prisons as compared to those in the US. It’s a bit more expensive per prisoner, but you don’t pay anything for the ones who don’t come back.

  185. Pretty much all of the Nordic countries use a similar model for prisons and treat their prisoners like citizens who will one day be restored to society rather than as animals who need to be kept out of society.
    And since it does not appear that I have ranted here before about how this plays into the whole sheep/sheepdog/wolf paradigm bullshit that Dave Grossman has pedaled to the LEO community, I think that we desperately need to get rid of any training material that encourages police officers to think of themselves as a separate sort of creature from both the people they protect and the people they arrest. Unless we treat both police officers and convicted criminals like ordinary citizens under the law, we are going to end up with some form of moral hazard and some form of dehumanization going on.

  187. One thing that stood out in the interview I heard was the idea that the sole punishment in being incarcerated was loss of liberty. Not being allowed to come and go as you pleased and not being allowed to live in your house or with your family were the penalty you paid. You didn’t lose the right to some level of privacy. You weren’t subject to brutality by guards. Staff would not look the other way when prisoners were abusive toward one another. The prisons are generally safe and peaceful, short of isolated incidents that the staff addresses appropriately. Solitary confinement is used sparingly and for much short durations than in US prisons. They have communal kitchens with knives. Responsibility is expected. It was really interesting.

  188. we need to end the police’s ability to seize property involved in crimes and sell it for funds.
    I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. Certainly funds that are seized should not go into the budgets of those doing the seizing. And funds shouldn’t be seized just because the police feel like it — the current practice appears to me to be a flat out violation of the 14th Amendment. But IANAL.
    But, on the other hand, I have no problem with seizing someone’s “ill gotten gains”. If you are convicted of a crime, any money or property that you gained as a result should be forfeit. Including not just the immediate money, but any profits or other gains you got from the immediate money. Rob a bank, buy rental property — all that rent money, as well as the property, is forfeit too.

  189. An effort at using the Norwegian approach to prisons in the US.
    “What sounds like fancy suburban boarding schools are actually North Dakota prisons.
    These programs at the prisons are based on findings from a far-away source: Norway. In 2015, a cohort of North Dakota legislators, judicial branch members, and prison officials were among those who took a trip to Norway to learn about the country’s incarceration system. Organized by California’s Prison Law Office, these trips are part of the nonprofit’s efforts to reform prisons in the U.S. by exposing officials to the methods of European prisons.”
    North Dakota Reforms its Prisons, Norwegian Style: The Nordic country, home to the most humane prison in the world, shares lessons with state officials.

  190. “Certainly funds that are seized should not go into the budgets of those doing the seizing.”
    Well, ya know, it was fiscally conservative taxpayers and their elected conservatives who got the whole “Defund the Police” ball rolling a long time ago by not adequately raising, in fact, cutting local taxes in order to squeeze the funding of police operations and much else, and so law enforcement would have to ding the public (taxpayers all) they are arresting for every jot and tittle.

  191. The Democratic Party should ask Dr. Fauci to assume the role of Convention Epidemiologist with the goal of testing every individual attending the convention, including John Kasich, and enforcing safe distancing and hygiene, AND he should supply the entire shindig with all the masks, testing kits, swabs, and wipes he can steal from the White House’s cache of pandemic swag the republican murderers are hoarding up there.
    The Democratic Party would listen to him even though he works for the other side.

  193. All money/property/ill-gotten gains that are seized by the police go to Public Defenders and Environmental Protection.
    There’ll be “confiscation”, but not as much and not nearly as egregious.
    If there’s money left over, buy cupcakes for Antifa.

  195. Lynn Cheney canceled and silenced.
    Does the term “circular firing squad” leap to your mind, too?
    To be expected, I suppose, when it becomes undeniable that the ship is sinking, apparently with all hands.

  196. Trump goes all in on pro-masks.
    It must have been a question on his dementia cognitive test that he got to do over.
    He even heard masks might be patriotic. Like the Confederate flag.
    Also, can you spell “Epiphany”, Barney?
    God, the poll his dupe slaves shoved in front of his face yesterday must have been appalling, like maybe identical to the last 10 minutes of the 737 Max jet’s flight pattern they haven’t found yet because it hit the Indian Ocean so hard nose down that there are nothing left but slivers and splinters.
    Also admits to being an illegal immigrant and having gone thru a gay phase of his life on account of a bout of boredom right between the Atlantic City casino disaster and his Apprentice show.
    I guess this means I’m going to have to rethink my stringent pro-mask stance.
    And probably really go after that acquaintance of mine in Denver who defends Trump no matter what and who might show up the next time finally wearing the hated mask without a trace of sheepishness.
    Now HE’LL be the mask Nazi. He can just as well goose step with one as he can without one, he’ll learn quickly enough, especially now that he can harangue us about the effing patriotism of wearing one.
    The rest of us just don’t want to die, but that was never good enough for him.
    At least he won’t be doing his usual bare-faced lying as I cough masklessly into his kisser.
    Now I can play the freedom fighter against all constitutional encroachments.
    This thing is just the sniffles, right?

  197. Random thought: I wonder what McKinney has been reading that he came across the Taibbi piece. His comment introducing it suggests that he’s a long-time fan of Taibbi, so maybe he follows him.
    McKinney, if you’re around, do tell.
    My hunch is that this is a drive-by, just as when he was called out for his rant about the Chinese “criminality”. He doesn’t really respond to criticism much, which is (of course) his right. I doubt that he’ll acknowledge the links exposing Taibbi as a misogynist bully (at minimum).

  198. Not speaking for McK. Could it be possible that Taibbi is a misogynist bully and have reasonable take in this case?

  199. Could it be possible that Taibbi is a misogynist bully and have reasonable take in this case?
    Of course. I haven’t read it, but I haven’t liked Taibbi’s opinion on things for a number of reasons, and russell’s comment rings true. Considering how much there is to read, I’d prefer not to read the work of a misogynist bully. Just me.
    On the other hand, I got huge intellectual gratification from reading the articles by Strout and Strine. So fun! I prefer reading work by people who take ideas (and women) seriously.

  201. I’m guessing that the average age of the signers of the first letter and the second letter is about 20 years…

  202. I’m guessing that the average age of the signers of the first letter and the second letter is about 20 years…
    Noam Chomsky probably skews that up a bit.

  204. They shot pepper balls at Naked Vagina’s … naked vagina…, umm …. feet?!
    That is so Republican!
    That’s like, I don’t know, Bill Bennett declaring, in full book of virtue virtue-signaling regalia, that we are NOT in a pandemic and then retiring to the slots with whatever he has left of his kid’s college fund plastic cup full of $500 Citizen’s United payoffs and bribes.
    Did they go all Ted Yoho on Athena’s AOC feet:
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hoyer-says-gop-rep-yoho-should-be-sanctioned-over-profane-comments-about-aoc
    This is why the Left should be armed at all times.
    She’s from the Bronx!
    Kick Yoho in the balls, the little Florida cuck.

  205. Given my time difference living in Japan from both the American and British, plus European, folks here, I’ll be haplessly late for the party almost every time out.
    One thing I see missing from all the talk about law enforcement reform is the problematic notion of the term “law enforcement” itself. I don’t recall hearing this term when I was a kid, and I’m no authority – but I seem to start hearing this beginning in the late ’70s, and then from the ’80s a lot more. It seems premised on the assumption that most people either won’t follow the law, or pay lip service to it while trying to work around it. It also has the effect – to me, as again I’m not speaking for others – of separating police from the communities they supposedly serve. So individuals, and entire communities if need be, must be brought to heel in the name of the law, intrusively if necessary.
    How much do police actually understand the laws they’re supposedly enforcing? And much do they understand how problematic some of their tactics are in the effort to go after those who break the law? How many of them have taken any basic law courses? How many of them have any understanding of how the law works, and where it constrains as much as it permits?
    I have no doubt that there are police officers that do understand these things. But there are too many of the type that don’t seem to understand these things, and some of them seem to be utterly clueless and don’t care.
    The immediate objection I see coming down the pike would be that a better grounding in the law, rather than simply knowing what is not illegal or what a cop can or can’t get away with based on legal technicality, would constraint a lot of police work. But what if it changed the character of policing from pushing the law in people’s faces to working with people in compliance with the law? This seems to be, at least in part, the basis of the Norwegian approach, and informs their incarceration system – yes, you lose your liberty if you’re jailed, but we recognize that you still have the right to retain your dignity and that it is even an obligation for you to retain it if you hope to rejoin society with your liberty restored.
    So as half-baked as it might seem – I would add to Russell’s list upthread: No discernible difference between what the police should understand the law to mean and what communities should understand the law is to mean.

  206. I wrote this yesterday, but forgot to post it, so they have to come after the comic stylings of Abbott and Costello. Sorry about that.
    Portland is an unusual place. It seems to be the preferred venue for anarchist vs. white supremacist cage matches, going back decades.
    Some other blogs and articles have discussed this in more detail, but I didn’t keep track of them very well. I think LGM might have had a few (the core of the blog is from the NW or went to school there) and there was something in the NYTimes (which I’m now thinking of subscribing to, just as a flip off of Bari Weiss, but that is neither hear nor there), but this happening in Portland, the biggest city in Oregon by a huge margin, is not unsurprising.
    I did my MA at U of Oregon, and so these observations are from someone who was juat passing thru, but the culture is quite different than any other place I’m familiar with. It has a bit of arrogance that I think comes from being in the Northwest, and the state itself has a long history of leave me alone-ism, which is why the libertarian streak is so strong, because it can unite elements of the left and the right. Legal marijuana, assisted suicide, a really strong (to the point of ridiculousness) ballot initiative system(in fact, the system is known as the Oregon system because Oregon enacted it in 1902, the history is quite eye-opening
    https://sos.oregon.gov/blue-book/Pages/facts/history/state-oregon.aspx
    no sales tax, first state to enact a direct primary, full women’s suffrage in 1912.
    In addition, Malheur refuge, in Oregon, was the center of the so-called Sagebrush rebellion
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge
    So with Oregon, you have a populated west coast strip that is really liberal and a huge relatively unpopulated area of Eastern Oregon that is home to a lot of really staunch right wing types.
    So it is no surprise that Portland is ground zero for this antifa v. Proud Boy crap. Whether this is a harbinger of the future is probably anyone’s guess, but for every reason I would say yes, I could think of one that would make me say maybe not.

  208. If McT doesn’t want to get it, he can read this excerpt
    Of course, another part of Garner’s story is not universal. His troubles with the police were of a character almost exclusively familiar to black and Hispanic men. As a white man I was poorly equipped to even guess what he might have thought or felt about any of this, and I knew that any story I tried to tell about Garner would therefore be lacking in important ways. All I could do was try to describe the incredible breadth of the institutional response to his life and death.
    The lengths we went to as a society to crush someone of such modest ambitions—Garner’s big dream was to someday sit down at work—were awesome to contemplate. What happened to Garner spoke to the increasing desperation of white America to avoid having to even see, much less speak to or live alongside, people like him.
    Half a century after the civil rights movement, white Americans do not want to know this man. They don’t want him walking in their neighborhoods. They want him moved off the corner. Even white liberals seem to, deep down inside, if the policies they advocate and the individual choices they make are any indication.
    The police are blamed for these deaths, and often rightly so, but the highly confrontational, physically threatening strategies cops such as Daniel Pantaleo employ draw their power from the tacit approval of upscale white voters. Whether they admit it or not, many voters would rather that Eric Garner be dead and removed from view somewhere than living and eating Cheetos on the stoop next door.
    Garner kept running headfirst into invisible walls. Each time he collided with law enforcement, this unspoken bureaucratic imperative to make him disappear threw him back into an ever-smaller pen. Even allowing him a few feet of sidewalk space was ultimately too much. His world got smaller and smaller until finally even his last breath of air was taken away from him. He was finally deemed greedy for wanting even that much.
    Garner’s real crime was being a conspicuous black man of slovenly appearance who just happened to spend his days standing on the street across from a string of new high-end condominium complexes. No white people I talked to would say it out loud, but Garner was just too visible for everyone’s tastes. His raw presence threatened property values. Plus he was an easy bust, and so became a regular target of police mandated to make busts like clockwork.
    Garner himself for a long time happily went along with this absurd charade. He accepted his “community policing” arrests as a business cost and trudged to court and to jail on command for years. He didn’t begin to get truly wound up about his treatment by police until he felt the cops were breaking the unwritten rules of the game, busting him after hours as he did his laundry, vouchering his money over and over, and so on.
    Then, on a day when he didn’t even commit a crime, as he was still huffing and puffing and leaning up against a wall after breaking up a neighborhood fight, Garner made the critical mistake of refusing for once to be dragged out of sight. In a way that was somewhat out of character, he decided suddenly that he’d had enough. He stood up for himself, not with violence but merely in the most literal sense, standing up straight and refusing to bend.
    This tiny act of defiance triggered not just a preposterous display of force but the mother of all disproportionate bureaucratic responses. The latter encompassed an apparent thrown case by the district attorney’s office, months of grand jury sessions, multiple judges in multiple courts holding the line against inquiries, years of obstinate refusal by city officials to turn over records, a sweeping effort by police to target individuals on the block deemed responsible for the controversy, and countless other actions.
    Garner’s death launched the political career of the prosecutor who failed to indict the policeman who killed him. It even contributed to a national backlash political movement that eventually coalesced around a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, whose “Make America Great Again” platform drew from an old well of white resentment.
    Once elected, Trump named as attorney general a man, Jeff Sessions, Sessions, who made one of his first acts a decision to “pull back” on the federal civil rights investigations of corrupt local police departments. The gutting of federal authority to conduct civil rights cases rolled back decades of work by people such as James Meyerson, who sought to find a way to police the police. It also cut off what would have been one of the last possible avenues for justice in the Garner case.
    Between the Bay Street tragedy and the onset of the Trump administration years later, America had essentially decided to start moving back in time, formally pushing back against the civil rights era. Garner’s death, and the great distances that were traveled to protect his killer, now stand as testaments to America’s pathological desire to avoid equal treatment under the law for its black population.
    But Eric Garner isn’t a symbol. He was a flesh-and-blood person—interesting, imperfect, funny, ambitious, and alive—who just happened to stumble into the thresher of America’s reactionary racist insanity at exactly the wrong time. But his story—about how ethnic resentments can be manipulated politically to leave us vulnerable to the lawless violence of our own government—is not his alone. His bad luck has now become ours.
    Bizarrely enough, this is the guy who then writes this.
    Take the Smithsonian story. The museum became the latest institution to attempt to combat racism by pledging itself to “antiracism,” a quack sub-theology that in a self-clowning trick straight out of Catch-22 seeks to raise awareness about ignorant race stereotypes by reviving and amplifying them.
    Funny, I feel like if I had held these two thoughts in my head, it would have been like matter and anti-matter, but I guess McT is made of sterner stuff than me.

  209. I’m guessing he’s come up with a way to define “antiracism” in a way that distinguishes it from “fighting (or opposing) racism”. I can see this would not be intellectually beyond him. But on my earlier point about conflict of interest, he might well claim that antiracists are not always antisexists, although I observe that antisexists are pretty much always antiracists. He may always have had more acceptable views on race than gender, of course, but it seems to me he is a journalist observing and analysing the zeitgeist, and seeing what he can get away with, stoking (professionally lucrative) controversy while avoiding more personal opprobrium.

  210. My theory (and it is just a theory) is that when his book about Garner came out, it was initially praised, and then he got hit with questions about his misogynystic behavior (and the stories have him as sort of a second wheel to Mark Ames, more enabler rather than enabled) His initial reaction was to apologize and say that his first book was satire, which then had him run into a buzzsaw because the book was pitched as non-fiction. And it was coming out in an era of #metoo, so his petard was hoisted. (Sapient’s WP link points to all this)
    Since he didn’t want to just get a job at a Cinnabon in Omaha, this had him turn on the left, which involves taking his faux Hunter S. Thompson shtick to hammer at whatever hypocrisies he can gin up, much to the delight of McT and others. This is not to say there aren’t hypocrisies, but for someone who sounded the alarm about Trump, this seems like an ur-hypocrisy.
    Again, that’s just my take, informed only by watching some (not all!) of the articles and discussion go by. If that’s similar to what went down, it’s unfortunate, I thought the book about Eric Garner was quite good at putting a person where we really only had a cipher and it would be nice for George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Vanessa Guillen and a host of others to be written about by a sympathetic chronicler. Taibibi himself said that he had to give up all the “linguistic cartwheels or jokes or any of the other circus tricks I learned to use” to tell the story, so must have some self-awareness of what he’s doing. Which has got to be the most pathetic thing of all.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/books/review/i-cant-breathe-matt-taibbi-eric-garner.html

  211. Debbie Dingell should be listened to:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/debbie-dingell-doesnt-believe-polls/614428/
    Add in active voter suppression and harassment at the polling places by recruited radical republican operatives and theft of the voting franchise, and so-called “Homeland” “Security” doesn’t have enough anonymous jack-booted thugs to put out the raging bonfire we are going to make of stinking conservative movement America if this corrupt, murderous republican crew wins again.
    We’re f*cking done with these filth.

  212. I recommend this, because it’s shorter and more immediately relevant: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/where-did-policing-go-wrong
    A cursory review of the anti-Taibbi comments deal with his time in Russia, not the substance of his comments on current idiocies on the prog left in the name of anti-racism. The reason for this is that there is no viable, substantive response. Either one thinks in cliches and soundbites, repeating the same mantras over and over or one actually looks at and analyzes what is going on.
    Taibbi’s piece on policing is a good case-in-point from the opposite side of things. Reflexive law-and-order types almost never do a deep dive into why they might want to re-calibrate. Not a wholesale, idiotic burn-it-all-down, but an honest re-calibration.
    What I would expect from reflexive law-and-order types is the same kind of intellectually vacuous responses to substantive criticisms the prog left trots out. Or, again like their counterparts on the left, they either ignore what doesn’t fit the narrative or dismiss it altogether.
    The new vocabulary the prog left is attempting to mandate is perfect for avoiding substantive debate.
    BP’s blanket denunciation of the Harper’s letter is a case in point. The farther one goes on the spectrum, the more stifling opposing debate seems like a good idea. BP, here is a challenge: find a paragraph in the Harper’s letter that is facially or substantively problematic, quote it and explain your view with reason and logic. Or, just admit you don’t like dissent, particularly when some on the left dissent from current, prog left dogma and practices.
    GFTNC often assays to infer the psychology behind others’ thoughts and views. I invite her to explicate the prog left’s underlying psychology of its not-so-distant love affairs with Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd. If leaving your date to drown while you flee isn’t a bit of misogyny, I don’t know what is. Maybe someone can square this circle for me. Please help me understand the high moral ground so many here seek to occupy with your own party’s recent past.
    Again, somewhat repeating myself, if anyone here ever wants to try to figure out why so many really aren’t down with the prog left, try getting out some, with an open mind.
    Which has got to be the most pathetic thing of all.
    Yes, the last thing we want someone to do is look back at past mistakes, reassess, reform and try to do better going forward. That’s just awful. Unless we are talking about Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd. Or plenty of others. Shorter LJ: you’re not a truly reformed sinner unless you join my church.

  213. GFTNC often assays to infer the psychology behind others’ thoughts and views. I invite her to explicate the prog left’s underlying psychology of its not-so-distant love affairs with Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd. If leaving your date to drown while you flee isn’t a bit of misogyny, I don’t know what is.
    This is a perfect example of the phenomenon I mentioned of McKinney attributing attitudes to “us” which “we” don’t have.
    I despised Ted Kennedy, and made it clear that if I was put in the position, I would refuse to shake his hand in a professional context which might have harmed me. I was agnostic about Bill Clinton (although impressed by his brilliance as a campaigner), but ended up believing Paula Jones, and thought Juanita Broadrrick’s allegation convincing.
    I had no idea who Robert Byrd was until I read your comment, but looked him up.
    Byrd later called joining the KKK “the greatest mistake I ever made.”[22] In 1997, he told an interviewer he would encourage young people to become involved in politics but also warned, “Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don’t get that albatross around your neck. Once you’ve made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.”[23] In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he “was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision—a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions.”[24] Byrd also said in 2005, “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.”[12]
    My attitude on reading the Wikipedia entry is this. I am aware that racists (even overt, activist racists) can reform, and I praise and appreciate those who do. It is ambiguous to me from this whether that was the case with Byrd, or whether his “conversion” was cynical and motivated by professional ambitions.
    McKinney, as so often you are arguing with people who aren’t here. Get a grip for God’s sake.

  214. Oh, I see that McKinney was talking about the “prog left”, not just me. But since he always seems to invoke us as representatives of the same (as I quoted earlier), I stand by my response.

  215. Namely:
    They are just as sure about their views as everyone here is about their own. They view the Prog Left as incoherent, authoritarian nuts who, among other things, have lost their collective minds in the aftermath of the Floyd George killing.
    …..
    Matt Taibbi, once again, lays out the reasons why I–and others–can no more lie in your bed than I can in Trump’s

  216. Goddamit, I was so pissed off that I was unclear. I should have said:
    I despised Ted Kennedy, and made it clear (in a professional context where it might have harmed me) that if I was put in the position, I would refuse to shake his hand.

  217. So, we should vote for Donald Trump because of Bill Clinton’s, Ted Kennedy’s, and Robert Byrd’s crimes?
    McTX, please invite your pro-Trump friends to comment here so we can argue with the real item, rather than your coy, evenhanded, well-meaning middle, untouched by hypocrisy.
    You wrote here some time ago that you could vote for Biden.
    Have your friends now convinced you not to, and to vote for some pointless third party candidate, which will be a de facto throwaway vote for Donald Trump, much as it will maintain your individual honor?
    I don’t have to be fully down with the prog left to prefer a ham sandwich.
    Be a hypocrite like we are and vote for the ham sandwich because the ham sandwich IS the binary choice over the rank, authoritarian, big government, murderous evil of the Trump conservative movement.
    Should you vote for Biden, I, and I expect no one else here will either, will not throw it in your face that a vote for Biden is a vote in favor of blowjobs and sexual harrassment in the Oval Office, the drowning manslaughter of Mary Joe Kopechne, Robert Byrd’s racist KKK past, and Antifa criminal mayhem, although in Byrd’s case, you have held the opinion that Byrd’s generation’s racism was a product of his time and place and should not be judged too harshly in arrears, which I don’t agree with much, but never mind.

  218. My take is that McKinney comes here oozing condescension and dismissiveness to criticize us (or the prog left, which we are all part of according to him) for being condescending to and dismissive of … Trump supporters? I’m not always sure. Well, whatever. We’re hypocritical jerks in a way that is unique to the prog left, and we best demonstrate that by not biting his hooks when he decides we should.
    Meanwhile, when we get into more detailed policy discussions, McKinney more often than not isn’t all that far apart from the general consensus among the people commenting here. It’s mostly the tribal labels that make it seem as though we’re terribly at odds.
    These generalized discussions about the left and the right are tiresome and unproductive.

  219. I have no problem with agreeing with Taibbi about both Eric Garner and what he says in MkT’s link and also with what he says about the ideology of “anti racism”, which is a mixture of legitimate anti racism and ideas that sound like something a Southern slaveowner would endorse. Below is a long quote from last Sunday’s NYT article on DiAngelo. The ideas expressed are the same as the ones Taibbi criticizes at the Smithsonian. It’s postmodern crap and the left is actually split on this and on the Harper’s letter. (Chomsky was mocking postmodernism back in the 90’s, back when the first panic about PC culture popped up.). I had no objection to the contents of the letter— I thought, like most people who follow the Palestinian issue, that it was ridiculous to see Bari Weiss and Cary Nelson signing it. Hypocrites.
    I don’t have a problem with the observation that people in different cultures see the world differently. But what is said blow goes a little beyond that.
    Here is the NYT Sunday Magazine quote
    ———————
    Running slightly beneath or openly on the surface of DiAngelo’s and Singleton’s teaching is a set of related ideas about the essence and elements of white culture. For DiAngelo, the elements include the “ideology of individualism,” which insists that meritocracy is mostly real, that hard work and talent will be justly rewarded. White culture, for her, is all about habits of oppressive thought that are taken for granted and rarely perceived, let alone questioned. One “unnamed logic of Whiteness,” she wrote with her frequent co-author, the education professor Ozlem Sensoy, in a 2017 paper published in The Harvard Educational Review, “is the presumed neutrality of White European Enlightenment epistemology.” The paper is an attempt to persuade universities that if they want to diversify their faculties, they should put less weight on conventional hiring criteria. The modern university, it says, “with its ‘experts’ and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)” has “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.” Such academic prose isn’t the language of DiAngelo’s workshops or book, but the idea of a society rigged at its intellectual core underpins her lessons.
    Singleton, who holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and who did stints in advertising and college admissions before founding what’s now known as Courageous Conversation in 1992, talks about white culture in similar ways. There is the myth of meritocracy. And valuing “written communication over other forms,” he told me, is “a hallmark of whiteness,” which leads to the denigration of Black children in school. Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.” He spoke about how the ancient Egyptians had “ideas about how humanity works that never had that scientific-hypothesis construction” and so aren’t recognized. “This is a good way of dismissing people. And this,” he continued, shifting forward thousands of years, “is one of the challenges in the diversity-equity-inclusion space; folks keep asking for data. How do you quantify, in a way that is scientific — numbers and that kind of thing — what people feel when they’re feeling marginalized?” For Singleton, society’s primary intellectual values are bound up with this marginalization. In Hartford, Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.” Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.”

  220. Well, McKinney *does* hail from the Ungovernable Tribal Regions of Outer Dumbfuckistan, so you have to expect a degree of brain-worm infection.

  221. McKinney,
    From the Harper’s letter: “We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”
    The Harper’s letter is a classic example of “bothsiderism”. It is really weak tea. The quote above was presented without any specific examples or factual evidence.
    Please explain, substantively, why one should take such an “argument” seriously?
    For further edification, you might try reading some criticism of the letter found here and here.
    Having digested those, I give you a similar choice you presented to me: Provide a substantive response or admit you are an authoritarian fascist. LOL!*
    *Admit it. You did stop beating your wife, right?

  222. intellectually vacuous responses to substantive criticisms
    Look, if we want to discuss substance, then let’s discuss substance.
    What I take away from the various Taibbi pieces cited throughout this thread is that he’s capable of doing solid, thoughtful, critical reporting.
    Which is not what was contained in the piece you cited way upthread.
    It’s very popular at the moment – probably always – to engage in “conversation” by cataloging all the ways in which your counter-party is a clownish ass. The appeal for the reader is that it confirms their sense of being a superior kind of person. The appeal for the writer is that it the easiest thing in the world to do, because everyone is to some degree a clownish ass.
    In a word, it’s lazy.
    Trust me when I say that I am only too aware of the foibles of the SJW world. I am likewise aware of the foibles of the wingnut world, and I am likewise aware of the foibles of the pox-on-both-their-houses-I’m-above-it-all world.
    Guess what? We’re all assholes on this bus.
    You quite often bring substantive, thoughtful comments here. And, you quite often bring comments whose point seems to be to rub all our noses in what clownish hypocritical dopes we all are.
    The first is welcome, the second, less so.
    We all know that the left is prone to clownish hypocritical idiocy. We accept that as part of our common humanity and do our best to move on.
    We’re also prone to playing the same point-and-laugh game, spending countless electrons cataloging the idiocies of the right.
    Guilty of the same sin as Taibbi, and yourself.
    So if we want to talk substance, let’s talk substance, and leave the point and laugh crap aside.
    Thanks for the Taibbi piece on policing, I thought it was very good, at least at first read.

  223. Shorter LJ: you’re not a truly reformed sinner unless you join my church.
    You stumbled on Taibibi in his fuck the left mode and you had not the faintest idea who he was or what he wrote before. Poor prep counselor. It would be nice if you had the stones to admit that you had no idea who he was, he was just a handy cudgel.
    But you won’t, cause admitting that might, you know, foster some actual discussion. And you can’t, cause you are a lawyer. So admitting that will happen, as they say in Thailand, when the 7-11 closes…
    (side observation: Robert Byrd? You know he’s been dead for a decade? It’s really embarassing when you channel Granpa Simpson)
    So even shorter LJ, go stir shit somewhere else.

  225. Meanwhile, when we get into more detailed policy discussions, McKinney more often than not isn’t all that far apart from the general consensus among the people commenting here. It’s mostly the tribal labels that make it seem as though we’re terribly at odds.
    I think hsh is right here. It really seems that the function we fulfil for McKinney is like one of those pillows certain idiotic therapists get their patients to shout their frustrations and resentments at instead of the genuine recipients. Here I go “assay(ing) [I thought this was what you did to gold] to infer the psychology behind others’ thoughts and views”, but it seems to me that during the Trump presidency McKinney has used us like one of those pillows more and more. In my assaying role I say: it has to be tough to realise that by making an equivalence between Trump, and that international criminal mastermind HRC (ex secretary of state, ex senator), and the damage either of them might do to America, you and others like you damaged your country internally and externally in ways that will take generations to repair, if it can ever be done. It must be tough. But it’s no fun being the pillow either.
    On a more conciliatory (but also sincere) note, wrs.

  226. Let the record show that my expert witness has identified both motes and beams as pernicious forms of cellulose eye-threat, to be shunned by anyone truly serious about their vision health, so I question…

  227. Too damn subtle, nous! Who are these two visually challenged sides to whom you implicitly refer, or are you (unusually for you) indulging in a bit of bothsideserism?

  228. Donald, thanks for the quote, that article is behind the paywall and though it says I can read it for free, I can’t seem to get to it. But honestly, I’m not seeing what is so wrong with the observations in the excerpt you quote.
    I much earlier posted a link, I think from an Indian writer, about how the West mocked Asian approaches to corona and how it just proved to be ethnocentrism rather than some sort of superior knowledge. This seems like an example of precisely the points that are being made in your excerpt, except it isn’t a subject as protean as racism, it’s looking at how, in another realms, a Eurocentric approach has basically screwed the world over. This is also the thrust of the Mishra article you recommended (In fact, his book makes this point even more explicitly, and draws a line from the Enlightenment to the revolutionary rhetoric of ISIS. Don’t get much more postmodern than that). So now, I’m wondering why you think this is all “postmodern crap”? From the excerpt
    Another “hallmark” is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.” He said, “There’s this whole group of people who are named the scientists. That’s where you get into this whole idea that if it’s not codified in scientific thought that it can’t be valid.”
    We all worship at the temple of science, but if I were to replace scientists with economists, I’m think that there is a whole lot of truth there.
    And even if we limit it to ‘science’, haven’t we just seen this happen? Rather than take some sensible precautions, every step against corona had to be rigorously justified. Masks? Ha, aren’t those Asians funny thinking that a little gauze mask is going to stop a pandemic?
    You might say this is too broad a brush, New Zealand is doing quite well, thank you, and they surely must be an example of the white culture that is being dismissed out of hand. But NZ is the outlier (and leavened by an indigenous culture and a left of center government) and the rest of the individualistic cultures that pride themselves on the thinking identified in the excerpt seem to be not doing so well.
    imho, but the whole postmodern project proves itself correct every day in a range of problems that are connected to racism only thru the fact that racism is another symptom of it. It’s not only that different cultures see things in different ways, it is that one particular way of viewing things, when allowed to crowd out all the others, causes a lot of the problems we face. Whether it’s Matt Taibibi ignoring what he wrote about Eric Garner, Bari Weiss standing shoulder to shoulder with Noam Chomsky and Andrew Sullivan, or Trump explaining that antifa has taken over Portland, these are all flowerings of a white culture that basically can’t shut up for a minute and let someone else talk.
    This doesn’t mean that the left is always correct, nor does it mean that you throw out everything. But it does mean taking seriously what post modernism is trying to tell us.

  229. “We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”
    FFS. this is true everywhere, always, for everyone, forever and ever since the beginning of fncking history. people should quit pretending to be aghast at fundamental human behavior.
    or, they could point to the point in history when everybody tolerated everybody else’s opinions without question, without condescension, and nobody ever said “wait a minute, that’s bullshit!”

  230. GftNC: In my assaying role I say: it has to be tough to realise that by making an equivalence between Trump, and that international criminal mastermind HRC (ex secretary of state, ex senator), and the damage either of them might do to America, you and others like you damaged your country internally and externally in ways that will take generations to repair, if it can ever be done. It must be tough.
    Yep.

  231. It seems, to me, ironic that a group of professional thinkers and writers would publish a letter in a prominent magazine, complaining about how they aren’t being heard.
    Organizations have points of view. Sometimes they make room for other points of view, sometimes they don’t.
    Do we see, for example, Krugman on Fox? No, we don’t. Do we see Chomsky in the WSJ? No, we don’t, except maybe in the crossword.
    Everybody isn’t going to be welcome everywhere.
    I’ll also say that post-modernism mostly goes over my head, but the idea that there are other ways of understanding and engaging with the world besides scientific method and linear thinking and written communication seems, to me, so obvious as to barely need mentioning.
    Which is “better” can’t be answered without first asking “better for what?”.
    How any of that aligns with race, whatever the hell race is, is unclear to me. But the fact of its existence is not.

  232. LJ—
    If one were having a discussion about how people in different cultures see the world I would have no objection to someone saying that this group or that doesn’t see time schedules as that important. Religious people ( I am one) don’t think that “ liberal, scientific thinking captures all of reality. And rule by technocrats can be very very bad. And if anyone wants to bash economists, I am right there with them. Cancel Milton Friedman.
    But the people quoted there were making sweeping statements about white people and Black people. It was IMO, idiotic. And actually racist. I would have no problem imagining a white nationalist agreeing with most of those claims.
    John McWhorter (sp?) who is a black linguist had a very harsh review of DiAngelo’s book at the Atlantic a few days ago. He said she has good intentions but her book is racist.
    I generally like Taibbi. I don’t feel obligated to defend every single thing he writes, but I agree with most of it, Lately , just in the past few weeks, I think he is too involved with the Harper’s letter issue and fighting leftist cancel culture. These days, while I mostly identify with the far left, it seems to have fragmented into a thousand pieces. People I usually like are snapping at each other. No big deal, I guess. On the Letter, I think there is a leftcancel culture, and a liberal one, and a Never Trump one and a Trump one and so on, But I agree to some extent with Taibbi that there is a problem on the left. Is it the biggest problem in the universe? If you are Rod Dreher, yes. Is it virtually nonexistent, as some lefties I normally like would say.? No. It is somewhere in- between.
    My problem with the Letter is that it would be better to go through a bunch of detailed examples of bad behavior and I think there are some on every part of the political spectrum so that people could discuss specific cases. IMO, the far left overreacted by claiming there is no issue on the left. It made more sense to endorse the letter and then point out that some of its signatories are total hypocrites. Complicating that is that even someone like Bari Weiss ( who I think is horrible) might possibly have been mistreated at the NYT, though some people there say she was the bully. They might all be right.

  233. You know, FWIW it seems awfully obvious to me that someone like, for example, J K Rowling, was not saying that she isn’t being heard (in fact some people have rather wittily christened her She Who Cannot Be Cancelled), she was saying that the phenomenon the letter was addressing was making many other people liable either to punishment, or self-censorship.

  235. It seems, to me, ironic that a group of professional thinkers and writers would publish a letter in a prominent magazine, complaining about how they aren’t being heard.
    My impression is that their complaint was more about the plight of people who, unlike themselves, don’t have their FU money and prominence. People who are not heard because they self-censor fearing the mob will come for them. It’s one thing to criticize people and their points of view. It’s entirely another to campaign for them to lose their jobs and otherwise have their lives upended and destroyed.

  236. Organizations have points of view. Sometimes they make room for other points of view, sometimes they don’t.
    Not to mention that people don’t have to consider a given organization’s point of view if they choose not to. I don’t watch One America News. Am I silencing them? For me, yes. For anyone else, no. But if enough people decide not to watch, it won’t be a financially viable outlet. Is that censorship? Of course not. It’s life.
    On the other hand, I can disagree with and condemn the behavior of people who, for example, participate in twitter mobs and screw up some random person’s life over some everyday offense that just happens to go viral. But I don’t really know what anyone is supposed to do about that. Even if you shut down twitter (which isn’t happening), something else will take its place. That cat’s out of the bag.
    That’s really the difference between today and the pre-Internet era. It’s much easier for something that would otherwise be an interpersonal incident go out to millions of people, some of whom might decide to threaten and harass you on line, which might lead to someone or some number of people threatening or harassing you in person. But it’s not something that’s exclusively or mostly a thing on the left or right. It’s also something that a very, very small percentage of people participate in, regardless of political persuasion, and something that a very, very small percentage of people will ever be subjected to. It just get lots of attention when it happens.
    It’s a weird f**king world. More speech is censorship. More sources of “information” make people less well informed. People complain on social media about people complaining on social media (and do so with no sense of irony).
    Is it a case of technology outpacing culture? If so, can culture ever catch up? Or is it just how people are, but with new ways of being that way? I don’t know, but I’ll find someone to blame, dammit!

  237. In Hartford, Moore directed us to a page in our training booklets: a list of white values. Along with “ ‘The King’s English’ rules,” “objective, rational, linear thinking” and “quantitative emphasis,” there was “work before play,” “plan for future” and “adherence to rigid time schedules.” Moore expounded that white culture is obsessed with “mechanical time” — clock time — and punishes students for lateness. This, he said, is but one example of how whiteness undercuts Black kids. “The problems come when we say this way of being is the way to be.” In school and on into the working world, he lectured, tremendous harm is done by the pervasive rule that Black children and adults must “bend to whiteness, in substance, style and format.
    This is the best example of why I believe that the very essence of the Black complaint is that society, outside their neighborhood, has rules to follow to be successful. These rules are applied equally, in no way disadvantaging anyone by race except that Black people, according to this, don’t want to be held accountable for things as simple as being on time.
    I watched the guy who founded BET on CNBC one day and he laughingly noted that “we”, meaning black people, don’t save for the future, we like to spend our money. The “rules” here are the very things that allow the accumulation of wealth, achieving financial success. If these are anathema to being Black then there is little to do to help Black people have any chance of upward mobility.
    I am actually not capable of believing that these are the examples any one gives seriously of how Blacks are disadvantaged.
    I can assure you when I moved from Texas to Massachusetts I was required to lose the accent to be successful. If that’s what bending to the Kings English means.

  239. If that’s what bending to the Kings English means.
    It’s King’s English, Marty. Jeez…

  241. And not (Rep.) Steve King for that matter.
    Btw, is there a difference between the King’s and the Queen’s English?

  242. I am also not aware that Rabelais (quite successful guy he) was black despite his known disrelish for clocks (his first rule for the ideal monastery was ‘no clocks’).

  243. John Thullen’s 1:37 pm link is the cancel culture I’m worried about at the moment.
    I admire a lot of the writers who signed the Harper’s letter, and think that they are speaking out on behalf of lesser known folks who may have felt intimidated. It’s something to keep our eye on when we have the luxury of living in a democratic country where the people aren’t dying in droves from a plague.

  246. i>you have held the opinion that Byrd’s generation’s racism was a product of his time and place and should not be judged too harshly in arrears, which I don’t agree with much, but never mind.
    No, I have not. He was a Klanner. I’m well aware of my own family history and the Klan was always viewed as the worst of the white South. My fore-bearers may not have been particularly enlightened by modern standards–but if we got into the detail of it, they were pretty forward thinking for their times. So, no.
    My take is that McKinney comes here oozing condescension and dismissiveness to criticize us (or the prog left, which we are all part of according to him) for being condescending to and dismissive of … Trump supporters?
    I ooze, do I? Damn. Actually, go back to my original comment, which was in response to your question of how come they think that way? I’m pointing out, yet again, it may not be Trump attracting people, it may be the BS that I linked to repelling people who are looking. That so many here either push back on the notion that it is BS or try to minimize or what have you is precisely why the prog left brand does not sell well.
    Also, let me point out that however pointed my remarks often are, they are nothing compared to the usual tone and tenor the majority her apply to conservatives/Republicans/Trumpsters. That folks here get angry over my modest sallies is just bizarre to me.
    The Harper’s letter is a classic example of “bothsiderism”. It is really weak tea. The quote above was presented without any specific examples or factual evidence.
    Please explain, substantively, why one should take such an “argument” seriously?
    For further edification, you might try reading some criticism of the letter found here and here.
    First, claiming “whataboutism” is itself not really a substantive address. The fact that a considerable number of people signed on to a letter decrying the illiberality of the prog left is at least some evidence that what I and others find problematic does, in fact, exist.
    But you make my point on why the prog left isn’t catching on: many here, as I’ve said, deny their own or their fellow travelers’ illiberality, or minimize it, and when they do, they look like Trump on Twitter–saying stuff that everyone who isn’t in the choir listens to and says, “they can’t be serious, can they?”
    I read your first link. It was a well-written–using linear, euro-centric logic and doing homage to the concept of cause and effect–piece that inferentially concedes the very illiberality I’m calling out and tries to make it palatable. It’s too long–and I am still a full time lawyer–for me to try to do a line by line take down on it, but I did look at it.
    So if we want to talk substance, let’s talk substance, and leave the point and laugh crap aside.
    Fair enough; however, the initial Taibbi link illustrates a real thing for the prog left. I’m not just pointing out hypocrisy–which I am happy to do whenever and wherever I find it–I’m pointing out a widespread, ubiquitous practice of thought policing by lefty front-liners, whatever you want to call them. Running someone off a job because that person’s opinions make others feel “unsafe”, for crying out loud. This is now a thing. Not a universal thing, but a thing that we all see and read about every day.
    It really seems that the function we fulfil for McKinney is like one of those pillows certain idiotic therapists get their patients to shout their frustrations and resentments at instead of the genuine recipients. Here I go “assay(ing) [I thought this was what you did to gold] to infer the psychology behind others’ thoughts and views”, but it seems to me that during the Trump presidency McKinney has used us like one of those pillows more and more.
    Maybe I’m misusing “assay”. Fair point. That said, no, you’re not my frustration pillow, if that’s what you mean. I’ve heard of the same thing. Very little frustrates me these days. What does is usually stupid lawyer tricks that I’ve seen a million times or filling out forms. I hate filling out forms.
    No, I come here and have been coming here for a long time to do three things: discuss whatever topic I find interesting that someone has raised; start a conversation on a matter of inconsistency or double standard; or just to hang out, particularly back in the day when there was a lot more fun, non-political stuff.
    Five years ago, when I was slamming the campus cancel culture, the general theme was “hey, it’s just crazy, over-wrought college kids.” I thought that was a lame and incorrect analysis then and today I’m proved right.
    It seems, to me, ironic that a group of professional thinkers and writers would publish a letter in a prominent magazine, complaining about how they aren’t being heard.
    That isn’t what they are saying, at all. They are pointing out, inter alia, that people who don’t toe the politically correct line line risk losing their positions. The risk is that the non-conforming opinion writer offends the majority of other opinion writers who then demand that the non-conformer be fired. This is a major concern to those of us with traditional liberal leanings. I no longer read the NYT because I know the only thing I’m getting is what writers think they can sneak by their censors. I’m also not sending my money to assholes who threaten someone’s livelihood over failing to meet political expectations.
    Also, it is absolutely true that the NYT can print or not print anyone it chooses. Making that argument totally sidesteps the issue. The issue is that institutions are now evaluating their employees based on their politics, compelling non-conformists to self-edit, self-censor, hide, remain silent, etc. It is a textbook example of the majority using its weight to suppress a minority. It is disgusting and indefensible.
    I’ll also say that post-modernism mostly goes over my head, but the idea that there are other ways of understanding and engaging with the world besides scientific method and linear thinking and written communication seems, to me, so obvious as to barely need mentioning.
    Post modernism goes over most people’s heads because it means whatever someone wants it to mean at any given time and place. The unkind take on it, i.e. my take on it, is that it is unbridled BS masking as intellectual substance but in fact writes its own rules of how it can be judged. If a postmodernist asserts that biological sex is a social construct, he/she can defend that premise by simply dismissing factual, historical, social and scientific evidence to the contrary as oppressive, western linear thinking that fails to take into considerations the life experiences of (fill in the blank). Again, it’s gobbledygook that most people just shake their heads at. Very few postmodernists that I’m aware of actually work. They are in academia where, other than writing and lecturing, they don’t do much. Ask them how a soy bean goes from a fifty pound bag to a constituent part of a particular medicine and they are clueless. They, for the most part, know and do nothing of value. They do not create jobs, invent useful products, processes or services. They are the perfect parasite. I hope I’m not leaving anything out here. But they are absolutely resolute that they have the answers. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, 5000 (one can debate this) years of written communication and only in last century of so have these elect few been able to discern the meaning, or lack of meaning, or whatever, of life. Amazing that it took so long and only these special, special people get it.

  248. BP:Compare and contrast for “subtancivity” (King’s English version): McKinney or this.
    I rest my case.
    You lose. From your link, focus on the bolded part, and then go reread Donald’s comment above.
    Abstract appeals to “free speech” and “liberal values” obscure the fact that what’s being debated is not anyone’s right to speech, but rather their right to air that speech in specific platforms like the New York Times without fear of social backlash. Yet virtually everyone agrees that certain speakers — neo-Nazis, for example — do not deserve a column in the paper of record.
    Nobody gives a rat’s ass about their opinions resulting in “social backlash”. That’s a lie. It’s another reason why Z Beauchamp and other prog lib’s are in bad faith. “Social backlash” is not “getting fired for upsetting the snowflakes.”
    Donald’s objectivity and balance is a very welcome addition to the discussion.

  253. The issue is that institutions are now evaluating their employees based on their politics, compelling non-conformists to self-edit, self-censor, hide, remain silent, etc.
    Look, if this is actually what the issue is, I have to say I’m just not gonna get upset about it. Because “institutions” have been doing this since the dawn of time.
    If you want to talk about specific examples, that’s all good.
    But “institutions” have been policing the public speech and behavior of people associated with them for, like, ever. On the left, on the right, in the middle.
    The list of examples is endless. Perhaps address the ones that you object to, specifically. It would make the topic easier to discuss in a useful way.
    The claim here seems to be “nobody should be subject to any consequences for anything they do or say”. Which I doubt is what you intend.
    the very essence of the Black complaint is that society, outside their neighborhood, has rules to follow to be successful.
    That’s an interesting observation, but I’m pretty confident that it’s not the “very essence of the Black complaint”.

  255. Look, if this is actually what the issue is, I have to say I’m just not gonna get upset about it. Because “institutions” have been doing this since the dawn of time.
    Ok, so you’re good if a grocery bagger at Kroger gets fired for having Black Lives Matters bumper sticker? No problem there? What about a MAGA hat–grounds for termination?
    If this doesn’t bother you, then there is a lot more room between us than I ever would have thought.

  256. “Social backlash” is not “getting fired for upsetting the snowflakes.”
    So. Rather than substantively engage you go right to charges of bad faith. Don’t blink, McKinney, let me get that mote out.
    Sheesh.
    Oh…and by the way…please cite some examples of those who were fired for upsetting “snowflakes”. I mean, that should be easy if this is indeed a problem of any degree of seriousness.

  257. Actually, go back to my original comment, which was in response to your question of how come they think that way?
    Not exactly. You posed it as as us prog libs wondering why they won’t listen to us. That’s not the point. And you have to first agree that Trump is a terrible choice as both a major-party candidate and a president for my question, which was simply about an example of politics going sideways, to even think it’s a question that needed to be asked. Do you? If so, then we can discuss what longer-term conditions can lead to such an awful political outcome (or any number of other similarly awful political outcomes, be they real or hypothetical) in a quasi-democratic country.
    I don’t think you appreciated the context of my comment, which was part a long-ish on-going discussion about something Donald and/or nous and/or lj (I’m not even sure anymore) brought up.
    You turned it into something about how Trumpers think we libs as crazy as we think they are, which must mean we’re both crazy (and you’re not, because you’re not a Trumper or a lib).

  258. Ok, so you’re good if a grocery bagger at Kroger gets fired for having Black Lives Matters bumper sticker? No problem there? What about a MAGA hat–grounds for termination?
    No, I’m not good with either example. Were we talking about a grocery bagger at Kroger who got fired for having a BLM bumper sticker? Or a MAGA hat?
    Is that what the issue is?
    To turn this around slightly, if the bagger wore a BLM t-shirt while bagging, and the manager spent the day fielding complaints about it, would you be OK with manager telling the employee to not wear that shirt to work anymore? Ditto the MAGA hat?
    OK, or not? If so, why OK – it’s preventing someone from expressing their point of view, right? If not, why not?
    Here’s the Harper’s letter.
    And it all sounds great. We should be tolerant of other points of view, we should welcome open and honest debate.
    Fine with me.
    They allude to some specific examples, but they don’t dig into them at all to examine why, for instance, Bennett was fired at the NYT.
    If we want to talk about this stuff, we need to talk about specific examples. Because sometimes people get fired because the “institution” is trying to intimidate them, and sometimes they get fired because they did something stupid or wrong.
    And sometimes they get fired because the institution, for reasons of its own, just doesn’t want to be associated with them, because of their public statements or actions. And sometimes that is perfectly legitimate.

  259. So the spectre of Maoist cancel culture overreach haunting this discussion is that there is an Afrocentric professor who is taking a critical position on positivism and speaking about it publicly? And this spectre has somehow seized such control over the whole of the prog left, and through them the whole of the Democratic party. to make it impossible for conservatives who are disillusioned with Trump to either support Biden or to publicly oppose Trump?
    I guess those Afrocentrists should just be quiet and not raise that controversial topic in public because it may turn people off and lead to tangible consequences.
    We should report his ass on one of those campus watchdog databases. He’s clearly ideologically driven and cannot be fair to white students.
    Oh, and also, Cancel Culture is horrible and should be abolished somehow.

  260. Ok, so you’re good if a grocery bagger at Kroger gets fired for having Black Lives Matters bumper sticker? No problem there? What about a MAGA hat–grounds for termination?
    You’ve succeeded in thread-jacking to “cancel culture”, something that is an extremely small blip in our current social conflagration.
    But if you’re going to do that, please point to real situations, not hypotheticals. That Kroger employee is probably more likely to be worried about Covid.
    Also, wrs at 3:11.

  261. The issue is that institutions are now evaluating their employees based on their politics, compelling non-conformists to self-edit, self-censor, hide, remain silent, etc.
    and this has never ever happened before.
    what a time we live in!
    Orwell must have been more than just prescient to see 70 years into the future.

  262. And this spectre has somehow seized such control over the whole of the prog left, and through them the whole of the Democratic party.
    somehow this is the first i’ve heard of it.
    i need to attend more meetings.
    to make it impossible for conservatives who are disillusioned with Trump to either support Biden or to publicly oppose Trump?
    they were always going to have a reason. and it was always going to be manufactured for them.

  263. Here’s one example of a conflict between employers and employees over employees’ political expressions while on the job.
    “Whole Foods workers are suing the Amazon-owned supermarket, alleging the grocery chain punished them for openly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
    …
    Whole Foods’ dress code bars any slogans or logos that aren’t company-related. But the suit maintains that Whole Foods did not enforce this policy until recently, when large numbers of employees started wearing masks or pins with a Black Lives Matter slogan.”
    Workers sue Whole Foods over right to wear Black Lives Matter masks

  264. And you have to first agree that Trump is a terrible choice as both a major-party candidate and a president for my question, which was simply about an example of politics going sideways, to even think it’s a question that needed to be asked. Do you? If so, then we can discuss what longer-term conditions can lead to such an awful political outcome (or any number of other similarly awful political outcomes, be they real or hypothetical) in a quasi-democratic country.
    I have always agreed that Trump is awful. And I’ve always said that a part of his support, until recently, was not a fondness of him, but rather a strong rejection of the prog left. I stand by that. How did we get to this point? It’s bipartisan. Neither party put up candidates that appeal outside the parties themselves. I’m not going to relitigate HRC, or do a comparative of her being the lesser of two evils, because back then, it was enough that DT was not well enough known and she was and it was not to her advantage.
    Going forward, no one on the R side other than Romney is president material IMO, and if he wasn’t around, I would say the lack of president material is universal. We are out of good candidates. In retrospect, I think Obama had what it takes, even if we part company on most policy issues. HRC too, in hindsight.
    Upthread, Thullen made reference to Biden and how I might vote. It’s still an open question, either Biden or a write-in. Not Trump.
    If we want to talk about this stuff, we need to talk about specific examples. Because sometimes people get fired because the “institution” is trying to intimidate them, and sometimes they get fired because they did something stupid or wrong.
    Do we? I disagree. Every American has the right to put a bumper sticker on a car and drive that car to work. Every single one. Whether once can bring their politics into the office is another question. But, if an employer is going to restrict political activity at work, it needs to be universal.
    Insisting that we only look at specific cases and not obvious trends sidetracks addressing the larger picture by focusing on minutiae. We don’t care that George Floyd was being arrested for violating the law or that he wasn’t a saint or that he resisted arrest before laying down–none of that matters. So, we look at the larger picture, the larger wrong and we address it.
    I cannot remember a time in my life where one’s employees could lobby an employer to fire a fellow employee over a political or other opinion matter. This is not just business as usual.

  265. Insisting that we only look at specific cases and not obvious trends sidetracks addressing the larger picture by focusing on minutiae.
    No, it by god does not. It makes us address the concrete realities of specific cases, instead of vague generalities. Because virtually all of the cases that are under discussion have a number of sides to them, and need to be considered in terms of their specific, concrete realities.
    Or, we can just call each other names and be done with it.
    None of the cases that have everybody all worked up involve someone being fired for having a bumper sticker on their car. None.
    Can you point to a single example of anyone being fired for having a bumper sticker on their car? Then why bring it up?
    Let’s talk about substance, not platitudes.

  266. Do we? I disagree. Every American has the right to put a bumper sticker on a car and drive that car to work.
    What cancel culture employer fired somebody for that?
    Whole Foods’ dress code bars any slogans or logos that aren’t company-related. But the suit maintains that Whole Foods did not enforce this policy until recently, when large numbers of employees started wearing masks or pins with a Black Lives Matter slogan.
    Is this left-wing cancel culture? Or is it a problem with a certain employment law situation?
    The fact is, you came here complaining about progs, but you are unwilling to discuss a real case, and I wouldn’t say that Amazon is a Prog. If you want to talk about Bennet, at the NYT, he didn’t even read the Cotton article he allowed to be published. The current version of the Cotton article has an apology attached, explaining the editorial malfeasance that was committed. It’s worth reading. You can provide a different example if you’d like.

  267. Sorry, my 3:36 is addressed to McKinney. CharlesWT helpfully provided the Whole Foods example that’s “cancel culture” by large corporations against BLM advocates.

  268. Serious question from a non-lawyer: Can an employer reserve the right to take action without aggressively taking that action in every instance where they could have according to their policies? So, with regard to the BLM t-shirts at Whole Foods, if they could demonstrate that the wearing of those shirts was causing demonstrable problems for them as a company, does it matter that they let other instances of political displays that didn’t cause them problems pass? (Obviously, they would have to truly demonstrate that and not simply use it as an excuse for selective enforcement, possibly as a way to discriminate unduly.)
    I guess what I’m asking is, what obligation is a company under to strictly police and enforce their policies universally for the enforcement of those policies to be valid means of addressing specific problems caused by employees violating those same policies? Are they allowed to let stuff slide when no one really cares, but not let it slide when lots of people really do care?

  270. Fruit of a random Google walk.

    Over the last two years, the number of dismissals on speech grounds has more than quadrupled (up 433%). There is a stark divide along partisan lines: while the terminations of conservative professors have doubled, the number of firings of liberals has boomed by no less than 950%. Of the 45 cases of faculty firings determined to be unambiguously related to speech, 26 of them occur in 2017 alone (compared to 6 in 2015), “the clear majority (19) being over liberal speech”. Even after adjusting the data by imposing a more strict, legalistic definition of political speech, the pattern remains extraordinary.

    The article links back to this.
    I make no claims for veracity, just throwing another pebble in the pond. The Niskanen piece seems interesting.
    Lastly:
    I cannot remember a time in my life where one’s employees could lobby an employer to fire a fellow employee over a political or other opinion matter.
    I think we’re more or less of an age. Two words, or rather, a name:
    Joe McCarthy

  271. Bennet “resigned”:
    “In a brief interview, Mr. Sulzberger added: ‘Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.'”
    Maybe it made a difference in whatever package he got, but it doesn’t sound like he was welcome to stay.

  272. Are they allowed to let stuff slide when no one really cares, but not let it slide when lots of people really do care?
    It probably depends on how much sliding they let happen. It seems to me, from the complaint, that the plaintiffs have a decent case based on the fact that Whole Foods/Amazon itself proclaimed support for Black Lives Matter, and employees have been okay wearing Pride paraphernalia. Interesting case.

  273. How did we get to this point? It’s bipartisan.
    Since we have a system that pretty much devolves into a “bipartisan” arrangement, this statement is pretty much meaningless.
    If it is an attempt to simply “spread the blame” (real leftist both parties are the same yadda yadda which see) it is manifestly incorrect.

  274. Do we? I disagree. Every American has the right to put a bumper sticker on a car and drive that car to work.
    Yes, they have that right. Employers also have the right to fire a worker for any reason whatsoever unless otherwise constrained by law or a union bargaining agreement (contract).
    Kinda’ brings a different prospective to that “right” does it not?

  275. Haven’t had time to do a detailed catch-up, but from my initial skim it looks as if McKinney has never again referred to Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton or Byrd, after my inconvenient response on behalf of The Progressive Left. It is only fair to say that this is a normal part of the McKinney MO when dealing with inconvenient responses which don’t fit his prejudices.
    However. Confirmation on “assay” – a small victory for the Queen’s English. Much more dramatic – belated realisation that HRC had what it took to be president. Congratulations, McKinney. I am not being sarcastic, it speaks well of you that you can say this, which is more than many have been able to do. Of course it is sad and ironic that you had to see a Trump presidency in order to realise this, but even then you’ve done better than many of the people (conservatives, Republicans, Trumpsters) you say we are regularly so rude about. The honorable exceptions are the never-Trumpers like Frum et al; notwithstanding the general dislike here about their former political views, these are clearsighted, patriotic Americans who saw the danger, and bravely publicised it, and acted upon it. Alas, on the right, there were not enough of them.

  276. Maybe it made a difference in whatever package he got, but it doesn’t sound like he was welcome to stay.
    LOL…well, perhaps so. But a mutual separation is different than a firing. Words have meanings. It’s a King’s English thing. 🙂
    Thanks.

  277. No, it by god does not. It makes us address the concrete realities of specific cases, instead of vague generalities. Because virtually all of the cases that are under discussion have a number of sides to them, and need to be considered in terms of their specific, concrete realities.
    Or, we can just call each other names and be done with it.
    Bennett’s ousting is a good example of a lefty mob ganging up on someone, getting that person fired after making a groveling public apology, and then, after the fact, the new regime puts together an ex post facto rationale that would have the rest of us believe the Cotton editorial somehow sneaked onto the NYT editorial page without any editorial oversight. Sure, some typesetter just happened to hit the wrong button.
    So, if you buy the insurgent party line, Bennett was justifiably terminated for allowing a wrong-headed editorial to appear in an editorial section that he says, not believably, that he never read. BFD–he was fired because his woke subordinates got so heated up over Cotton’s editorial that they wanted blood–and someone in the future who would reliably toe the party line. And, they got it.
    Bari Weiss fully documented her constructive termination at the NYT. Sullivan at the New Yorker fits the bill.
    But fine, none of this is happening and all of the people who say it is happening are delusional. That doesn’t work. Denying or minimizing or contextualizing a sea change in illiberality only resonates inside the prog zone. It does not travel. Demanding that critics prove their case when we read about new cases everyday is like DT demanding that someone show him the actual votes in CA. We know he lost in CA and we know what many on the prog left are doing to those who disagree.
    Is this left-wing cancel culture? Or is it a problem with a certain employment law situation?
    It’s not left wing cancel culture, or even cancel culture, because you don’t have the right to bring your politics to work. However, you do have the right to your bumper sticker, to your social media, etc.
    When employers cross the line from regulating conduct at work vs in their employees’ private lives and start firing people because other employees or whoever have a complaint about their political views, then we have a major problem and that major problem is actually here.
    I used the ‘at work’ examples because that is the trend line. The poor guy driving to work in San Diego is an example.

  278. So, a serious question for McK.
    Let’s say you have a junior associate who makes a very public name for himself as an advocate of white supremacy. Reasonably good lawyer, but all of a sudden, a visible figure, politically.
    What the country needs is to kick out the Jews and send the blacks back to Africa. Build, not just a wall, but a wall with guards carrying machine guns, which will be used to eliminate the illegal immigrant problem post haste.
    And your guy starts showing up on national media with this stuff.
    Clients take note.
    And, if you like, feel free to reverse the details. Your guy is a reasonably good lawyer, but all of a sudden is popping up on network news calling for, not just more taxes, but on seizing anyone’s personal wealth in excess of a million bucks. Top marginal tax rate of 100% kicks in at $250K. Government seizes ownership of all publicly owned corps.
    Invent your own nightmare, here. Be creative.
    Your guy is a good lawyer, you can find no fault with his work product or professional deportment.
    But he’s a highly visible whack job, popping up on Fox or CNN or wherever on a weekly basis.
    What do you do?
    This isn’t a gotcha, I’d like to know how you would address it.

  279. and that major problem is actually here.
    it’s been here forever.
    the only difference now is that we can all easily build collections of instances which support our existing points of view.

  280. When employers cross the line from regulating conduct at work vs in their employees’ private lives and start firing people because other employees or whoever have a complaint about their political views, then we have a major problem and that major problem is actually here.
    Been here for a long time, buddy. The list of employees illegally fired for engaging in union organizing activity is legion. Where the fuck have you been?

  281. I make no claims for veracity, just throwing another pebble in the pond. The Niskanen piece seems interesting.
    Not vouching for Sachs’ accuracy is a good move. I read the piece, googled a couple of his links and read the wiki page about him. I knew his name sounded familiar. If I ever link to a Victor Hansen Davis piece or someone similar as support for one of my positions, you have my permission to cancel me.
    I think we’re more or less of an age. Two words, or rather, a name:
    Joe McCarthy
    Technically, yes. And weren’t those good times?

  282. I cannot get worked up for this Cancel Culture paranoia because my professional life for the last 15 years has featured an endless cycle of the university evaluating my employment in part based on the results of student evaluations.
    I have academic freedom to choose my readings. I have freedom of expression and every single conservative student I have ever had was 100% on-board with how important freedom of expression was on campus.
    For the most part I have good student evaluations. No surprise, since I’m an older white dude and all the research into student evaluations say that being an older white dude generally provides an automatic boost.
    But boy, you should have seen my ratings the quarters that I decide to teach a feminist science fiction text for one of the readings. Suddenly those ratings took a big hit and came down to the level of my women and minority and openly LGBTQ colleagues. And those were also the quarters where conservative male students complained to the department that I had graded them unfairly. And they went onto the campus sub-reddits to complain to their friends.
    Same thing for a music class if it featured writings from Riot Grrrls or black punks. I can look at the averages for my ratings and tell by the overall score whether or not I taught something that ran afoul of the conservative students.
    And I’ve had SJW, BLM, LGBTQ students in my class who have found things written in the texts I have assigned to be offensive, who have come to office hours to talk about those things.
    I tell them the same thing I tell the conservative students who actually come to talk about the texts: if you disagree, write about it, but you have to do it fairly, from a critically aware standpoint that represents the other view accurately. You don’t have to give up your bias, you just have to show good faith in understanding the things you oppose and be fair to them.
    Somehow, that conversation never turns into a hit to my evals. Most of those students come back to see me in later quarters and talk about other subjects.
    And I haven’t faced anything like the struggle that my minority and LGBTQ colleagues have faced. Every one of them had been targeted in their evals any time they have dared to make their students read a feminist or gender studies text.
    I’ve heard about how terrible all us indoctrinating college professors are from right wing talk radio and the RW blogosphere for longer than I have been a teacher. I’ve heard them encourage people to go after the Marxists and expose them and get them fired. And I’ve seen RW activists from out of state come to campus to intimidate and follow around colleagues after a student complained about them on Reddit/4chan.
    This was long before Cancel Culture became the rallying cry of the professional RW harumphers.
    Y’all say it sucks.
    Welcome to our world. It’s always been here. You just never got a taste of it before.

  283. Yes, they have that right. Employers also have the right to fire a worker for any reason whatsoever unless otherwise constrained by law or a union bargaining agreement (contract).
    Yes, and you can legally break wind in an elevator, cheat on your spouse, tell a broad range of lies and do all kinds of other anti-social things that are wrong unless you are a post-modernist, and then it’s all a construct and nothing matters anyway unless they tell it matters and then it matters until they tell you something else.
    For the rest of us, a civil society recognizes boundaries and lines and limits. It’s the social contract. When you’re on the job, the employer can impose reasonable limits on extra-employment matters such as politics, religion, philosophy, etc. Where the fabric begins to fray is when employers become content-sensitive, e.g. firing a BLM t-shirt wearer but allowing a MAGA hat. Even if it’s legal, it stinks.
    We’re moving way beyond that.

  284. And I haven’t faced anything like the struggle that my minority and LGBTQ colleagues have faced. Every one of them had been targeted in their evals any time they have dared to make their students read a feminist or gender studies text.
    Ok, so what department are you teaching in and are these electives or degree requirements? If someone wants to study politically charged drivel from any quarter and signs up for the class, they get what they get. If it’s a core requirement, I’m with the peeps who prefer not to be indoctrinated.
    And, not to put too fine a point on it, you signed up for that and so did your colleagues.

  285. Bennet said he didn’t read the Cotton opinion. Maybe he was lying. This is the Times apology which now accompanies the opinion:
    After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
    The basic arguments advanced by Senator Cotton — however objectionable people may find them — represent a newsworthy part of the current debate. But given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved. While Senator Cotton and his staff cooperated fully in our editing process, the Op-Ed should have been subject to further substantial revisions — as is frequently the case with such essays — or rejected.
    For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of “cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa”; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned. Editors should have sought further corroboration of those assertions, or removed them from the piece. The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged. The essay also includes a reference to a “constitutional duty” that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation.
    Beyond those factual questions, the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate. Editors should have offered suggestions to address those problems. The headline — which was written by The Times, not Senator Cotton — was incendiary and should not have been used.
    Finally, we failed to offer appropriate additional context — either in the text or the presentation — that could have helped readers place Senator Cotton’s views within a larger framework of debate.
    The “apology” sets out some editorial standards that we expect of journalists who are not Fox News. It is very welcome.

  286. I’m with the peeps who prefer not to be indoctrinated.
    So, you do freelance cancellation, based on your own predispositions. So do I, which is why I didn’t read the Taibbi piece.
    “Cancel culture” is a crock.

  287. Bennett’s ousting is a good example of a lefty mob ganging up on someone
    Apparently, Bennett made a number of editorial decisions during his tenure that were problematic for the NYT. The NYT was his boss, so “problematic for the NYT” becomes problematic for Bennett.
    And to be honest, it’s not clear to me that having a large number of people in the editorial and news staff of a newspaper saying they don’t want to work for an editor is a bad reason to consider firing the editor.
    So no, I’m not losing sleep over the resignation / firing of James Bennett. I have no bad feeling toward him, I have no opinion about him in any direction, on any topic, whatsoever.
    He worked for the NYT, he made choices that created problems for the NYT, so they parted ways.
    I’m not seeing points of view being suppressed here. Cotton is a freaking Senator, he gets air time anytime he opens his mouth. The NYT has actually been notable, for a “mainstream liberal newspaper”, for the exposure they’ve given to conservative voices.
    Andrew Sullivan has, as far as I can tell, no problem getting his point of view out into the public arena. Bari Weiss, same. Bret Stephens, same. None of these people are being silenced.
    Some of the publications they used to work for don’t want to employ them anymore. That may well be due to political perspective, because *all of those publications have a point of view*, and the authors in question might not be well aligned with their point of view.
    I’m not sure what it is you want from the NYT, or the Atlantic, or the New Yorker. Or Fox News, or the Washington Examiner, for that matter. Publications generally have a point of view. They may provide an outlet for people who aren’t aligned with their point of view, but then again, they might not.
    They aren’t obliged to do so.
    So I’m not really getting the whole “cancel culture” thing out of these examples. Not from the left, not from the right.
    There are people who are harmed by social media mob justice, but the James Bennetts of the world are not among them.

  288. And, not to put too fine a point on it, you signed up for that and so did your colleagues.
    LOL
    So, if you’re a professor, and you get “canceled”, that’s just the gig?

  289. While McKinney composes his answer to russell’s 4:28PM question, I’d like to ask us prog leftists the following:
    Are you less inclined, indifferent, or more inclined to shop at Whole Foods if some workers there are wearing:
    1) Masks with “BLM” on them?
    2) MAGA hats?
    3) US flag T-shirts?
    4) Confederate flag T-shirts?
    This question may be ill-posed, but I can easily imagine some “market research” questionnaire containing it. “Market research” commissioned by Whole Foods management, probably. In pursuit of profit, not political correctness.
    I have no idea what the results would be if Whole Foods posed this question to a random sample of its customers, or the general public (potential customers); just curious how we prog leftists (as potential if not actual customers ourselves) would answer.
    –TP

  290. For the rest of us, a civil society recognizes boundaries and lines and limits
    Thank you McKinney “now you know the rest of the story” Texas. This may come as a real shock, but you do not get to unilaterally determine what those boundaries are.
    Shocking, no?

  291. Are you less inclined, indifferent, or more inclined to shop at Whole Foods if some workers there are wearing
    Indifferent.
    I’m mostly inclined to shop at WF if I can’t find what I want at the Stop and Shop across the street, because WF is $$$$$$$.
    But for some things, they’re really good, and I’ll spend the extra dough. Plus, the cut flowers are nice.

  293. Can’t speak for any of you prog leftists, but like russell I would be indifferent to the messages on the employees’ shirts. Unless it’s on company-required shirts that all of them are wearing — which is a whole different deal.

  294. Tony,
    I, for one, do not shop a Whole Foods for the following reasons:
    1. Their presentation is nice, but their prices verge on gouging.
    2. The CEO, John Mackey, is a libertarian fruitcake.
    3. Most significantly, there is not a Whole Foods establishment near me.
    Thanks.

  295. I’m not sure what it is you want from the NYT..
    He wants stultifying center-right to right conformity….the special sauce of conservative politics.
    Look, the Times has been subjected to a lot of SJW and other “Left” pressure over the last few years to bring a wider array of voices to the editorial page than the Tom Friedman, David Brooks genre.
    Frankly, the paper is better off for it.

  296. You know, the more I think about it, the more I realise that when McKT said of me:
    I invite her to explicate the prog left’s underlying psychology of its not-so-distant love affairs with Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.
    and I went to the trouble of answering him, it is pretty damn uncivil of him to ignore my “explication”. McKinney, you may think my answer, as opposed to being just inconvenient, was inadequate, and that I was too light on the underlying psychology of the (mythical so-called) love affair, but what the hell?

  297. I’m still trying to figure out who in the “prog left” was in love with Robert Byrd.
    Not saying it wasn’t a thing, just that I was somehow unaware of it.

  298. For CharlesWT, a taste of Bari Weiss, admittedly not curated to show her best side, if she has one. Which seems unlikely.
    Other than that, doesn’t anyone have a dictionary?
    In my 1967 Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate, the very first meaning for “assay” as a verb is “TRY, ATTEMPT.” “To analyze (as an ore)” is meaning 2a.
    Time passes, language changes. In my 1999 Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, “to attempt; try; essay [how do you like that one? – ed.]” has been demoted to the 5th meaning for “assay” as a verb.
    Online today, a number of sites say the “try” meaning is archaic.
    Well, so am I, and so, apparently, is McKinney, who should learn to stand up for himself.
    Still, if I were editing, I’d be asking McKinney what’s wrong with writing “try” in the first place? Like I used to ask them at work: Why do we all now have to “utilize” things and “assist” people? Why can’t we just “use” them and “help” them? Not pompous enough, I guess.

  301. Still, if I were editing, I’d be asking McKinney what’s wrong with writing “try” in the first place? Like I used to ask them at work: Why do we all now have to “utilize” things and “assist” people? Why can’t we just “use” them and “help” them? Not pompous enough, I guess.
    Rather than using the simpler word, I enjoy trying to figure out why a second word came into fashion.
    For example: Utilize seems to resemble utility, which would seem to suggest sharing a common useful resource. Utilizing a reservoir for community water, for example.
    Assist (latin origin) means to stand by someone, slightly different than help (German) by giving.
    The linguists here may disagree or shed more light, but I kind of love thinking about it as an amateur.
    I am not very careful in everyday speech or writing, but if I’m trying, it’s fun to think about those nuances.

  302. I think there are various complaints about Bari Weiss, but one is that she has spent much of her life trying to cancel pro Palestinian activists. So it was funny to see her signing an anti- cancellation letter.
    https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-falsely-denies-her-years-of-attacks-on-the-academic-freedom-of-arab-scholars-who-criticize-israel/
    Some people here don’t like Greenwald. I don’t care. GG is one of the few mainstream journalists to write about Palestinians.
    I suspect that as a NYT op ed editor she had something to do with some of the opinion pieces in 2018 that defended Israel’s shooting of Palestinian demonstrators. It was interesting to me how little attention that got. Shmuel Rosner was openly contemptuous of their deaths. May 18, 2018 if anyone wants to google. But I don’t know if Bari was directly involved.
    There are other complaints about her, but given my interest that’s the one I noticed. She and some of her coworkers did not get along. My guess is that there might be fault on both sides.
    Here are the opening paragraphs of the Rosner piece. To me these are the words of an apologist for mass murder, but opinions no doubt vary.
    I like the term “ ingenue mourning”. Shows that tough minded unsentimental spirit one likes to see in an analytical piece one reads over breakfast about the killing of scores of demonstrators. He balances it with an acknowledgement that the deaths of humans is never a happy occasion.
    Nice touch. Palestinians are human, even if you have to gun them down.
    “ It is customary to adopt an apologetic tone when scores of people have been killed, as they were this week in Gaza. But I will avoid this sanctimonious instinct and declare coldly: Israel had a clear objective when it was shooting, sometimes to kill, well-organized “demonstrators” near the border. Israel was determined to prevent these people — some of whom are believed to have been armed, most apparently encouraged by their radical government — from crossing the fence separating Israel from Gaza. That objective was achieved.
    Of course, the death of humans is never a happy occasion. Still, I feel no need to engage in ingénue mourning. Guarding the border was more important than avoiding killing, and guarding the border is what Israel did successfully.”

  303. Andrew Sullivan was with New York Magazine, not the New Yorker.
    As for the prog Left, whatever that is, back in the day, they took down a Democratic President over Vietnam. Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, and the rest of the poisonous right wing did not seem too awfully exercised about that cancellation.
    Nor about Edmond Muskie’s.
    I’d be curious to know what editorial and by what writer got bounced from the New York Times so that Tom Cotton, who, I believe is a clear and present danger to this country, could shoot his surly mouth off on those pages.
    And why do not those who are daily denied space on any editorial space in this country complain about the cancellation of their voices.
    The job of an editor is to choose whose voices get canceled. An editorial page is not a blog comment section. You get the four opinions the editor chose to print and the dozens rejected end up in the round file.
    Tough sh*t.
    Back to Tom Cotton: if that fascist f*ck with that mouth of his comes anywhere near me, his free speech will be the last thing on his mind.
    Not opining is what he should do.
    By the way, where does Shirley Sherrod go to get her life and reputation back after Obama fired her after subhuman filth and scum Andrew Breitbart lied about her.
    Let’s go back and see if any conservatives here were up in arms about her cancellation except to ridicule Obama for falling for Breitbart’s bullsh*t.
    Happily, Breitbart was canceled by the universe.
    It’s a relief not hearing his voice.
    “For the rest of us, a civil society recognizes boundaries and lines and limits.”
    Is that the same civil society who elected Trump, who destroys all boundaries, lines, and limits?

  304. With my 6:33 pm post, commenters who mostly agree with me could assist me with more examples [with a nuance of supporting my statement]. Commenters who are sympathetic, but think I’m slightly misguided, could provide some help [with a nuance of changing my statement somewhat].

  306. On the “assay” question, what do you know. I did look it up before posting, to check, and the source I looked at (can’t remember which) used the gold one first. It did list “try” afterwards, but then (as I discovered in my enraged fulminations after the Kavanaugh hearings) dictionaries now list “deny” as a meaning for “refute” after the correct meaning of “disprove” (my version of what Janie calls being archaic, apparently). So the whole idea of proper usage is obviously going to hell in a handbasket! But anyway, my apologies to McKinney for that, if nothing else.

  308. Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote the Letter, has a twitter account and you can find a lot of links to that point of view there if you are interested. I got the preceding link from that location.
    Going to quit now. I think there is a problem on the left to some degree, but don’t know how much.

  309. Here is a podcast discussion, if you don’t mind listening instead of reading, that covers in some detail what is being discussed at length in this thread.
    “We live in a world where a Boeing executive was forced to resign over a 33-year-old article opposing the idea of women in combat and a respected art curator was pushed out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for saying he would “definitely still continue to collect white artists.” The editor of The New York Times opinion page left his job after publishing an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and TV host Nick Cannon was fired by ViacomCBS after voicing anti-Semitic comments on his podcast.”
    Jonathan Rauch on Cancel Culture and the ‘Unending Battle’ for Free Speech: “The idea that wrongheaded, dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous ideas should be not only allowed but protected is preposterous,” says Rauch. And yet, it’s “the single most successful social principle ever invented.”

  310. Annie Applebaum has been canceled by the Republican Party. No invites for her.
    I wonder if socialist Michael Harrington ever got published by William F. Buckley’s rag?
    Buckley, in what must have been a momentary fit of good sense and taste, canceled Ayn Rand and other conservatives as well.
    The right in this country originated the cancel culture.
    Now it’s their turn.
    And they secretly like it, notwithstanding grandstanding drama queens like Sullivan and Weiss, who have been so peeved all along that they didn’t get to be victims, that they resigned rather than wait forever to be fired.
    By the way, Bari Weiss went to her boss and complained about liberals on the New York Times staff as well.
    I just read that she attended Shadyside Academy, a private prep school visible from my public high school in Pittsburgh, PA.
    She’s had a rough life. Nearly Palestinian in its misery.

  313. Donald, that Rosner extract is truly disgusting.
    That was the day that the US opened its embassy in Jerusalem, right? Both sides do it?
    One of the things we don’t talk about, because we’re too busy with all of the horror at home, is the horror of Donald Trump abroad. Because, yeah. It’s a lot worse now.

  314. It’s always a bit of a problem getting to the comments after everyone has had time to get up a head of steam, such that any further observation seems like an affront. I try to remember and avoid that, but I am 13 hours after you, so simply conforming to that means that I don’t get to say much. I’m not claiming that I’m being ‘silenced’, but by replying, I’m threatening to pour gas on the embers. But I did want to go back to Donald’s excerpt, where he said
    But the people quoted there were making sweeping statements about white people and Black people.
    One of the problems with these discussions is that if you push the point too hard, you are implicitly not allowing any space for the other person to reframe what they said. Someone like McT takes advantage of that by skipping over points he doesn’t like and hammering on the things he feels he can defend.
    The problem with my discourse style (and probably why I don’t get along with McT or Marty for that matter) is that I tend to be pedantic, and overly formal as you will see below.
    If we look at the excerpt Donald gave, we see 8 tokens of ‘white’. They are
    white culture (4 times) and the following 1 time each
    White Eurocentric knowledge
    White European Enlightenment epistemology
    White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges.
    white values
    At no point are DiAngelo and Singleton talking about white “people”. So I think one of the points of contention is that we don’t agree that they are talking about the same thing. We could have a discussion (and have had it in varying forms) how we can separate ‘people’ from ‘culture’, but I feel like Donald’s underlying assumption is that if you talk about a culture, you are talking about the people in it.
    This is where a lot of the flak that occurs when this topic is discussed can be found. Values embedded within that culture, there’s no problem with it because everyone knows it, everyone does it, and everyone understands what the problems are if you don’t.
    I’ve not followed who said what (another problem with coming to this in the Japanese AM), but some people seem to dismiss the idea that different groups have different conceptions of time. There’s actually a large body of research saying the opposite and if one is interested (rather than simply googling to find counter examples), I’d check out the work of Hofstede. Here’s an interesting website that compares different countries on not only time but other variables proposed by Hofstede.
    https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/
    As I mentioned before, when it is embedded in the culture and everyone roughly agrees, there’s not a problem. But when two different cultures (and DiAngelo and Singleton are arguing that there is a Black culture) having, for example, differing conceptions of time, bump into each other, one can expect conflict to arise. A difference in time perception, with the majority white culture adopting a monochronic approach where time can be spent, saved or wasted and lateness or any form of interruption will not be tolerated bumps into the polychronic where number of tasks can be done at once and people are not expected to do one thing at a time (some national cultures/areas that are considered to be like this are Mexico, the Philippines and Southern Europe) problems arise. When it is assumed that this approach tells us something about the people in that culture, we have the monochronic culture assume that representatives of the polychronic culture are lazy and shiftless. This is where the problem lies, and you only get at that by discussing the cultural tendencies.
    At any rate, that’s why I was baffled by Donald’s reaction to the excerpt. To write at this length creates the impression that I’m mad at Donald, which is not the case, it is just the time shifting, so I apologize for the impression.

  315. It was interesting to do a comparison of the US and Mexico in the Hofstede piece. Made sense to me.

  316. lj’s comment reminded me of something from my honeymoon, when my wife and I traveled to Greece. There were a lot of Greeks on the flights both on the way there and on the way back. On the first flight out of JFK, we were a little shocked at the way the Greeks all rushed to the boarding gate in a big cluster the moment they announced the start of boarding. Everyone had an assigned seat, and they were boarding in an order, as usual. Their behavior seemed almost offensive to us.
    On the way home, we just sat and waited until the last minute to get on. Very quickly (or maybe after two weeks in Greece) the rushing, crowding Greeks were just … different? In any case, it was no longer the least bit bothersome. We knew the deal and did our thing.
    I don’t remember what the baggage claim was like going to or returning from Greece, but I used to fly fairly regularly years ago, and the baggage claim always annoyed me. That was because of American behavior. Everyone would crowd the carousel to get their luggage. Meanwhile, no one had a clue whose bags would come out first, it was difficult to see your luggage coming out if you weren’t right at the front, and it was difficult to get to your luggage when it did come out. If everyone just stood back, everyone could easily see and retrieve their luggage when it came out in whatever random order that would happen.
    The thing is, though, that I can imagine (and maybe that’s because it happened that way, even if I don’t specifically remember it) that the Greeks would just hang out at a distance (probably smoking, if it was in Greece*) waiting for their luggage to come out, behaving in a way that was far more sensible than the American way of crowding the carousel.
    So the Greeks weren’t good with the ordered process, and the Americans weren’t good with the unordered process. That seems like culture to me. One good at one thing and the other good at another. Neither better overall.
    *My wife and I joked that the non-smoking section in the Greek airports, where people were smoking and there were ashtrays, was where smoking was just optional. In the smoking section you had to smoke. It was mandatory.

  317. Marty, The arc of my travels has never put me in a place with a large Mexican or even a large Hispanic population except for brief periods of time and I’ve never made it to Mexico so I’d be interested in any anecdotes you have about encounters with Mexico or Mexicans that you’d care to relate.
    hsh, a friend who spent time in Italy (another one of those Southern European cultures) said that in Italy, a line is a triangle with its base at the counter.

  318. Here is a long article giving examples of leftwing cancel culture.
    Thanks for this Donald. Most of the examples are cases of which I have, up to now, not been aware. I agree that many of them seem to be examples of people suffering consequences way out of line with whatever it was they said or did.
    All of that said, this Twitter comment from the article is closest to my own opinion:

    ‘Cancel culture’ has become such a vague, catch-all, hodgepodge phrase, encompassing wildly different people and situations. It’s not useful at all.

    I’ll also say that it seems reasonable for an organization to cut ties with people who they simply do not want to be associated with, due to that persons public (often very public) statements or actions.
    It’s a weird time, everybody is angry. About a lot of things. And there are a lot of things that people should be really angry about. It seems almost naive, to me, to think that there is some idyllic forum for thoughtful, balanced, and carefully reasoned discourse on offer out there somewhere, if we could all just open our minds and ears and really hear what our counter-parties are saying.
    It’s kind of a knife-fight. A lot of people are getting hurt, in a lot of ways. Strong words, and strong reactions, should not surprise anyone.
    None of us are going to get past any of that without hearing and acknowledging the fact that a lot of people are hurting.
    Not to pick on Marty, but upthread he offers the thought that the essence of the black complaint is that society wants black people to act in ways that work for society, and (presumably) black people don’t want to have to do that.
    I submit that that is not the essence of the black complaint. I can’t tell you what the essence of the black complaint is, because I’m not black, and it would be lame for me to say I can speak for black people. But I am, let us say, highly confident that that is not the essence of their complaint.
    Lather, rinse, and repeat, for all of the other groups of people who feel that they don’t have a full stake in our common life. For whatever reason.
    If folks want to tone down the ‘cancel culture’, maybe the first step is to listen to the angry people. Maybe they’re angry for a reason.
    If Twitter is the biggest weapon they have to bring to the table, maybe they’re angry, and not particularly powerful. Maybe a bigger seat at the table would help.
    In any case, I have no solution to the problem. I’m not on Twitter, I don’t really engage in social media pile-ons. I’m not really interested in bullying people. All of this is kind of outside my experience.
    Conversation and openness and the granting of the benefit of the doubt goes in multiple directions. The opposite, likewise.

  319. A perhaps-Hofstede-related anecdote.
    My wife and I were in Italy. We rented a car. It was black.
    We were heading back home and returned our car to the rental agency. The paperwork said the car was white.
    Car model, year, mileage, plate number, all matched. Car was black, paperwork said white.
    “But, the car is black”, we said. “Is there a mistake?”
    “No, it’s fine. We just put ‘white’ down as the color for all the cars”.
    Different strokes.

  320. My wife and I were in Italy.
    Glad we went there in the fall, even though it was a splurge. It will be awhile before we’re allowed out amongst the world community again.
    This is what it must have felt like to be a Soviet citizen. Thanks, Trump voters.

  321. Not to pick on Marty, but upthread he offers the thought that the essence of the black complaint is that society wants black people to act in ways that work for society, and (presumably) black people don’t want to have to do that.
    I submit that that is not the essence of the black complaint. I can’t tell you what the essence of the black complaint is, because I’m not black, and it would be lame for me to say I can speak for black people. But I am, let us say, highly confident that that is not the essence of their complaint.
    Being braver (more foolhardy) I will take a shot. The black people I know personally (admittedly perhaps an atypical subset) have no problem with acting in ways that are unexceptional among white people. The essence of their complaint is that they frequently don’t get the same response. In particular, but by no means exclusively, from law enforcement.
    In short, not “we are being forced to do it your way” but “we do it your way (and are OK with that), but it doesn’t work the same.”

  322. On the matter queues.
    “Is queuing just a phenomenon of English-speaking countries? The British are famous for their habit of queuing, as are the Canadians. Americans will wait in line and become extremely agitated if somebody cuts in. Yet in China, standing patiently in a queue is a sign of weakness. The strongest, and most successful get to the front. And anybody who has tried to board a train in India will be familiar with the stampede that happens as soon as the doors open.
    Different cultures have different attitudes to waiting in line. Here’s a quick trip around global queuing habits.”
    Why do Brits love to queue?
    “Queuing, it’s what the British are renowned for doing – and doing very well. Better than anyone else in the world, if reputation is to be believed.”
    Queuing: Is it really the British way?
    Perhaps TLDR
    “What separates a good queuing experience from a bad one, however, is not just the speed of the line. How the wait makes us feel and line fairness (nobody likes line-jumpers) can have a greater impact on our perception of a queue than the amount of time we spend in it. And while waiting time is often hard to cut down, perception can be altered with good line design and management.”
    Waiting game: An extended look at how we queue: You might have heard of a serpentine line, but did you know about jockeying and slips & skips? Enter the weird and wonderful world of waiting line design.

  323. Donald,
    From the article”: “Which is the real threat?” is a pointless argument, because the answer is: Both.”
    This claim is not true in any meaningful sense in today’s political zeitgeist in our country. That it is given significant credence in a time when a fascist POS President is sending armed thugs into our communities is simply this: Unforgivable.
    It is a near total abdication of what is actually important.
    Sorry. I agree with you on some really fundamental issues (US foreign policy, Palestinian rights) which you point out repeatedly and correctly are “cancelled” in just about every sense of the term. This is not one of them.
    Perhaps this author could take a moment to speak with Phil Donahue, a real victim of “cancel culture” (a case somehow never mentioned by our freedom crusader, McKinneyTex) . My take is this: An article that takes on “cancel culture” and only cites left wing “woke” transgressions is simple taking sides.
    Cathy Young is taking the wrong side.

  324. Greek culture — or rather, public behavior — is somewhat different now from what it was in the days of hairshirt’s honeymoon in my home town on Crete.
    For example, the frivolous Greeks (citizenry and government both) managed to take Covid-19 more seriously than the exceptional Americans. Greece has suffered only about 200 Covid deaths out of about 10 million population so far. And although Greece lives on tourism, Greeks are willing to forgo tourists from the US and other shithole hotspot countries. Maybe that’s a form of “cancel culture”, though, and to be frowned on by such paragons of reason as McKinney.
    On a completely different topic: it appears that every one of you prog leftists couldn’t care less what slogans or insignia Whole Foods workers are allowed to wear at work. So, just to make McKinney feel better, let me reassure him that there’s at least one prog leftist around here who would be MORE likely to shop at Whole Foods if I noticed some of its workers sporting BLM masks (or tee shirts, or tatoos) and LESS likely if it was MAGA hats or Confederate flags. I might go so far as to be indifferent to American flags, in moderation.
    “Less likely” is not the same as “boycott” or “picket” or “cancel”. But it’s still something savvy businessmen looking to increase shareholder value in a free market with at-will employment might care about.
    –TP

  326. Perhaps lj can weigh in here better with some additional insights, but when it comes to queuing, Japanese generally are patient, listen to any instructions from various officials and other staff about the need or reason for queuing, and in explanations of any reactions I’ve gotten about queuing from people here that I know, will say that all the instructions and the personnel are there for public safety, and to help people. Completely the opposite from what I hear about many Chinese.
    One thing that seems to come up in the Japanese view of queuing is to make it a worthwhile experience. A TV clip from some time back illustrated not only this, but also the difference in cultural views of queuing.
    A certain restaurant had opened in Tokyo that had gotten a lot of great advance reviews, and the clip showed people lined up waiting for the restaurant to open. A TV interviewer went around getting some “vox-pop”-type comments from people as to what they were there to try in the place and so on, including a woman with two children was there.
    The interviewer asked her if it was difficult for her to wait in line with two children, both of whom appeared well-behaved. She said she had no problem with waiting because she could share in the anticipation and experience with others in the line. But then she added that her American husband was elsewhere at that time because he couldn’t stand waiting in line like this, as to him it was a complete waste of time.

  327. If folks want to tone down the ‘cancel culture’, maybe the first step is to listen to the angry people. Maybe they’re angry for a reason.
    Precisely. Thank you, russell. Look, it goes like this:
    OP (the oppressed): Your boot is on our neck. release it!
    TP (teh powerful): We will take your complaint under consideration. Fill out this form in triplicate and forward to the P.O. Box provided.
    OP: That didn’t work! We protest!
    TP: You are being rude and disrespectful! Why are you burning buildings in your own community? Obviously your complaints are without merit.

  328. And although Greece lives on tourism, Greeks are willing to forgo tourists from the US and other shithole hotspot countries.
    It’s been almost a quarter century since my honeymoon, and I still occasionally check out Rethymnon on google street view. Before going down to street level, seeing all the places labeled as “currently closed” is a punch to the gut. Thinking of that place as being remotely empty stabs me in the heart.

  329. Or stabs me in the gut and punches me in the heart. Whiskey… Did I mention I’m an engineer?

  331. Completely the opposite from what I hear about many Chinese.
    From one of the articles I linked to up thread:
    Yet in China, standing patiently in a queue is a sign of weakness.
    I suspect that this can vary with age. Unlike middle-aged Chinese who lived through the bad times, young Chinese are known to wait in line for hours to get into the currently popular eating establishment. And the establishment may pay people to stand in line to make it look even more popular.

  332. This is a very interesting article about practical electoral mechanics:
    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html
    What it brushes very lightly over is what changes people’s attitudes over time, but it’s nonetheless extremely interesting on why they vote the way they do. I expect some will find the arguments offensive or in persuasive, but I think they bear thinking about.
    (And set aside the interviewer’s snark at the start.)

  333. I hate to be a party pooper, and I confess to being as guilty as anybody here….but really, shouldn’t we argue about more important things? Remeber when we argued about the Iraq invasion(s)? Torture? Privatizing Social Security? Tax cuts? Deficits? Health care? And yes, racism?
    And now everybody is getting their panties in a bunch because Bari Weiss QUIT her lucrative well paying job? Really?
    We have lost our minds.

  334. nigel @ 02:00 AM,
    Do you realize what an ungodly hour this is over here? But yes, good article….too long to fully digest right now. Thanks.

  335. “The term “cancel culture” comes from entitlement – as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience,& one is a victim if people choose to tune them out.
    Odds are you’re not actually cancelled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.

    — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 10, 2020

    “I have an entire TV network dedicated to stoking hatred of me,” continued Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat who serves as house representative for New York’s 14th congressional district.
    “A white supremacist with a popular network show regularly distorts me in dangerous ways, and it’s a normal part of my existence to get death threats from their audience. You don’t see me complaining about ‘cancel culture’.”

    i’m sure Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib can sympathize.

  336. FWIW, I have to say the David Shor pile-on and firing seems just dumb. World-class, shoot yourself in the foot, own-goal dumbness. A liberal auto-da-fe.
    And yeah, we’ve lost our minds.

  338. Darth Cheney’s daughter is not welcome at the GOP Parteitag either for the crimes of 1) supporting a candidate in a GOP primary whose opponent Jabbabonk endorsed and 2) supporting a candidate in a GOP primary endorsed by Jabbabonk (put not the party establishment).
    Just waiting for the trifecta with charges that she did not endorse any candidate in a third GOP primary.

  339. the former GOP nominee had a 23% approval rating nationally, among Republicans, this spring.
    Good to know we’ve got about a 1 in 4 starting point of sane people for the re-creation (I think we’re beyond mere “rebuilding” at this point) of my party. I was worried it was closer to 1 in 8.

  340. I’m only part of the way through Nigel’s link, but I wanted to share these excerpts about balancing shorter-term electoral strategy with longer-term attempts to move public opinion.

    There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
    (…)
    Non-college-educated whites, on average, have very conservative views on immigration, and generally conservative racial attitudes. But they have center-left views on economics; they support universal health care and minimum-wage increases. So I think Democrats need to talk about the issues they are with us on, and try really hard not to talk about the issues where we disagree. Which, in practice, means not talking about immigration.
    (…)
    The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish, racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So that’s the trade-off.
    (…)
    But it’s a hard trade-off. And I don’t think anyone ever says something like, “I think it was a good trade for us to lose the presidency because we raised the salience of this issue.” That’s not generally what people want. They don’t want to make an unpopular issue go from 7 percent to 30 percent support. They want something like what happened with gay marriage or marijuana legalization, where you take an issue that is 30 percent and then it goes to 70 percent.
    (…)
    If you look at long-term trends in support for gay marriage, it began linearly increasing, year over year, starting in the late 1980s. But then, right when the issue increased in salience during the 2004 campaign, it suddenly became partisan, and support declined. After it stopped being a campaign issue, support returned to trend.

    Interesting stuff.

  341. Haven’t had time to do a detailed catch-up, but from my initial skim it looks as if McKinney has never again referred to Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton or Byrd, after my inconvenient response on behalf of The Progressive Left. It is only fair to say that this is a normal part of the McKinney MO when dealing with inconvenient responses which don’t fit his prejudices.
    I’m away from my office and just now getting up and running–is the above the comment you believe I failed to address? If not, pls specify and I will respond.
    I did not see a response to my general broadside against the prog lefty double standard that, pick your Verb: allied with, idolized, revered, championed, defended, etc. Down the memory hole as it were. I do concede that a number of women today–well past time when it matters–have had unkind things to say about Bill while ignoring his wife’s complicity or by claiming it to be unrelated to her husband or her defense of her husband and, for the record, here is what I said upthread:
    GFTNC often assays to infer the psychology behind others’ thoughts and views. I invite her to explicate the prog left’s underlying psychology of its not-so-distant love affairs with Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd. If leaving your date to drown while you flee isn’t a bit of misogyny, I don’t know what is. Maybe someone can square this circle for me. Please help me understand the high moral ground so many here seek to occupy with your own party’s recent past.
    The prog left today is quite judg-y from most outsiders’ viewpoint, which ties into the Taibbi piece, cancel culture, twitter mobs, the “white” fetish and so on. The disconnect with the prog left’s own history, particularly Kennedy, has always been astonishing to me.
    Your personal views are apart from the defenders of those cretins at the time.
    Invent your own nightmare, here. Be creative.
    Yep, I get it. I tell my attorneys, when I hire them, that we have the full range of political and social outlooks in our office and among our client base and if you can’t work and play well with the full range of what our society presents(and our world, for that matter, since not all of our clients are domestic), go somewhere else. I make it clear that they have the right to believe, vote, etc as they see fit but they do not have the right to alienate others. If they feel they need to take a public stand in a way that is likely to cause problems with clients, they must leave and if they don’t, I will cause them to leave.
    As an aside, we are a trial firm. We try cases all over the state and Texas is quite diverse in many, many ways. Either you develop an affinity and an understanding of who your state-wide neighbors are or you’re out of business. We are anything but out of business and for that very reason, this will be my last comment until I can get caught up and that may be sometime right around the first of Never. Adieu.

  342. I make it clear that they have the right to believe, vote, etc as they see fit but they do not have the right to alienate others. If they feel they need to take a public stand in a way that is likely to cause problems with clients, they must leave and if they don’t, I will cause them to leave.
    Which, in your particular situation (which is not the situation of most companies IMHO), is not unreasonable. IF you tell them right up front that is what is expected/required.

  343. No. The comment I believe you failed to address, although I notice that now (Your personal views are apart from the defenders of those cretins at the time.) you may preemptively explain this, was:


    This is a perfect example of the phenomenon I mentioned of McKinney attributing attitudes to “us” which “we” don’t have.
    I despised Ted Kennedy, and made it clear that if I was put in the position, I would refuse to shake his hand in a professional context which might have harmed me. I was agnostic about Bill Clinton (although impressed by his brilliance as a campaigner), but ended up believing Paula Jones, and thought Juanita Broadrrick’s allegation convincing.
    I had no idea who Robert Byrd was until I read your comment, but looked him up.
    Byrd later called joining the KKK “the greatest mistake I ever made.”[22] In 1997, he told an interviewer he would encourage young people to become involved in politics but also warned, “Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don’t get that albatross around your neck. Once you’ve made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.”[23] In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he “was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision—a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions.”[24] Byrd also said in 2005, “I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.”[12]
    My attitude on reading the Wikipedia entry is this. I am aware that racists (even overt, activist racists) can reform, and I praise and appreciate those who do. It is ambiguous to me from this whether that was the case with Byrd, or whether his “conversion” was cynical and motivated by professional ambitions.
    McKinney, as so often you are arguing with people who aren’t here. Get a grip for God’s sake.
    Posted by: Girl from the North Country | July 22, 2020 at 09:27 AM
    Oh, I see that McKinney was talking about the “prog left”, not just me. But since he always seems to invoke us as representatives of the same (as I quoted earlier), I stand by my response.
    Posted by: Girl from the North Country | July 22, 2020 at 09:31 AM
    Namely:
    They are just as sure about their views as everyone here is about their own. They view the Prog Left as incoherent, authoritarian nuts who, among other things, have lost their collective minds in the aftermath of the Floyd George killing.
    …..
    Matt Taibbi, once again, lays out the reasons why I–and others–can no more lie in your bed than I can in Trump’s
    Posted by: Girl from the North Country | July 22, 2020 at 09:36 AM
    Goddamit, I was so pissed off that I was unclear. I should have said:
    I despised Ted Kennedy, and made it clear (in a professional context where it might have harmed me) that if I was put in the position, I would refuse to shake his hand.
    Posted by: Girl from the North Country | July 22, 2020 at 09:40 AM

    As I make clear, I believe I was entitled to give you my view, since you characterise all of us here with the exception of Marty (and maybe wj) as The Prog Left.

  344. Yep, I get it.
    All good. I appreciate the reply!
    IMVHO, some of the ‘cancel culture’ stuff is, in fact, overzealous policing of thinking and saying the ‘right things’. See also, the David Shor case.
    And also IMVHO, a lot of what is characterized as ‘cancel culture’ is people saying and doing things in a very public context – whether work related or not – that makes life more complicated for their employer or peer group or whoever than they would like.
    So ways are parted.
    Things like Bennet at the NYT fall into the second category. Again, IMVHO.
    And sometimes, what is broadly characterized as ‘cancel culture’ is straight up harassment, not infrequently to the point of criminal behavior.
    See also, Milo Yiannopoulis and similar trolls.
    Different cases are different.

  345. I don’t really get the “as sure about their views” thing. McKinney strikes me as being very sure about his views. As far as I can tell, he’s as sure about his views as I am about mine. Does that make us equally wrong, or what? Here we all are – the prog left, Trumpers, and McKinney – all sure about our views. What does that say about our views?
    I know people who think the administration of vaccines is part of a global conspiracy to … well I’m not sure what the goal of the conspiracy is supposed to be … but they’re sure there is one. I know people who think the moon landing was faked, and they’re very sure of it.
    I’m sure that the world is round. Some people are convinced that it’s flat. Is one of those views right, or are they equally wrong because of the equal certainty with which they’re held?

  346. Yup, I think it means “my Trump supporting friends are sure they’re right, and so are you prog lefties at ObWi, so same-same.” Which rather ignores, as you remark hsh, what those views are. I don’t want to harp on, but some people like McKinney and Marty were sure of their view that HRC or Trump would be equally bad for America as president. I would far rather that history had not proved the sure view before the 2016 election of the ObWi commentariat regarding Trump as being so very, very right.

  347. I’m truly sorry to harp on about HRC, and would call it back if I could. But I can’t think of another example which shows how utterly blind the right (except for the Never-Trumpers) were before the election. As a thought experiment, if by some strange series of events Trump had been the Dem nominee, and someone like Romney the GOP one, I wonder how many of us would have voted GOP, or abstained? But I guess it’s almost impossible to see how Trump could have succeeded in getting the Dem nomination, despite his earlier history. On the other hand, the whole thing would once have seemed unimaginable….

  348. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/23/1963124/-Texas-county-overwhelmed-with-Covid-19-will-deny-treatment-to-those-deemed-unlikely-to-survive
    https://www.dallasnews.com/business/health-care/2019/09/10/here-s-how-many-texans-don-t-have-health-insurance-according-to-new-census-data/
    Texas turned down expanded Medicaid as well.
    McTX, since you measure us repeatedly against friends of yours who vote for Donald Trump and whatever nutcase conservatives his Party coughs up, and find absolute balance in the the two sides’ respective crazy, please tell them for me that they are genocidal cold-blooded republican murderers and we are not.

  350. quoted by hsh:

    There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.

    Never heard of Broockman, but I made that point here at ObWi long ago.

    The problem is that swing voters don’t trust either party. So if you get Democrats to embrace Abolish ICE, that won’t get moderate-ish, racist white people to support it; it will just turn them into Republicans. So that’s the trade-off.

    I have also long held that “independents” are people who will vote Republican given the slightest excuse.
    McKinneyTexas is by his own statements here a solid Republican (though anti-Trump) so he’s not one of those “independents”. He doesn’t need an excuse.
    hsh, in person:

    I don’t really get the “as sure about their views” thing. McKinney strikes me as being very sure about his views. As far as I can tell, he’s as sure about his views as I am about mine. Does that make us equally wrong, or what? Here we all are – the prog left, Trumpers, and McKinney – all sure about our views. What does that say about our views?

    Gee, I wish I’d said that.
    As for unjust “cancels” by the “prog left”, let’s focus on cancelling He, Trump and his fascist lickspittles and then worry about reining in the overzealous among us.
    –TP

  351. FWIW, and in the interests of accuracy, I think McKinney has told us in the past that he hasn’t been an actual Republican for years. But I don’t think he’s ever didavowed being a Conservative, or on the right.

  353. McKinney has stated here several times in the past that he is not a member of the Republican Party.
    Yes, a conservative, but on some issues, gay marriage for example, he would be pilloried as a RINO and worse by that party, if in fact he was in that party.
    “As for unjust “cancels” by the “prog left”, let’s focus on cancelling He, Trump and his fascist lickspittles and then worry about reining in the overzealous among us.”
    Exactly.

  354. I don’t really get the “as sure about their views” thing. McKinney strikes me as being very sure about his views. As far as I can tell, he’s as sure about his views as I am about mine. Does that make us equally wrong, or what? Here we all are – the prog left, Trumpers, and McKinney – all sure about our views. What does that say about our views?
    I have a short break and this is a valid point. Let me clarify: the commonality between the prog left and the Trump right is that both have realities unique to their outlook that are are viewed much differently by people outside their respective orbits. The regualar/moderate Dems I know say, like I do, “I don’t have a party anymore.” The “base”, whether Republican or Democrat, has their core beliefs and no one is moving them off their positions, come hell or high water. And both are as sure as they can be that everyone who doesn’t agree with them has it wrong. Back to work.
    JT, I’d tell them they were murderers if that’s what they were. They aren’t. You’d like most of them. And they would like you.
    TP–I haven’t aligned as a Republican for years. I’m obviously conservative on a number of issues.

  355. Bobbyp- I agree Cathy Young’s piece is biased. The point was to see some examples of what conservatives talk about. Are there cases where they have a point? I think the answer is yes. Some twitter account— McWhorter’s, I think— claimed that he received numerous emails in private from people in academia claiming they kept their mouths shut on some issues for fear of their jobs. One doesn’t have to agree with them on everything they say. And I certainly agree that we on the left can give many examples of lefties being cancelled. Half of what Chomsky wrote about in his political books were examples of US atrocities being ignored. I
    I think there are multiple factions — it isn’t just left vs right—and to the degree that a given faction has power in some setting, some people will abuse it and engage in bullying.
    GTFNC— Yeah, that Rosner passage was terrible. I have mixed feelings about publishing it. I lean towards the idea that the NYT is such a huge institution that they should publish a very wide range of views, including some that are shocking. But if so, they needed to publish a very hard hitting response to the Rosner piece. Or the Cotton one.
    LJ— I didn’t think you were mad.
    I object to that way of thinking that I cited on multiple grounds. So I don’t think one should talk about rationality and science as “ White”. If you want to criticize how science has been used to justify racism, then go ahead. I have a ( half- read) copy of Ronald Fisher’s book on natural selection It is one of the most important works of evolutionary theory. Part of it is about eugenics. And yes, Enlightenment figures were often racist, sexist, and antisemitic. People should know the bad side of Western history ( though without acting like it was all bad or that much worse than other cultures.)
    So one could talk about how certain attitudes claim the mantle of rationality and science, but DiAngelo and company weren’t doing that. They were making a claim that scientific thinking is “ White” and that it is unfair to Black children to judge them by these white ways of thinking.
    I can’t think of a polite way to express my fervent disagreement with certain forms of postmodern bullshit. Yes, people from different cultures and subcultures see things differently. And yes, children raised in a given subculture might have trouble learning what these people consider “ White” ways of thinking. Teachers should take this into account. But children really should learn about math and science and they should learn how to communicate effectively via the written word and they should not be taught that these useful abilities are “ White”. If they work in certain settings then it is important to be on time.
    All these are useful and important skills. One can also have classes where one learns about other cultures, ideologies, religions, and so forth in a respectful way.
    I sometime feel like many of the portions of far left thinking that successfully break out into the wider culture are the really stupid parts. I assume that wokeness workshops for office workers are a lucrative business and enable corporations to avoid lawsuits without having to worry about giving longer bathroom breaks,or longer stretches of paid sick leave and decent health care to their warehouse workers. Yes, this is oversimplified.

  356. The “base”, whether Republican or Democrat, has their core beliefs and no one is moving them off their positions, come hell or high water. And both are as sure as they can be that everyone who doesn’t agree with them has it wrong.
    I’m not sure how this addresses the point regarding what that means about who actually is right about … anything, I guess. And I don’t see how it’s something exclusive to the people in a given party’s base to think people they disagree with are wrong. That’s what disagreement is. Perhaps it’s the sureness that you think is particular to the bases, though I don’t know how you’re measuring that. Like I wrote earlier, you seem as sure that your opinions are right as I am that mine are, AFAICT.
    When you get time, McKinney, I’d suggest Nigel’s link in his 7/23 2 AM comment. It says something different about the bases of the two parties than what you’re suggesting.

  357. “ these people”
    I used that phrase. I meant DiAngelo and the other person that was cited, or more generally, this particular brand of leftwing radical.
    One point Taibbi made which was obvious— you could are exactly the same case when fundamentalist parents objected to having evolution taught in their biology classe, or demanded equal time for their own ideas. You can an should be respectful to children and their religious beliefs and not engage in ridicule but students should learn biology in school and that includes evolution, even if they think that is a “ secular humanist” view

  358. I don’t see how it’s something exclusive to the people in a given party’s base to think people they disagree with are wrong.
    For a non-political example, one need only consider theology. Not just between religions, but even within one. Indeed, the term “heresy” for any disagreements has its origins there.

  360. the commonality between the prog left and the Trump right is that both have realities unique to their outlook that are are viewed much differently by people outside their respective orbits.
    I personally belong to at least three groups of people, for whom this statement is also 100% true:
    * UU Church member
    * Working musician
    * Software engineer
    Plus, bog standard white middle class suburban blue state liberal.
    So, what you’ve said is completely true, but I’m not sure what to do with it.
    I’m sure that (D)’s could pick up some votes if their base wasn’t seen as too extreme by people who think of themselves a moderate. They’d also lose some votes if they went out of their way to appeal to people who think of themselves as moderate.
    I understand why you find it unpalatable. I often find it unpalatable, but my own values and interests align closely enough with those of the “prog left” that I just ignore the stuff that bugs me and carry on.
    I suspect that something north of 90% of People Like Me are more or less in the same place. There aren’t that many people who are, in any meaningful sense of the word, radical.
    Eat the meat and spit out the bones. And if the meat itself is not to your liking, that’s also cool, everybody has their own point of view.

  361. Yes, a conservative, but on some issues, gay marriage for example, he would be pilloried as a RINO and worse by that party
    pilloried is a quaint old fashioned way of saying “cancelled”.
    so, sorry, you must be wrong about that, JT.

  362. The regualar/moderate Dems I know say, like I do, “I don’t have a party anymore.”
    I would say you don’t seem to know many Dems, “regular” or otherwise.

  364. I apologize for assuming upthread that a man who wrote here that he voted for Republicans up and down the ballot except for president “is” a Republican. I freely and humbly acknowledge that McKinney may be simply one of those “independents” who vote Republican given the slightest excuse.
    There are many people like that, I hear. The kind of people who want government to “get things done” and never mind what “things” those are. The kind of people who are “as sure as they can be that everyone who doesn’t agree with them has it wrong” because the MAGAs and the SJWs can’t both be right. The kind of people who seem to think two adversarial political parties is one party too many for a sensible, moderate, congenial form of self-government.
    So what do such people ask of the “prog left”, and what do they ask of the Trump-supporting right? What would either “side” have to say or do to get these numerous and sensible “independents” to ally with it? Or abandon it?
    –TP

  365. So what do such people ask of the “prog left”, and what do they ask of the Trump-supporting right? What would either “side” have to say or do to get these numerous and sensible “independents” to ally with it? Or abandon it?
    The “prog left” should disappear in a cloud of marijuana smoke, and the Trumpers should do as they are told by their masters.

  368. I loved cleek’s copy upthread of AOC’s masterly tweets about cancel culture, but I have just watched her statement on the floor of the House about her encounter with Yoho, and it is just wonderful. It may become as iconic as Julia Gillard’s speech in the Australian parliament, but in the meantime, I imagine it will resonate pretty strongly with 50% of the population, and not all of them Ds.
    https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1286381316670398465

  370. Just reread my comment upthread. It needs an editor. I could use a few lessons in clear writing myself, though I blame part of it on impatience while typing.
    Anyway, to me leftwing cancel culture is an issue, possibly important, but I am not sure. The worst case I know of was that woman who lost her job because the Washington Post exposed her poor judgment in satirizing a Fox News host.
    But right now getting Trump out um, trumps everything for the next few months. Who would have guessed that having a moron in the WH during a global crisis would be a bad idea? If Biden gets in, then there will be a wide range of issues to argue about.

  371. If Biden gets in, then there will be a wide range of issues to argue about.
    Doubtless true. But we will remain in agreement that he is a huge improvement. However many objections we find ourselves having over some things he does.

  372. Further to which, I’m guessing that Trump’s boasting about having aced the cognitive test might just be his worst mis-step with the public since the bleach injections. If I’m right, quite a lot of the public might have either done the test themselves, or more importantly have accompanied a spouse or parent who has been doing it (as I did with my late mother), and know from personal observation that doing well on this test is not something to boast about. Here’s hoping, anyway.

  373. Or maybe it will become this generation’s
    “Have you no sense decency, sir?”
    Sadly, I find this unlikely.
    Further to which, I’m guessing that Trump’s boasting about having aced the cognitive test might just be his worst mis-step with the public since the bleach injections.
    Trump has a rock-solid lock on about 30% of the population. If he has a couple of strokes of luck between now and November, that’s probably worth another 10 – 20%. How that plays out electorally is a jump-ball, although at the moment it doesn’t seem to be in his favor.
    Tax cuts, deregulation, and the endless appeal of owning the libs. It has a constituency.
    What he says about a cognitive test is not going to make any difference.
    TBH, if it wasn’t for the virus, I’d put his odds at better than even.

  374. Damn you russell for your good sense! (I feel like Snoopy on the roof of his doghouse going “Curse you, Red Baron!”) I guess I was indulging too much in wishful thinking, particularly since I also just finished reading Nigel’s excellent link to the interview with David Shor, where the electoral maths for the next few cycles depressed me enough to go looking for good news.

  375. The Jacksonville Republican summer of suffocation has been canceled.
    Trump today: “I looked at my team and I said, the timing of this event is not right.”
    “I had a deal with my friend, the Covid-19, that if I ignored the virus, it would agree to go away. I kept up my end of the bargain.
    His team, cowering under the table, breathed a great Covid-19 droplet-filled sigh of relief.
    Here they are on the way into the meeting:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-WX5-WexvE
    We’re a f*cking pathetic, but deadly joke.
    It’s true, in retrospect Obama and H. Clinton might, I say, maybe now, don’t hold me to it, it’s still up in the air, all of the evidence is not in, after all, but they MIGHT not have been so bad after all.

  376. Here is the problem with cancel culture, everyone knows it exists, so really it’s just not worth the back and forth.

  377. Cancel culture is like political correctness or the race card. It’s not that there’s nothing at all there. It’s just not of the size or nature that some people think (or at least claim to think). It gets turned into a cudgel, an all-purpose refutation for a broad yet still conveniently selective set of circumstances. There a bunch of cancel culture outside of the set that people use it to describe, and there’s a bunch inside that same set that doesn’t belong there.

  379. Morning, I don’t want to be worrying this like a dog with a bone, but this is obviously something that deeply interests me. Donald wrote:
    I object to that way of thinking that I cited on multiple grounds. So I don’t think one should talk about rationality and science as “ White”. If you want to criticize how science has been used to justify racism, then go ahead. I have a ( half- read) copy of Ronald Fisher’s book on natural selection It is one of the most important works of evolutionary theory. Part of it is about eugenics. And yes, Enlightenment figures were often racist, sexist, and antisemitic. People should know the bad side of Western history (though without acting like it was all bad or that much worse than other cultures.)
    I don’t think that DiAngelo and others are suggesting that rationality and science are ‘white’. They are saying that it is embedded in a way of teaching that empowers whites and disempowers others.
    To give an example, I was I was pretty good at math, but when I was helping (or should I say trying to help) my daughters with their math, I was totally flummoxed. It didn’t effect my self-image, math is not really essential for my job, but as a kid, I got good scores in math, so my self-esteem was supported at that point in my life.
    However, if I were in the position in JHS or HS, it is very easy for me to see how it would have adversely affected me. Perhaps, had I learned Japanese as my first language, I would have been able to show my math ability, but we should be acutely aware that education in the US often does not really give minority children the kind of background that they need.
    The point is similar to the one Michael Herriot gave at the end of this long tweet thread. I’ve pulled out the anecdote, though the whole thread is worth reading (though I’m not too sure about saying Native Son is better than Moby Dick, I tend to agree with James Baldwin’s complaints about the novel, but the idea that Bigger is Ahab is interesting, though I think Baldwin would see Bigger as Moby Dick)
    here
    When I was in college, I took Chinese. The way you learn Mandarin Chinese is through a system called Pinyin, which is basically a system of phonetics and accents. Someone asked her if we’d be able to communicate in China if we learned Pin Yin, she said “probably not” She had a hard time explaining the variations in dialect and eventually settled on explaining it this way: “It’s how white people talk in your country.”
    Some people were offended until she elaborated: “I know how to speak American English,” she said. “ “Before I came here, I read newspapers and watched the news. But no one talks like that. Then one day, I was in a math class taking a test. It was very difficult because it was all word problems. It was so hard even though I am very good at English and math. “After the class, someone asked me ‘how I think I did.’ I didn’t know what he meant. How I did what? What did I do?”
    That’s when I realized that everyone around me was talking JUST LIKE THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE TEST. They were all White people. “ “It’s not that I didn’t know correct English, I didn’t know how to speak like the people who wrote the test!”
    Because there are so many local & regional dialects, China tried to romanticize the written language for hundreds of years. But instead of restricting, Pinyin combined other systems into one written system. So you won’t be able to understand everyone but if you know pinyin, most ppl will understand you. “In America, most people understand correct English but they speak ‘white English’” she said.
    Then she made a joke that offended some people but, as the only black person in the room, I knew exactly what she meant. It was a throwaway line but I remembered it for the rest of my life. “Learning ‘white’ should really be a prerequisite,” she said… “For ALL the classes.”
    So when you see D & S making:
    a claim that scientific thinking is “ White” and that it is unfair to Black children to judge them by these white ways of thinking.
    I see them instead pointing out how it is taught, though people seize on that explanation to judge it as illegitmate. This is the point that Michael Holding, the Jamaican cricketer, made about Edison and Lattimer’s place in history.
    Interestingly enough, Herriot’s thread was prompted by a tweet by Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the authors of the infamous Harper’s cancel culture open letter, complaining about this article about Rutger’s changes to their curriculum
    https://www.thecollegefix.com/rutgers-english-department-to-deemphasize-traditional-grammar-in-solidarity-with-black-lives-matter/
    which, as Herriot points out, was misread by the article and the identity of the author may explain why he chose to read it in that way.
    Williams was also interviewed by Issac Chotnier in the New Yorker. He doesn’t fare as badly as Richard Epstein did (ouch!), but his discussion of the genesis of the letter underlines how much it was a product of a bubble.
    I can’t think of a polite way to express my fervent disagreement with certain forms of postmodern bullshit. Yes, people from different cultures and subcultures see things differently. And yes, children raised in a given subculture might have trouble learning what these people consider “ White” ways of thinking. Teachers should take this into account. But children really should learn about math and science and they should learn how to communicate effectively via the written word and they should not be taught that these useful abilities are “ White”. If they work in certain settings then it is important to be on time.
    All these are useful and important skills. One can also have classes where one learns about other cultures, ideologies, religions, and so forth in a respectful way.
    Unfortunately, the problem with this approach is that it places non-white cultures off to the side, so that people can treat them as an add-on rather than as the true meat of the education program. This is also the complaint made of the diversity programs that DiAngelo cut her teeth on, so if you take on board that complaint, they you need to apply it to this situation.
    Anyway, apologies for length, hope it is of some interest.

  380. LJ—
    Actually, yes, if you are learning math or science then everyone’s culture is off to the side. When it isn’t, off to the side, you get creation science in biology class.
    I have no particular stance on how humanities classes should be taught.

  381. Incidentally, back in the day when people argued about intelligent design in the classroom, circa 2005, some people said that it could be taught in a religion class or even philosophy if a high school had a philosophy class. Which is fair.
    I sometimes thought it would be interesting for a biology teacher to take on the intelligent design or creationist arguments in class— take them seriously and critique them. I still think that would work with openminded intelligent kids but on the whole it was probably a bad idea. You use up limited time and in practice, if you don’t come to the “ correct” conclusion you still have upset fundamentalists at the PTA meetings.
    So shove that culture stuff out of the science class. If you want to know abou tthe cosmologies of people whose beliefs don’t fully coincide with what Western science teaches, do it in another class.
    BTW, this includes some of my beliefs.

  382. On a related note, I know some white people who don’t entirely live in a secular Western materialist cosmology, though it is funny to think about where we draw the lines. I’m a Christian and so I am one of them. I haven’t had any woo- woo experiences. But I know people who say they have. I am not going into that as none of these are my stories and I haven’t seen any of them. But yes, I mean ghost stories from people who claim to have seen them or heard them or in one case,been carried by one.
    So it seems kind of silly to link a scientific worldview with “ whiteness” when I could fill a few paragraphs with some distinctly non scientific stories I have heard from white friends who claim to have experienced them. Plus there are people who believe in astrology and then there are all of us who still believe in some religion involving God and spirits and life after death. I have one friend who thinks belief in ghosts is absurd. He is a creationist.
    Do these stories and beliefs belong in a science class? Are we sidelining actual “ white” culture when we leave them out of the educational system, except for maybe a religion or folklore class? Where exactly do these postmodern folk get their stereotypical notions of whiteness?

  384. As so often, the judge’s ruling against the Trump administration is scathing. Because its actions were not only unjustified, but blatantly so. These guys wouldn’t even make the cut for the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

  385. Nigel,
    The Shor interview was interesting and a bit gloomy (his logic seems pretty sound on that matter). However, his take on the increasing ideological sorting of the electorate into two camps is fairly common knowledge. I also found his narrative re post WWII elites to be a bit, um, odd. Not sure I agree with that take.
    Thanks for the link.

  386. Where exactly do these postmodern folk get their stereotypical notions of whiteness?
    You need to define ‘these postmodern folks’. Absent that, I don’t really know how to answer the question. But to take a stab at it, I’d say that DiAngelo gets her idea from seeing what is taught and related and how it is understood. That last bit is pretty contentious, but when you pile up lots of examples, there is arguably a pattern. That understanding might not be shared by everyone in the society, but it is a lot like herd immunity, if a large proportion holds that, it exists, so arguing that one person or one group of people’s understanding, (often for one particular fact) goes against it doesn’t really invalidate the idea that the notion exists in a way that can influence people’s actions.
    An example is discussed in the 2016 op-ed by Garfield and Van Norden that provoked a lot of discussion
    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html
    You might argue that you are talking about science, but “science” doesn’t appear in the passage, the passage says “White European Enlightenment epistemology“. So taking science as the keystone of the complaint has, like the lawmaker who wanted to change the value of pi to something easier, nothing to do with science.
    I agree with you that ‘whites’ have a lot of non scientific beliefs and I entertain them myself from time to time. But I hope you can see that the framing of the great march of progress and how science banished ignorance is largely a tale from a perspective of white society.
    And we don’t have to pay the price for believing in non-scientific mumbo jumbo. Yet someone who isn’t white who says they believe in some aspect of say, Afrocentrism, I don’t think they fare as well. Yes, there are theories that are way out there, but those are focussed on in discussions to the exclusion of theories and speculation that is actually worthwhile. (cue someone to google and pull up Stanley Crouch complaining about Afrocentrism)
    I gave an example of how the structure of word problems can be dependent on the majority discourse. Fixing that is not simply painting a layer on top, it’s actually going in and reconsidering how things are taught. Of course, given the short shrift given to public elementary and secondary education in US, the outcome is that the people who are more likely to succeed at university tend to be self-selected, and so, incidents like this are a symptom of that. So our education system works together to create a picture that whites are somehow more deserving.
    The interesting thing is that when we restructure how we teach, we often find that people who may not fared as well in the old system are able to make strides. The requirement that someone be ‘twice as good’ makes sure that all the people who are just as good, or maybe 1.5 times as good don’t get to where they can act as models for others.
    To move this away from race, this Ted talk by Temple Grandin
    https://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds?language=en
    suggests what we are losing out. Assuming that we both agree that skin color has no bearing on this, then the structuring of education to present a myth of white superiority is problematic. How this is tackled is a difficult question, but if the question is considered out of bounds from the beginning, it won’t be tackled at all.

  387. Science did appear in the passage I cited from the NYT piece., Go back and look.
    And from your NYT link—
    “ Others might argue against renaming on the grounds that it is unfair to single out philosophy: We do not have departments of Euro-American Mathematics or Physics. This is nothing but shabby sophistry. Non-European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy. There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.”
    I completely agree. And as a Christian I am certain I would find the philosophical traditions of other cultures very interesting. But the article specifically excludes science and math. Good.
    I would happily read at some point histories of racial oppression in the US and the West more generally. I have in the past. But I really have less than no interest in the way many academic leftists talk. I think it starts out with a clear complaint— Edward Said pointing out that the characters in Mansfield Park benefit from West Indianslavery, for instance, ( I may have that mixed up— it has been a long time since I read either Mansfield Park or Said). But that’s clear. White supremacy is tacitly accepted. Or even more clear is how our own glorious history has been thoroughly whitewashed. Or Ta Nehisi Coates wrote a pretty clear description of how black wealth was stolen via policy. I haven’t read Michelle Alexander’s book on prisons and Jim Crow, but I could no doubt follow that. And when reading about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict it is not hard to see the various hatreds and bigotries on both sides manifesting.
    But when I read the passages in the NYT article I cited or read the transcript of the DiAngelo talk my reaction can best be summarized as “ Wtf is this shit?” The parts which are true are obvious. Her anecdotes were of white people being dumb, including herself. She thoroughly misrepresented how everyone talks about JackieRobinson. I don’t follow baseball history, but I knew nobody ever talked about the lesson being what she said it was. But overall it just seemed like a religious revival meeting, except one where you can’t be saved.
    I first encountered this style of leftism in the first moral panic about OC culture back in the 90’s and it frustrated me, because it seemed to me that legitimate fact based revisionist views of Western history were being lumped in with some postmodern language that nobody understood.
    As for whites being privileged to get away with nonsense while Afrocentrists are called out, this is hard to measure, but certainly white creationists get called out and ridiculed whenever they try to impose their views on the school systems.

  388. I like the Michael Holding cite, lj.
    One of my cricketing heroes (though Malcolm Marshall was even better, IMO).

  389. That’s when I realized that everyone around me was talking JUST LIKE THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE TEST. They were all White people. “ “It’s not that I didn’t know correct English, I didn’t know how to speak like the people who wrote the test!”…
    To some extent that’s the difference between good and bad teaching. Certainly the better lecturers at British universities are sensitive to this king of thing – necessarily so in recent years owing to the large numbers of overseas students universities have recruited.
    And less of a problem to our kids generation, I think, as they are simply more sensitive to such issues ?

  390. The Shor interview was interesting and a bit gloomy (his logic seems pretty sound on that matter). However, his take on the increasing ideological sorting of the electorate into two camps is fairly common knowledge. I also found his narrative re post WWII elites to be a bit, um, odd. Not sure I agree with that take
    I didn’t really bother much with that last point, bobby. My thoughts were more about how it sets our rather clearly ways in which to be electorally smart, or avoid being dumb, without overly compromising your political principles. Some politicians (AOC is perhaps one) appear to get this intuitively, but many (most ?) are either completely wrapped up in their ideologies, or completely subsume principle to electoral considerations.
    His remarks on statehood, and how to push for it, as a counter to the inbuilt Republican bias were also very interesting.

  392. Well, we are probably reaching the event horizon on this, but I’ve been reading some things cited and if anyone is interested, here is the article cited in the excerpt
    https://robindiangelo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Sensoy-DiAngelo-HER-2017.pdf
    The focus of the article is about hiring at the university level, which may be of interest to some people here. I was particularly curious about the context of the quote of “validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge over non-White, Indigenous and non-European knowledges”
    Another unnamed logic of Whiteness is the presumed neutrality of White
    European enlightenment epistemology. The modern university—in its knowledge generation, research, and social and material sciences and with its
    “experts” and its privileging of particular forms of knowledge over others
    (e.g., written over oral, history over memory, rationalism over wisdom)—has
    played a key role in the spreading of colonial empire. In this way, the university has validated and elevated positivistic, White Eurocentric knowledge
    over non-White, Indigenous, and non-European knowledges (Battiste, Bell,
    & Findlay, 2002; Carvalho & Flórez-Flórez, 2014; Grosfoguel, Hernández, &
    Velásques, 2016; Mignolo, 2002). These knowledge forms “inscribed a conceptualization of knowledge to a geopolitical space (Western Europe) and erased
    the possibility of even thinking about a conceptualization and distribution of
    knowledge ‘emanating’ from other local histories (China, India, Islam, etc.)”
    (Grosfoguel et al., 2016, p. 59). The decolonization of the academy requires,
    at minimum, an interrogation of not only the disciplinary fields and their borders but also the everyday commonsense practices of the institution itself.
    that’s it for me, will try and get a few new posts up about something or other.

  393. Here is the problem with cancel culture, everyone knows it exists, so really it’s just not worth the back and forth.
    the problem with “cancel culture” is that it’s this season’s ebola. it’s a bogeyman ginned-up to scare conservatives during an election year.
    people shunning or shaming or cancelling each other is as old as humanity. all that’s changed now is the American right has been sold the idea that this intrinsic human activity is something lefties recently invented in order to take over the world.

  394. I slept on it and my complaint is in part with the entire use of language by the academic left. This is what Chomsky has said for decades about postmodernism and it resonates with me and probably most people. It goes like this—
    In science and math and some areas of philosophy people use a technical language which is hard to understand at first, but unless it is a degenerating research program ( technical language for BS) there actually is substance behind it. It isn’t BS. If you put in the work you will understand it. Whereas in much academic thought there seems to be a kind of joy in polysyllabic language and technical lingo for its own sake and sometimes underneath it all just a kind of relativism, but there isn’t much else there. If there are any legitimate points being made they could be made much more simply. This doesn’t have to be postmodernism, because it can pop up in some areas of philosophy as well. Hume, rightly or wrongly, consigned scholastic philosophy to the flames because it was just rhetoric.
    So much of the academic left is composed of people dressing up banalities in a lot of pretentious rhetoric.
    This has little or nothing to do with styles of teaching. If people have new ways to teach linear algebra, great. I could have used someone who knew some better method when I took it. It made no sense to me until I saw some of it used in physics.
    Taibbi is being a jerk on his twitter feed in the past couple of days, but he is also collecting phrases used by lefties and imo he is right. There are just a lot of lefty cliches that have become very tiresome.

  395. There are just a lot of lefty cliches that have become very tiresome.
    I agree (without having read Taibbi), but I’ll take tiresome over apocalyptic right now.
    Also, what cleek said.

  396. So much of the academic left is composed of people dressing up banalities in a lot of pretentious rhetoric.
    inasmuch as it’s not just a problem for “the left”, i 100% agree. sticking fancy labels on banalities lets people seem like they’re saying just a bit more than they actually are.
    you can also find this in business jargon (especially management trends), and comp-sci (an entire sub industry devoted to giving names to the ‘patterns’ all programmers use every day!); and probably everywhere else, too.

  397. So much of the academic left is composed of people dressing up banalities in a lot of pretentious rhetoric.
    Have you ever been in a corporate all-hands meeting?
    There are just a lot of lefty cliches that have become very tiresome.
    I’m sure that’s true.
    But here is where we are. We are being led by a corrupt, narcissistic ignoramus. And a solid third of the country is not only OK with it, they celebrate it.
    We’re back up to about 1,000 deaths, per day, from COVID. 70 THOUSAND new cases, yesterday. New cases, in one day. And there is not now nor has there at any point been anything remotely like a coherent strategy for dealing with it. People lose their shit if they’re asked to wear a mask when they’re in public places.
    I haven’t seen the country this divided since the glory days of Vietnam and Nixon.
    I could go on at length.
    And people like McK, who despises Trump and on matters of substance is actually not that far away from many if not most folks here, can’t find a way to get with the “prog left” program because James Bennet got fired and people are mean to somebody on Twitter.
    Lefty cliches are tiresome because all cliches are tiresome. Lefty party line blather is annoying and vapid because all party line blather is annoying and vapid. Doctrinaire lefties are bullying asses because doctrinaire adherents to any position are bullying asses.
    And I don’t care. Because the only people on the scene right now that appear to give a crap about anything I value in the public sphere are the annoying vapid lefties.
    You should hear what the other side sounds like.
    Time to stop picking nits about style and look at the bigger picture. At least, seems that way to me.
    And if anyone thinks everything is gonna be all better if we just get Biden in the White House, it’s not. All the people who freaking adore Trump and everything he is about, are still gonna be here in January 2021, no matter who is POTUS.
    Also – nous has provided the best available clue to disentangling the whole “science is white” business with his reference to positivism.

  398. but many (most ?) are either completely wrapped up in their ideologies, or completely subsume principle to electoral considerations.
    Rock meet hard place. There are infinite shades of “completely”, and events can make rabid ideologues geniuses (Lenin, 1917) or goats (Hoover, 1932).
    But interesting stuff, nonetheless, coming from a professed marxist. Another commonality is race. As some observers have remarked, nearly 20% of Dem voters are really pretty racist.
    Thanks.

  399. people shunning or shaming or cancelling each other is as old as humanity.
    It is, but the existence of social media has radically expanded its reach, at the same time as massively weakening the constraints of direct human interaction.
    Though that, of course, is a more general problem.

  400. The McKinney Theorem:
    The importance of an issue is inversely proportional to the amount of ink released explicating it.
    Research is ongoing to test this hypothesis. While not yet validated, some avenues of research apppear promising….
    1. “cancel culture”
    2. trans people entering bathrooms
    3. the Columbian exchange
    4. Genghis Khan

  401. russell, the last thing you really want is to quit picking bits on style. It’s the only place you were winning. The problem with the cancel culture discussion for the left is it weakens that advantage.

  403. Ahh, so the Chomsky-Foucault debates? Here’s the background on those
    http://www.openculture.com/2019/06/michel-foucault-and-noam-chomsky-debate-human-nature-power-on-dutch-tv-1971.html
    and here’s Chomsky’s statement on postmodernism that also discusses Foucault, which also has a similar reference to your reference to Hume.
    http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
    he debate they had was in the 70’s and this article presents it in a more current light with a skeptical view of Foucault, though I think it may explain why I think Foucault is more correct than Chomsky in this historical moment.
    https://areomagazine.com/2020/03/05/chomsky-vs-foucault-revisited/
    I certainly understand that post-modernism is tough, and I think there are a number of reasons that it is so tough, which include that it arose from a French academic culture (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard) but I think there are a lot of important observations, and one can draw a line from Nietzsche, who Mishra draws on for his analysis. Not easy stuff, and the complaint if it were really true, it should be in easier language is not something I agree with.
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good review
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
    And I personally think that Foucault is prescient in his Discipline and Punish. I think it is worth a look.
    I don’t know if I can write a post about all this, but with the end of term coming up, I may try.

  404. If you can make it intelligible, I’d read it with enthusiasm.
    Never could make out what they were on about.

  405. russell, the last thing you really want is to quit picking bits on style. It’s the only place you were winning.
    with you, maybe.
    everybody isn’t all about tax cuts and “safety is overrated”.
    if “cancel culture” is what gets in the way, you weren’t really on board in the first place. which is fine, different strokes. but seriously, just own it.
    do you think anybody really believes that you, or anyone, gives a crap if James Bennet is no longer the editor at the NYT? or any of the other ‘cancel culture victims’?
    it’s just another tribal pissing contest.
    this country is going to drown in a sea of trivial horseshit.

  406. “So much of the academic left is composed of people dressing up banalities in a lot of pretentious rhetoric.”
    Donald, if you never write another word here, that statement will serve as the summation.
    I would tergiversate, but instead will agree completely, and besides I might hurt myself.
    The pretentious language of the social sciences has always made my skin crawl. It is a source of a great dispiriting and befuddlement.
    As Professor and Foremost Authority Irwin Corey asks: “I’m sorry, what was the question?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJIvBeVKoQA
    Let him explain:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFshZsux1-s
    When in doubt, the Three Stooges were marvels of linguistic distraction when they knew nothing about the task at hand, which was all
    the time:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKefWjRd58
    And why CAN’T life be like this?:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTSmbMm7MDg
    Never was so much political drivel produced as when the periodical Dissent merged with Commentary and they published Dysentery.
    As a wag once asked Euclid: “Why was the hypotenuse so bad in bed?” To which the great one answered, “Because he could never find the right angle.”
    George Bernard Shaw said every profession is a conspiracy against the laity, and opaque, high-sounding, but impenetrable jargon is the moat the professions build around whatever their money maker happens to be.
    Technical jargon is like a patent.
    Which is why I never hire a plumber who calls himself in large lettering on the side of his van, “Doctor Plunger”, or a roofer named “Professor Shingle”.
    And there is nothing more off-putting then when an interviewer asks a porn star: “How long have you been working in the industry?”, like maybe she carries a lunch pail to work and is pursuing an advanced degree in technique of some kind.
    Ask any lawyer about this stuff, but make sure you bring a Latin dictionary along with.
    Our Founders were lawyers and the case in point is “e plulibus unum”, and every few months since 1776 we have to have a parsing discussion about whether it means out of many, one, .. or … all for one and one for all, or whatever, and meanwhile, during that distraction, Donald Trump waltzes off in broad daylight with the silver cutlery in the White House.
    Over at the American Conservative, I’ve never heard so many know-it-alls use terms like “petty bourgeoisie”, and the “vanguard of the proletariat” and accuse Black Lives Matter and Antifa of being Marxists, when I know not one of the conservative accusers nor the protesting accused have ever cracked open Das Kapital for a look-see, but all of them can mouth the cliches with exactly the same authority as I can mouth the Flintstones’ theme jingle.
    Every statement regarding the Constitution by one of these guys with a little copy of the document in his shirt pocket starts out with these words: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say …”
    Somehow, when it gets around to saying what it does say, everyone stops and furrows their brow and takes a collection to hire at a hefty fee a constitutional lawyer who then goes into a lengthy and expensive process of throat clearing in a marble building with august pillars holding up the veranda, and even then the Judge, wearing no pants, issues a stay and we have to come back next year to hear something even more perplexing.
    Even God, who is most likely Chico Marx, has his own exclusive, mysterious jargon in the Bible and the Koran and the vast Hindu and Buddhists texts that demands hiring a raft of consultants to get to the bottom of, and then when we finally think have reached bottom, a fragment of stone is found in some ancient rubble telling it’s all too gnostic for us to comprehend.
    I knew the world was headed down the chute when bartenders started referring to themselves as mixologists and had a certificate on the wall behind the bar where the photo of the young Angie Dickinson used to hang to prove it.
    There is always the Simpsons or Shakespeare if you want it straight.

  407. if I was going to give the (D)’s a piece of advice it would be to do the following:
    point out to people how much the average household got from Trump’s tax cut. compare that to how much the average household with income over, say, $200K got. or the average S-corp owner. or, you know, C-level executive.
    ask people how much cash they could lay their hands on, on short notice. cash, not charge card.
    ask people how confident they are that they will have a job in one year, or five years. ask them how many months they could get through with whatever they could scratch up.
    ask people how much of that beautiful DJIA they own.
    you are correct about one thing, rank and file America doesn’t give a shit about social justice stuff.
    it’s the economy, stupid. it’s always the economy, stupid.

  408. “petty bourgeoisie”
    FFS, it’s “petit bourgeoisie”.
    Let’s get our snotty elitist lingo correct, damn it!!

  410. Which is why I never hire a plumber who calls himself in large lettering on the side of his van, “Doctor Plunger”, or a roofer named “Professor Shingle”.
    True story: When I was a kid, my grandmother, having been widowed for years, dated a mafioso who owned a roofing company, Ed’s Roofing. (All widowed grandmothers do that where I come from.)
    Their slogan was, “Don’t be a goof! Let Ed fix your roof!”
    (He gave me a promotional t-shirt, which I would have worn every damned day if it weren’t for my “Gong Show Reject” t-shirt with the hand pointing to the person standing next to me or the “Polen Farms” t-shirt I got from my dad’s pig-farmer friend, with a picture of a huge hog on it.)

  411. the complaint if it were really true, it should be in easier language is not something I agree with.
    for those who prefer the plain and simple facts of science to the turgid verbiage of academia, I invite you to explain string theory.
    the ABC’s are always easy. if you don’t want to dig deeper, fine. some people do.

  412. I invite you to explain string theory.
    Hell, just try to explain general relativity theory or quantum mechanics.

  414. Chiming in late. I have no problem with people talking about American culture, our subcultures, and how they do or don’t get discriminated for and against.
    But when someone starts talking about “whiteness” what I hear is someone applying a pejorative label to the parts of American culture that he or she personally dislikes. Whether it is characteristic primarily of members of one race, or is common across society generally, doesn’t seem to be a factor. Any non-whites who subscribe to that characteristic simple get put down for selling out their race.

  415. Technical jargon** mostly (admittedly not always) is a matter of having a label which helps specify a difference which matters when working in the field. Jargon in some other fields seems to serve, primarily, pretentiousness.
    ** Doesn’t matter whether we’re talking nuclear physics or automotive mechanics. It’s a matter of needing to specify a part, a tool, or a procedure, without which what you’re dealing with won’t work.

  416. I’d guess that older scientific (and other) terms don’t bother people much because they’re used to them. But you can imagine something that’s now as pedestrian as “chromosome” sounding ridiculous to people when it was coined.
    Maybe someday “intersectionality” won’t bother bother people – not even McKinney’s grandkids when their grown.

  418. Jargon in some other fields seems to serve, primarily, pretentiousness.
    I think jargon, in all fields, is mostly shorthand. It’s way to boil a complex set of ideas, with an attendant history and backstory, into a phrase, so that every time you talk about it you don’t have to unpack the whole mess and rehearse the backstory (again).
    And yes, in all fields, it can be a way to distinguish the folks who are in the know, from the folks who are not.
    And TBH, I find a lot of pretentiousness in technical jargon, also. Like, what the hell is a software ontologist?
    All of this makes me think about the raging debates in the early centuries of Christianity.
    homoiousios, or homoousios? filioque, or not?
    As if a word was going to capture a mystery like the nature of god.
    What is the actual thing that people are talking about, is my question. If the specific language that people are talking about gets in the way, maybe just ignore it.
    Most of the language that people are objecting to here actually refer to pretty basic things. Who has power, who doesn’t. How do people acquire and hold on to power, do they and how do they prevent others from having it. What does it mean to be free.
    Maybe just focus on that and not sweat the annoying parts.

  419. I’m nearly sure that “petty (sic) bourgeoisie was a direct quote from a piece at TAC just the other day, but I can’t find it today.
    I read everything.
    Nietzsche is tough, but more along the lines that he uses revelatory poetic language than he does a philosophical jargon.
    I tried reading Derrida once.
    I went out and bought a couple of Graphic Guides (published by Introducing Books.com) last year, one on Postmodernism and one on Derrida.
    Haven’t gotten to them yet.
    I’ve always thought Walker Percy’s career trek was instructive for those attempting to express difficult concepts, from early on publishing fairly difficult papers on the nature of language and his existential complaints in obscure philosophical journals to later expanding on those views in really good, highly literate novels (still difficult but “getting at” something with metaphor), and then ending up publishing his “Lost In the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book” to introduce a wider readership to his musings.
    If he had lived, we probably would have seen a Walker Percy reality show format illustrating extreme cases of existential alienation and distraction as he did his best to introduce the swine to his pearls by moving them closer to the front of their noses that they cant see either.
    By the way, I’ve always thought lj has a knack for tweezing out legible meaning from difficult matters.
    One of George Carlin’s least favorites:
    “Say it in your own words.”
    He’d ask, and I paraphrase, “So, everyone has their very OWN words, now? No words in common?”
    Well, pretty much.
    wj, I think as a general statement that it is true that the “softer” social sciences borrowed the idea of an exclusive technical jargon from the harder sciences that deal with concrete stuff. It’s just that the naming of the moving parts is by definition mushier and more difficult to get a grasp on in the social sciences.
    A doctor, a sawbones, can say let’s replace the child’s left kidney so the whole child can go forward fully operational on a schematic physical basis is easier to relate than say, in education, or child psychology, instructing us to address the needs of the “whole child”.
    The jargon is by its nature mushy and its specific relation to the referent hard to get at.
    I just finished a collection of short stories by Guy Davenport, and about to start a collection of essays by the same, and the reader is challenged to know way more minutiae in myriad fields than he or she could possibly have at hand, but one of the pleasures of deep reading to going back and seeking out the knowledge, if you have the patience before going forward with the reading at hand, and then re-reading.
    Davenport also makes up words, or at least one would need a Borgesian dictionary of “archaica” to follow up what he could possibly mean sometimes.

  420. russell, I could not care less abou6 Bennet. I do care about the guy in Arizona who, in an impassioned political speech said the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat, immediately pointed out it wasnt literally, and was fired from his job the next day. That’s cancel culture. Michael Richard had a more egregious incident, but cancelled.
    These things happen all the time, I dont keep a list, but it exists, it is harmful and happens because millions of people can anonymously pile on and dont have to consider the consequence for another human being.
    It isnt trivial, it is why I remain relatively anonymous, not kidding myself, as many of the things I have said here could effect my employability in MA. Needless to say I dont discuss politics at work or much of anyplace besides here.
    In MA, I’m cancelled. In Florida I’m pretty cancelled too.

  421. Cops are good at using unnecessary jargon. “We apprehended the adult male suspect fleeing at a high rate of speed from the vicinity of the double homicide” means “We caught the guy speeding from where the two murders happened.”

  422. I’m nearly sure that “petty (sic) bourgeoisie was a direct quote
    No worries, that was just me amusing myself by being a dick. 🙂
    Guy Davenport
    Long ago I stumbled across his translations of Diogenes and Heraclitus. The former being hilariously caustic, and the latter being… obscure – it certainly seems like he’s onto something, but what is it, exactly? Nonetheless, the meaning somehow seeps through, by some kind of osmosis.
    “In a rich man’s house, there is nowhere to spit but in his face” – Diogenes
    “Time is a game played beautifully by children” – Heraclitus
    Davenport was a man of parts, with a curious and perspicacious mind. Now I have to go find more of his work.

  423. JDT, I know the social sciences are dealing with a “mushier” field. (I’ve got a couple of degrees in Anthropology to go with my engineering degrees.) But it doesn’t have to use the amount of jargon that sociologists, especially ideologically motivation sociologists, seem to employ currently.
    I think the easiest test for such things is, “Could I describe the same events with equal precision without all the gobbledygook?” If so, the jargon isn’t really useful.

  424. I do care about the guy in Arizona who, in an impassioned political speech said the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat
    I believe you refer to Couy Griffin, founder of Cowboys for Trump and a county commissioner in NM, not AZ.
    As far as I can tell, not fired. There were calls for him to resign.
    Gee, why, in the current climate, would there be calls for a person holding office, and who made the statement “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat” in a public speech, to resign?
    I’m mostly anonymous here, too, for the same reason you are. Because, as McK noted way upthread, if you publicly identify yourself with a particular point of view, that can create problems for your employer and / or whoever hires you or buys stuff from you.
    That is just the way life is. It’s not “cancel culture”, it’s the reality of separating our personal lives from our professional ones.
    And it’s weird for you, or anyone, to complain about being “canceled” in the context of a blog post. Right? Because here you are, talking.
    Being “anonymous” here to prevent your political views from affecting your business is no different than not wearing a MAGA hat to a business meeting. It’s not something imposed on you, it’s your choice, because making some big political point is likely less important to you than paying the rent.
    Nobody’s making you do it, it’s your choice.

  425. I do care about the guy in Arizona who, in an impassioned political speech said the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat, immediately pointed out it wasnt literally…
    Unfortunately, it has become SOP to do that independent of whether it was indeed meant metaphorically or just done to avoid legal liability.
    The alternative is of course ‘it was/is just a joke’
    I guess Henry II should just have added that after ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest’.
    No idea about the context of the Arizonian example, so I will abstain from judgement whether to agree or disagree with the consequences met.

  426. “We apprehended the adult male suspect fleeing at a high rate of speed from the vicinity of the double homicide” means “We caught the guy speeding from where the two murders happened.”
    Except that while “homocide” simply means someone is dead, “murder” is a specific legal crime. Distinct from, for example, “justifiable homocide” or “accidental death.” It makes clear that “we’re still working on figuring out exactly what happened.”

  427. Marty: … millions of people can anonymously pile on and dont have to consider the consequence for another human being.
    Also, one human being can say things that offend millions of anonymous people.
    You might say “A million people merely feeling offended is less unjust than one human being losing a career” and you might be right. But I would ask you this: if one guy steals $1 from each of one million people, should he be punished for grand, grand larceny? Or not?
    –TP

  428. There are people who abuse social media to harass other people, sometimes to the point of causing them to lose their jobs, have to move, or otherwise have their lives turn into some version or other of hell.
    Is that bad? Yes it is.
    Should people do that? No they shouldn’t.
    Is this behavior particular to the left, or right, or middle, or any other point on the compass? No it is not.
    It’s people being jerks. Sometimes people are jerks. Life would be better if people weren’t jerks.
    Is there much more to say about it than that? Not as far as I can tell.
    Next topic, please.

  429. Many postmodernist academics are bad writers. Many deal in banalities. Many of those who deal in banalities are propped up in that by others who are under the sway of the pose.
    Same happens in the sciences. Same happens in the social sciences. Lord help us all does it happen in business schools.
    It’s a product of careerism and a publish or perish model of tenure. Don’t blame me, I’m an adjunct. I decided early on to focus on my teaching of undergrads rather than on writing for a small group of academics.
    But that does not in any way mean that postmodernism is all smoke and mirrors and empty suits. Foucault and Derrida are hard, in large part, because they are complex and allusive writers in French, drawing on references that a small group of people know very well, but that many people know only through secondhand summary. And most people read them in translation. Ever tried to translate an allusion to Levinas wrapped in a Heideggerian framing that includes puns that only make sense in French? Good luck with that. And if you attempt to unpack all that linguistic play for a reader, you end up with a Pale Fire sort of document that is more footnote than text.
    On this level, the comparison to religion makes sense, or at least to revealed religions focused around a central text. Those cultures, too, develop styles of communication that are densely allusive and require high levels of cultural literacy in order to understand the subtext and decipher the sender’s information.
    But on another level, the comparison to religion makes less sense for the postmodernists than it does for Chomsky. Postmodernism has its roots in Nietzsche’s anarchism and is more at home with chaos theory than it is with Platonic ideals of justice being baked into the pie.
    I find Chomsky as tiring as I do Žižek and most other Lacanians, but I always find it ironic when Noam accuses anyone else of moralizing.
    TLDR: postmodernism is hard to read because its core is all about the metaphysical scaffolding and language upon which we organize and deploy our understanding of things like math and science. Some postmodernists may get the science wrong or push their arguments too far (Latour, Lyotard, Baudrillard) and others just do a shit job of reading and understanding the difficult texts at the core of the postmodern critique. But the core of the critique is based on a solid and consistent paradigm of how language and metaphysics permeate science and rationality.

  431. My own experience in chemistry is that at least for papers (less so for books) bad writing is actively encouraged. Some journals explicitly ban any use of personal first person pronouns and/or require exclusive use of the passive voice however awkward it makes the result. No ‘we found that…’ will be tolerated, only ‘it was found that…’. And that’s just one example.

  432. Purely on the subject of jargon (and of course its distancing effect), and only because when I posted in the past the first of Henry Reed’s Lessons of the War, the wonderful Naming of Parts, people liked it, this is the second poem, not as good but still not bad, also written in 1943, called Judging Distances. I particularly like “whatever you do don’t call the bleeders sheep”, which you can immediately hear in a cockney army instructor’s voice.

    II. JUDGING DISTANCES
    Not only how far away, but the way that you say it
    Is very important. Perhaps you may never get
    The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know
    How to report on a landscape: the central sector,
    The right of the arc and that, which we had last Tuesday,
    And at least you know
    That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army
    Happens to be concerned—the reason being,
    Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know
    There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,
    And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly
    That things only seem to be things.
    A barn is not called a barn, to put it more plainly,
    Or a field in the distance, where sheep may be safely grazing.
    You must never be over-sure. You must say, when reporting:
    At five o’clock in the central sector is a dozen
    Of what appear to be animals; whatever you do,
    Don’t call the bleeders sheep.
    I am sure that’s quite clear; and suppose, for the sake of example,
    The one at the end, asleep, endeavors to tell us
    What he sees over there to the west, and how far away,
    After first having come to attention. There to the west,
    On the fields of summer the sun and the shadows bestow
    Vestments of purple and gold.
    The still white dwellings are like a mirage in the heat,
    And under the swaying elms a man and a woman
    Lie gently together. Which is, perhaps, only to say
    That there is a row of houses to the left of the arc,
    And that under some poplars a pair of what appear to be humans
    Appear to be loving.
    Well that, for an answer, is what we rightly call
    Moderately satisfactory only, the reason being,
    Is that two things have been omitted, and those are very important.
    The human beings, now: in what direction are they,
    And how far away, would you say? And do not forget
    There may be dead ground in between.
    There may be dead ground in between; and I may not have got
    The knack of judging a distance; I will only venture
    A guess that perhaps between me and the apparent lovers,
    (Who, incidentally, appear by now to have finished,)
    At seven o’clock from the houses, is roughly a distance
    Of about one year and a half.

  433. Hartmut: agreed.
    Passive voice is a big feature of science writing. Scientific authors fall back on it because it allows them to sound objective and authoritative and completely erase the scientists at the heart of the process. As a writing teacher, I have to strike the balance between trying to break my students of that passive voice habit if they ever hope to make clear arguments about cause and effect, and letting them know that they will need to employ it if they ever hope to publish in a scientific journal.

  436. Cancel culture from early May in Ohio. Dr. Amy Acton resigned from her post as Ohio’s director of public health in June.

    Protesters have been a near-ubiquitous presence at Ohio’s Statehouse for the past couple of weeks. Some are armed with long rifles and refuse to stay 6 feet apart from each other and those passing by, as recommended by health experts. The groups have been small but spirited and peppered with signs professing support for President Donald Trump, the anti-vaccination movement and a conspiratorial, prejudiced distrust of Jewish people.
    Acton is Jewish.

    Also this:

    Protesters returned to the Bexley neighborhood of Dr. Amy Acton for a third time, driving up and down the street with upside down American flags as well as protesting on foot in front of her house at about 3 p.m. May 8.
    Katie Forbes, a freelance photographer, told the CJN Acton’s neighbors decorated Acton’s lawn with balloons the day before to show their appreciation for her work to protect the lives of Ohioans, and the display was descecrated by that afternoon. The balloon display originally read, “We love you.”
    Forbes said there were about 20 protesters and about a dozen troopers from the Ohio State Highway Patrol as well as officers from the Bexley and Columbus police departments.
    One car went through the neighborhood with white lettering that said, “Quit Acton Viruses Need a Host.”
    Protests previously took place at Acton’s home on May 2 and May 4. At the May 2 protest, two men openly carried guns.

    [My bold.]
    Amy Acton and her husband have six children. I don’t know how many of them are still at home.
    “The prog left’s cancel culture” — another McKinney phantasm, a perfectly crafted hoop. Or is it hook? So many metaphors, so little time.
    Also, I love that reporting: “small but spirited.” Guns and anti-semitic messages are very spirited indeed.

  438. A fascinating article on keeping business going during the pandemic.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/24/coronavirus-mask-mandate-ohio/
    Money quote:

    Protesters claimed the masking requirement trampled on their individual freedoms. The political nature of the anti-mask movement baffled Sullivan. “I am a free-market, small-government conservative,” he said. “This isn’t about some in-your-face constitutional issue. It’s about doing the right health protocols to mitigate the spread and to keep Ohio’s economy going.”

  442. More on how Sarah Death Panel was one of our most far-seeing, prescient subhuman futurist republicans.
    Years ahead of her time, except for all the other times.
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/07/24/now-you-have-your-fucking-death-panels/
    When she blurted out “Abbott!” during her eye-rolling, out of body on camera seances in which she communicated with the subhuman republican future of America, she didn’t mean Bu Abbott.
    Murderers .. empaneled.
    One problem with settling for a ham sandwich is they don’t tend to organize death squads to kick off truth and no reconciliation.
    None of these filth will ever be held personally responsible.

  444. The latest racist insane loudmouth, recently successful juking stocks, gets an audience with God:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/barstools-dave-portnoy-used-his-interview-trump-complain-about-dr-anthony-fauci
    Your are full of shit, America.
    The rest of the world needs to join arms and cordon off our borders, shoot down any planes, sink any ships bearing diseased insane Americans across our borders.
    If you spot Cuban agent Mario Rubio rowing to Cuba, let him pass.
    F8ck him.

  446. The ‘Death Panels’ in Texas were signed into law by Gov. Dubya, lo these many years ago, in order to kick out maybe-end-of-life patients that didn’t have the ready benjamins to stay in the ICU. (Go ahead, look it up: it’s the Futile Care law).
    I guess they’d just roll ’em out the doors, and dump ’em out of the wheelchair, with a cheery ‘now y’all take care, hear?’

  447. From the barstools link:

    The company that bought us, Penn National, are a gambling company, so sports gambling’s a big part of what we do. I switched to the stock market, actually, day trading. So Fauci’s on my ax list, because every time he talks and says the companies — the country should stay inside, my stocks tank. So I don’t like that aspect of it.

    Penn National paid $450M for Barstool Sports.
    Not enough for Portnoy. And if it takes people dying for him to make more with his day trading hobby, then fuck it, people can die.
    I feel a personal obligation to try to extend the benefit of the doubt and not assume the worst of people. But lately I find myself struggling with the fact that some people just really do seem to be selfish entitled shits.
    Maybe he’s nice to his mom.

  448. By the way, “you’re”, not “your are”, a little upthread.
    With grammar like that, you’d think I’d be full in on Trump.

  450. Shorter Trump:
    As in most most of American history, Republican or democratic, the latter until recently, the niggers are coming.
    And your wives and daughters and gay sons might like it:
    https://digbysblog.net/2020/07/making-the-suburbs-great-again/
    The rankest sort of demagogic racism.
    F*ck Republicans. But not that way.
    Your might catch something.
    Think about it though, republicans will come around to abortion, like they always *cking have for their white suburban daughters when the kid is interracial.

  451. Shapiro, it should come as no surprise, misrepresents the social science about empathy, but he’s always been a shit reader and thinker for the very reasons pointed out in those studies.
    All he’s really doing in that piece is conflating empathy with partisanship. They are not equivalent.
    Try America in One Room on for size:
    https://helena.org/projects/america-in-one-room
    Empathy is not the problem. Propagandists like Shapiro are.

  454. TNR:

    Presidents might be right or wrong, but they are at least supposed to try. But that is not where we are, because that is not the kind of president we have.

    Nuff said.
    (R) support for Trump has declined, but is still right around 80%.
    We’ve had Nixon, then Reagan, then Poppy Bush who was basically “kinder gentler” Reagan, then W, then Trump.
    I can’t even bring myself to think about what comes next.
    I know it’s freaking horrifying that some random dude in NM was called on to resign after saying the only good (D) is a dead (D) (except not really, that was just rhetorical), but WTF is it gonna take for conservative people to give up the (R) party as a bad job?
    You aren’t the party of Lincoln anymore. Lincoln’s dead, and if he was alive, you’d probably kill him.
    The (R) part is not the party of fiscal responsibility. It’s not the party of equality under law. It’s not the party of anything good or constructive or useful in any American tradition I recognize.
    Your guys big plan to win in 2020 is to keep people who won’t for them from voting.
    Time to abandon ship, y’all. Or not, and go down with it.
    Your candidate for POTUS is Donald J Trump, criminal fraudster and general flaming asshole. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
    Whatever happens this year, where the hell do you think you go from here? Tom Cotton?
    Cut it loose. Consider this an invitation.

  455. then Trump.
    I can’t even bring myself to think about what comes next.
    Seems like a great time to embrace a belief in reversion to the mean. Which said mean might irritate you enormously. But compared to Trump, a massive improvement. (And I, too, can’t bear the idea of comtinuing the trend.)

  456. Seems like a great time to embrace a belief in reversion to the mean.
    I’ll embrace it when I see it.
    Which said mean might irritate you enormously.
    I’m not sure what you think I’m about.
    If you’re offering Eisenhower, I’m fine with that. But what’s the mean between Nixon and Trump? Or Reagan and Trump, for that matter?
    W Bush?
    Been there, done that. No thanks.
    I don’t mean to be unkind, but you all need to bring your game up.

  457. Didn’t Obama attempt a reversion to the mean?
    Meanwhile, more Applebaum:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/trump-putting-show-portland/614521/
    But even if the courts eventually force the troops in jungle camouflage off the streets, the president who sent them there—and who is now threatening to send similar troops to other cities—might not care. That’s because the purpose of these troops is not to bring peace to Portland. The purpose is to transmit a message. Americans should find this tactic familiar, because we’ve seen it before. When the Trump administration cruelly separated children from their families at the southern border, that was, among other things, a performance designed to show the public just how much the president dislikes immigrants from Mexico and Honduras. The attack on demonstrators in Portland is like that: a performance designed to show just how much Trump dislikes “liberal” Americans, “urban” Americans, “Democrat” Americans. To put it differently (and to echo my colleague Adam Serwer): The chaos in Portland is not an accident. The chaos is the point.
    I just finished reading the chapter about the Kosovo War in Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo and it is a scathing indictment of how thoroughly the US military has learned to manage and manipulate the media. This is just the next natural step.

  459. “reversion to the mean” doesn’t apply when you have a clear trend in the time sequence.
    Russell’s data points show an exponential increase in “horrible”: each one beyond what one expects from a simple linear extrapolation.
    R0>>1. Inject bleach and Lysol.

  460. “You aren’t the party of Lincoln anymore. Lincoln’s dead, and if he was alive, you’d probably kill him.”
    John Wilkes Booth fathered the modern, anti-modernist Republican Party and he sired it under many names, Newt Gingrich being one among legions who reverted to meanness and cruelty to further the movement’s objectives, including Robert Welch, Richard Vigurie, Paul Weyrich, the grifting Fallwell clan, Tim Lehaye, Ralph Reed, the De Vos family, and plenty of other opportunistic, self-enriching fake Christians, Grover Norquist, Pat Buchanan, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Cheney, Jude Wanniski, Arthur Laffer, every successive leader of the NRA …. add hundreds of names to that list.
    And then decades later statues of the Confederate heroes and veterans of that awful war, and the destruction of Lincoln’s rough-hewn plan for Reconstruction, were erected to peer down from their perches at us to make sure the oppressed were reminded daily of who REALLY won that war and was still running the show.*
    Think of all of the “moderate”, “reasonable” “open to compromise” republican politicians who have entered the expensive box seats in the theaters of their Party’s primaries over the past number of years and emerged metaphorically feet first like Lincoln, outed and canceled as RINOs, and with bullet holes in their stovepipe hats, to be replaced by whackjob, crypto-Christian, John Birch goons who view the past 100 or more years of political history as so much anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist Reconstruction, on every level, to be eliminated, just as Andrew Johnson did the bidding of the traitorous Confederacy and vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau.
    Each generation of conservative republican upstarts is more Orc-ish than the last, so much so that the likes of Barry Goldwater (far right-wing conservative hero who took a look around at the filth that was penetrating his party and was promptly RINOed in retirement) Ronald Reagan and George W. seem kindly and comforting, almost comically and ham-handedly foolish now, even though their outward cheerfulness belied the inner ruthless reptile slithering toward the death of rational government.
    Even Paul Ryan, the blue-eyed wonder with the deceptive, flirtatious Dagny Taggart grin, seems relatively harmless now, but all of them, perhaps unwittingly, laid the cornerstones upon which the current filth built their trumpean monument to “mean”ness and cruelty.
    “reversion to the mean”
    I take Donald Trump, and whatever comes after from the deep bench, deep state of meanness the Republican Party has put in place, as merely the natural fulfilled apotheosis of the American conservative movement’s aspirations.
    What Trump gifted to them was the will NOT to give a sh*t about norms, compromise, and and even fake civility. McConnell and the rest of them looked at that and thought, finally a motherf*cker who will dispense with the theater of civil kindness we’ve been putting on these last decades because “political correctness” and such-all bullsh*t, and roll over any civil opposition and force our program on this country and destroy not just the Left, but all opposition, even from what once was the moderate right.
    Trump is their money maker. It took a sadist and a psychopath to get those tax cuts and make the country free for Covid-19 and now deregulated Salmonella and much else, and they f8cking know it.
    There will be no going back, however. While I find the never-Trumpers useful to the restoration and return of the ham sandwich middle, if you look at these guys’ history of “meanness” as political operatives for the Republican Party, thank you for lending your help in the advancement of ham sandwich politics, but now shut your mouths and sit down.
    We know the type of “mean” the Republican Party will always revert to, because it worked.
    *I’m not fully cancel culture on statues. Many of them should be decommissioned after legislative deliberation and Statues of Robert E. Lee, the General, for example can be placed in museums of “great” military leaders on the battlefield, along with, I don’t know, Rommel, Yamamoto, Grant, MacArthur, Genghis Khan, Sammy Kahn, James Caan, and Madeline Kahn.
    I get the anger, long in coming, because many of these statues should not have been erected in the first place and should have been removed by legislative deliberation long ago, but they weren’t, so here we are. What did we expect? Another hundred years of patience and forbearance?
    As to General Andrew Jackson, (and his successor, Martin Van Buren), his statue, except symbolically, has done no harm. Better that the Cherokee Nation had put battle hatchets and staves (they mostly used bows and arrows for hunting) into the back of the live item way back in the day so he could be rightly punished when it counted. I know Jackson was a product of his time and place and knew not what he was doing, since all the cool kids were doing it too, perhaps, but so were the Cherokee and THEY KNEW what Jackson was doing was immoral, murderous, racist, and ruthless, so they must have had higher moral IQs than the white men who did them in.
    But THEY were the ones who had to move and die doing so.

  461. What Trump gifted to them was the will NOT to give a sh*t about norms, compromise, and and even fake civility. McConnell and the rest of them looked at that and thought, finally a motherf*cker who will dispense with the theater of civil kindness we’ve been putting on these last decades because “political correctness” and such-all bullsh*t, and roll over any civil opposition and force our program on this country and destroy not just the Left, but all opposition, even from what once was the moderate right.
    I have to say I think this is pretty much exactly right. And when liberated from “the theater of civil kindness” they (the GOP) experienced a huge burst of relieved, exultant exuberance, and really ran with it. And half the country, or at least the ones who wear the MAGA hats and the T-shirts reading “Fuck your feelings”, got caught in the nimbus of the exuberance too. And as russell keeps saying, those people aren’t going anywhere.

  462. those people aren’t going anywhere.
    and neither am I.
    the last 4 years have been an unending dumpster fire. the nation is a freaking shambles, and internationally is now something of a laughing stock.
    you got your tax cuts, deregulation, and judges. and to get them, you’ve freaking gutted the nation.
    nobody here seems to want to own up to supporting Trump, so I guess our conservative readership is somewhere in that tiny minority of (R)’s or (R)-leaning folks who aren’t MAGAs. so I guess I’m not talking to you when I say this.
    but I will never, ever, ever forget what a freaking calamity conservatives and the (R) party have foisted on this nation.
    it’s gonna take years and years and years to dig our way out of this mess. I’ll probably be dead before it’s done, if it’s ever done.
    you guys did this.

  463. Which mess russell? Other than replacing the idiot in charge himself what mess do you think will take years to clean up? Immigration? Naw pretty much right where Obama left except for a few executive orders. Foreign relations? Any actual downside is repairable in the first 90 days of a new Presidency, that will undo some good things but it wont take “years”. Economically, well recovering from the virus will take a few years,but that was true no matter what.
    Not that I think no damage is done, but unless you’re counting the judges as something that needs to be repaired, there is not much long term damage here. The House stymied his worst instincts, the courts have blocked some others and by and large what’s been damaged is the Anerican ego.

  464. As bad as W was (and I, for one, didn’t vote for him) he was a saint compared to Trump.
    I don’t think we do anyone any good by ignoring just how far beyond and previous Republican president (or presidential candidate) Trump actually is. Certainly his fanboys have been around for a long time. But they were no more the whole story of the GOP than the Dixiecrats were of the Democrats back in the day. For all the the Dixiecrats were what gave the Democrats cintrol of Congress for so long.
    I’m guesing (hoping?) that there’s maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of Republicans who are actually true believers in his racist xenophobia. Unfortunately, there are a huge number who treat politics like sports: they’re out there cheering for “their guy,” without reference to anything about him or what he does. That’s pretty appalling to everyone (like all of us) who pays attention to politics and thinks it matters what politicians do. Even when there isn’t a major crisis in progress. But we’re definitely a minority — in both parties.
    So yeah, as I said, you’d be seriously unhappy with what another Bush I or Reagan did. But I submit you’d take him in a heartbeat if the alternative was another Trump. Sure, you’d prefer that the GOP return to being the party of Eisenhower. So would I. But for the moment, I’ll settle for a massive reject of Trump and all his works.
    P.S. My pipedream for November is Trump losing Utah and Wyoming. Just because of what that would mean for the future direction of my party. And save me having to work to create a new center-right party from scratch. Which is the alternative.

  465. Which mess russell? Other than replacing the idiot in charge himself what mess do you think will take years to clean up?
    I’d say the biggest mess is staffing. Trump (and his appointees) have driven an enormous number of talented and experienced people out of government service. Rebuilding that expertise won’t be quick or easy. Policies can be turned around relatively quickly. People, not so much.

  466. Which mess russell?
    Every community needs a Pangloss.
    you’d be seriously unhappy with what another Bush I or Reagan did.
    Correct.
    But I submit you’d take him in a heartbeat if the alternative was another Trump.
    Also correct.
    FWIW, IMO Reagan was actually a very good POTUS – clear direction, pretty effective executive. The whole happy grandpa thing was kind of an act, IMO he was actually pretty sharp about the things that were important to him, at least until the mental deterioration set in. And I will always be happy to give him props for the nuclear weapons scale-down, that was well done.
    I just basically profoundly disagree with his understanding of what the country is about. If I never have to hand out crappy stale old government cheese to crazy homeless people who were “de-institutionalized” and turned out on the street again, I’ll be grateful.
    W, different story. Everything I didn’t like about Reagan, plus not really good at the job. Plus, you know, Cheney and the whole torture regime and Strangelovian world domination fetish.
    Trump is just a nasty piece of work, all around. And 80% of (R)’s think he’s great. Maybe you’re right, and 1/2 to 2/3 of them are just pretending, but 80% say they think he’s great. And if that’s just people applauding “their guy”, I’m not sure that’s any better.

  468. Foreign relations? Any actual downside is repairable in the first 90 days of a new Presidency, that will undo some good things but it wont take “years”.
    Marty, I am breaking my self-denying ordinance to tell you that on this alone (about which I can speak with more authority than on the domestic US aftermath) you are very much mistaken. Unfortunately. America’s 20th century allies have now had to truly get used to the idea (as a fact, not just a thought experiment) that America is no longer a reliable ally nor a trustworthy signatory to international treaties. A commonly understood attitude towards totalitarian dictatorships has crumbled, with what seems like the enthusiastic approval of a significant percentage of the American public, and to make things worse, as I have said before I am reliably informed by those seriously in the know that the damage to the specialist knowledge base in your diplomatic corps will take two or three generations to repair, if it can even be done. Your country has been terribly damaged, and as I say, that is even without considering the damage domestically.

  469. Not to mention, I hardly dare ask what “good things” you think have been accomplished in foreign relations during the Trump presidency!

  470. America’s 20th century allies have now had to truly get used to the idea (as a fact, not just a thought experiment) that America is no longer a reliable ally nor a trustworthy signatory to international treaties.
    And I think it’s occurring to them that they might not actually need us.
    Which is a realization that may not be to our advantage.

  471. anonymous federal troops are plucking people off the streets of the US, without charges.
    nothing to see here, Dems are just as bad. Obama was a tyrant!

  472. I have a few conservative friends and relatives who I have tremendous respect for, who have shown courage and integrity during the Trump years. Most of them work for the federal government. They are sick at how badly gutted their departments are, how shabbily the people who had stewarded those departments through multiple administrations have been treated as they were thrown out or forced into retirement and replaced by incompetent partisan lobbyist hacks.
    Those institutions will be decades in rebuilding, and the rebuilding process will be complicated and exploited at every turn by foreign rivals who favor a weak US.
    The one potential silver lining in any of this is that this loss of ability to project US influence might force the US to be better and more collaborative allies, but I don’t think that course of action is a given. Just as likely we are brought low by hubris.
    I’ll stop channeling Sophocles now and yield back my time for Thullen’s antistrophe.

  473. Those institutions will be decades in rebuilding, and the rebuilding process will be complicated and exploited at every turn by foreign rivals who favor a weak US.
    Exactly right.

  474. Those institutions will be decades in rebuilding
    Like I said, the worst damage is people we’ve lost.

  475. The question becomes what do you want to rebuild? All post wwii a d cold war diplomacy has been based on the projection of US military power in varying degrees throughout the “free” world.
    This provided a reasonably stable economic environment for the west to flourish financially, both the US a d its “allies”.
    Allies is used loosely as dependence was really not a long term basis for alliance. Ultimately, as someone may have pointed out, the dependent western nations look up and find the imminent threat is something they can deal with, without the hegemon.
    So they reasonably dont a totally live up to their end of the alliance while increasingly criticize the more powerful ally. Outside the UK this has been SOP since pre Bush 2. More and more the US was not supported by the “allies” in key negotiations, wars, treaties.
    So, the foreign service staff becomes obsequious in trying to extend their sense of self importance, at least in terms of the time, by just executing the playbook that makes the US as indispensable as possible while giving away to the EU and China increasing economic power as the need for our military power wanes.
    I could go on but the question remains, what do we want to rebuild? What role to we want to secure internationally? Will that really take 2 or 3 generations or just using the talent that is still available toward a more thoughtful foreign policy posture.

  476. Will that really take 2 or 3 generations
    The sense of the room appears to be “yes”.
    The rest of your argument here seems to be, yes, we FUBARed it, but we didn’t want to be that important anyway.
    If so, you’ll probably get your wish.

  477. All post wwii a d cold war diplomacy has been based on the projection of US military power in varying degrees throughout the “free” world.
    The view that all of our diplomacy has been based on military power makes Trump’s approach comprehensible.
    Of course, in reality our post-WW II diplomacy has been based on trying (not always successfully) to persuade our allies to work with us to achieved agreed upon goals. Not coerced, agreed upon.
    Achieving that kind of agreement requires knowing something about those other countries, and having people who are able to talk to the leaders of those countries and show them how our goals align. People who have left in disgust (or been fired for excessive competency).

  478. So, the foreign service staff becomes obsequious in trying to extend their sense of self importance, at least in terms of the time, by just executing the playbook that makes the US as indispensable as possible while giving away to the EU and China increasing economic power as the need for our military power wanes.
    I have mentioned before how extraordinary and insulting your view of the US diplomatic corps is, and that was before the incomprehensible accusation of obsequiousness (which is actually, now I think of it, a better description of Trump when dealing with foreign tyrants in defiance of his diplomats’ advice). I told you in the past that they have taken an oath to uphold the constitution, put themselves in harm’s way for their country, and died for their country. As far as I can see, the members of the current administration have only done the first, are foresworn at that, have no expertise to benefit their country, and have never risked anything whatsoever in their country’s service.
    Will that really take 2 or 3 generations or just using the talent that is still available toward a more thoughtful foreign policy posture
    Yes, to the first part, and you are being optimistic (or perhaps just ignorant) in assuming there is much talent “still available”, when I believe the top several (3 or 4) layers of experienced, specialist knowledge are already gone, and more going all the time.
    As for while giving away to the EU and China increasing economic power, to anybody with eyes to see this was obviously destined to happen, about China anyway, and without anybody doing the “giving”. I remember my father saying it to Chinese nationalists round the dinner table in Hong Kong in the 60s.
    More and more the US was not supported by the “allies” in key negotiations, wars, treaties.
    You have claimed this before, and been proven wrong. I see you now except the UK, but that’s not adequate unless you give several (“more and more”) proper examples. In their absence, this is just a Trumpian talking point.
    The rest of your argument here seems to be, yes, we FUBARed it, but we didn’t want to be that important anyway.
    If so, you’ll probably get your wish.
    Yes.

  479. More and more the US was not supported by the “allies” in key negotiations, wars, treaties.
    Close. But the accurate version is:
    More and more, since Trump, the US is not supported by the “allies” in key negotiations. It’s not what happened in the past. But it’s what’s happening now.**
    But why would they support us? Not only do our positions routinely make no sense — in fact, are antithetical to the goals we (well Trump) simultaneously proclaim. But we not only don’t discuss what we’re considering doing, we don’t even give them a heads-up. Although, to be fair, Trump frequently doesn’t give his own people any warning about whatever stupidity he is going to go for next.
    ** Interestingly, the assertion fits right in with the Trumpian practice of denouncing others for things that they have not done . . . but he has.

  480. Well 30 years before Trump I watched our IP being stolen by the Chinese, in 1998 I had a high level meeting with an Indian businessmanwho who unabashedly claimed that outsourcing was Indias way to steal the work, then the IP, then marginalize the US.
    So if that tracks with anything Trump has said, he is right in that case. The EU has increasingly hedged its bets with both China and Russia over the las 30 years only to fall back on his when they prove unreliable partners.
    I have a very high regard for ipndipviduals working in the foreign service, they just havent had much to work with since Reagan.

  482. Problems at the State Department predate Trump by years. Of course, there’s no problem Trump can’t make worse.
    “Over the last several decades, special envoy positions have proliferated for the simple reason that the State Department bureaucracy can suffocate policy implementation. Under normal circumstances, the State Department is slow and unwieldy. The bureaucracy is byzantine and beset by petty turf fights that undercut cooperation to a common cause. Nor does every issue conform neatly to preexisting bureaucracy. The fight against ISIS, for example, initially involved Syria and Iraq (two different State Department desks), and coalition affairs mandated interactions with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, among other countries.”
    State Department bureaucratic bloat undercuts Syria and Islamic State strategies
    “Take, for instance, one of the central findings of the new report: under-qualified staff. This is a fixable problem, not a law of nature. The basic failure, as the State Department’s own reviews have highlighted, is that the diplomatic service doesn’t hire people with the skills it needs—and doesn’t teach, incentivize, or reward them for anything other than language proficiency. There is no system of midcareer education after the initiation course. The professional development model relies entirely on mentoring, yet half the diplomatic corps has less than ten years’ experience.”
    The State Department’s dysfunction predates Pompeo: Bad as he is, the Secretary of Swagger isn’t entirely to blame for the crisis of American diplomacy.

  484. Of course, there’s no problem Trump can’t make worse.
    That’s the point. Nobody says the State Department was perfect before, but there was real, deep expertise, which benefitted your country, and now most of it’s gone.

  485. The world trusts us ….pighsit:
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/republicans-blow-an-fbi-source-again/
    We’re pariahs.
    International scoundrels.
    We’re Goldfinger.
    “Well 30 years before Trump I watched our IP being stolen by the Chinese, in 1998 I had a high level meeting with an Indian businessman who who unabashedly claimed that outsourcing was Indias way to steal the work, then the IP, then marginalize the US.”
    You watched? Tell us more. Did you call the Ghost Busters?
    Did she hit on you, too?
    Larry Kudlow may have dated that Indian woman, merely for her capitalist Ayn Rand chops.
    She probably writes for the National Review now.
    Did she regale you with tales of the British Raj and how she learned everything she needed to know from them?
    In Charles’ second link above, this:
    https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-state-departments-dysfunction-predates-pompeo/
    “In the longer-term, rather than having diplomats attend the National War College, there should be a Diplomacy College, providing an education of strategy, economics, and history so demanding that the military would clamor for places in it.”
    I agree. Good luck.

  486. “The professional development model relies entirely on mentoring, yet half the diplomatic corps has less than ten years’ experience.”
    So, I guess we can put to rest to the raw bullsh8t peddled by conservatives all these decades about the entrenched, careerist federal bureaucracy attracted by the complacent difficult to fire policies and the gold-plated extras.
    You’d think those long lunches alone lied about by pigf8ckers all these years would have been reason enough for more than half the staff, to stick it out.
    There was turnover constantly between fed and private spheres the two times I worked for the Federal government, which I am proud of.

  487. CharlesWT’s linked article there signals bureaucracy as the problem, but the information that is linked to, there, points not to “deep state” style bureaucracy so much as to too much extra War on Terror apparatus tacked on to the top of a functioning foreign service.
    And while they talk about Tillerson’s anemic attempt at downsizing, what I have heard from the people I know who saw that in action, the downsizing was not in any way a careful pruning of the 9/11 overgrowth. It was more of an MBA downsizing mentality applied across the board without regard to how those things disrupted the day-to-day workings of severely understaffed offices abroad. And the people being cut were the ones with the most local knowledge and local trust.

  488. I don’t know what Marty remembers, but I’m old enough to remember that NATO invoked Article 5 right after 9/11 for the first and so far only time in its history. Maybe Marty still harbors a grudge against de Gaulle for withdrawing from NATO, although France has returned to full membership since then. Maybe he still resents that some US allies refused to support our misbegotten war in Vietnam or Dick and Dubya’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq. Maybe Marty thinks He, Trump has a point when he claims some NATO allies are “playing us for suckers” by not spending enough on their militaries, although that would only make sense if their spending more on theirs meant we could spend less on ours — and He, Trump (like most Republicans) loudly denounces any suggestion that the Pentagon budget is too big. I’m just guessing. Marty’s generalities invite that sort of thing.
    But enough about “defense”. I wonder about Marty’s Indian businessman and “outsourcing”. Does Marty think US companies are coerced into outsourcing by foreigners, rather than tempted into it by their own greed? Is it foreigners who “steal the work” of American job consumers, or is it American “job creators” who do it? Is it possible to outsource “work” without transferring know-how to the cheap workers?
    –TP

  489. Defense budget is double what we need to defend us, just my estimate but it is also an employment and training program, maybe we could shift that money to the non war age someone mentioned above.
    France votes against us regularly at the UN, has for decades.Since you brought up France.
    I ll leave the business discussion alone, John made fun of my source a d Tony just popooed thr whole notion.

  490. I’m old enough to remember that NATO invoked Article 5 right after 9/11 for the first and so far only time in its history.
    Countries participating in the war in Afghanistan. I count 60, but I could be off by one or two.
    Countries participating in the Iraq war. Looks like about three dozen.
    China is trying to bootstrap itself into the 21st C. They are absolutely trying to get access to our IP, either as a quid pro quo for American countries doing business there, or by outright stealing it if they can.
    That is, literally, how the US got our foothold in the Industrial Revolution. We stole it. There’s no surprise there. In the early cold war, we got a big infusion of expertise in rocketry from the Nazis we defeated. All of that stuff is basically a given.
    It’s definitely worth asking critical questions about what we want our place in the world to be. It’s definitely worth asking whether we really want to be spending many many multiples of any other country on the planet for our military.
    The thing is, there is a difference between choosing a direction, and having a direction imposed on you because you have limited your options through your own stupidity and ham-handedness.

  491. tl;dr
    You can try to put some lipstick on this pig, but Trump has significantly diminished the standing of the US in the world.
    As did W Bush.
    That’s not to our advantage.

  492. It’s definitely worth asking critical questions about what we want our place in the world to be. It’s definitely worth asking whether we really want to be spending many many multiples of any other country on the planet for our military.
    You can try to put some lipstick on this pig, but Trump has significantly diminished the standing of the US in the world.
    A lot of our standing in the world had to do with (not necessarily in this order):
    1) Reliable partner with allies.
    2) A strong military (too much money, but whatever).
    3) A reputation for reasonably non-corrupt government (not perfect, but in the scheme of things, quite good).
    4) A State Department with experts, and consistent policies.
    5) Goodwill among people who traveled and did business abroad.
    This made us a “hegemon” which a lot of people [here] complained about constantly. The good news about being a hegemon is that power can be wielded in a positive way if that’s the direction that the Executive wants to travel.
    So, whether we’re a “hegemon” after Trump, we don’t really know. We’re a nuclear power, so obviously can wield the scare tactics. But what else do we got?
    To some of us, great not to be a “hegemon” and not be able to say a meaningful word about any horror story that goes on elsewhere. Right?
    Weren’t a lot of folks here advocating that?
    Obviously, during the next [?] years, we’ll have piles of whatever to clean up right here, as we always have [but who says that focussing here and ignoring other places is going to solve the problems here?].
    Anyway, I hope we don’t catch fire and incinerate, and that we can find a humane path and move forward in some kind of peace and love. Trump definitely set us back. Maybe we should consider what is going to get us to that path in the future. I thought Obama had us on the right track, but many here thought not.

  494. It is good we are losing our status as a hegemon, but bad that we are losing it through hubris and incompetence rather than giving it up because we found a better way to achieve the greater good. I do not think that we will deal well with the loss of status. I do not think we have been doing well with it for a while.
    Obama was probably as good as could be expected under the circumstances, but that good was constrained by our long legacy of exploitative interventionist foreign policy. We were not the worst on that front by any means, but we were far from as good as we flattered ourselves to be, and Yemen was a black mark for his administration.

  495. It is good we are losing our status as a hegemon, but bad that we are losing it through hubris and incompetence rather than giving it up because we found a better way to achieve the greater good.
    In other words, too bad we don’t live in Heaven.
    It’s good to have the power to work for good. When we lose power, we cede it to others. Maybe they will do better. Think so? I don’t.

  496. Also, some people here don’t like me because they think that I have called for Democratic solidarity to the point that they don’t think (under my prescription) they have a “voice”.
    Trump has reduced anyone’s “voice” (internationally, especially) to f’ing zero.

  497. @Tony Is it possible to outsource “work” without transferring know-how to the cheap workers?
    In a word: No.
    I work for a very small company which is currently developing some cutting edge network technology. That’s “cutting edge” as in there are, at most, a dozen people world-wide who can follow the technical details, if we were willing to explain them. One of those being a kid in Morocco, who is doing some of the development for us.
    Because he’s super-bright (as well as inexpensive), he’s going to end up knowing more about this stuff, and not just the specific things we’re doing, than almost anyone on the planet. But even if he just learned the minimum needed to write the code, he’d still be among the world elite on the general subject. No way to avoid that.
    Did we set out intending that? No, we just wanted some code written. But the more capable he shows himself to be, the more we have him do. Do I think he’ll turn Morocco into a tech superpower? Nope. But he could form a core for a tech cluster. And that’s not a bad thing.

  498. If they aren’t with us, they are against us.
    lj, stupid as that one was, I think it’s even stupider that we blocked another UN resolution solely because it said covid-19, and Trump insisted that it had to say “Wuhan virus.” Well, that’s what happens when the guy in charge lives the philosophy that image is everything, and reality irrelevant.

  499. You had to have been living under a rock not to have seen that electing Trump was the day the U.S. pretty much handed China the 21st century.
    Where the country will go even if we manage to get rid of him is the question of the moment. As for Marty’s notion that we can easily undo the diplomatic damage within the first 90 days…welp, hate to pile on, but I don’t think he gets just how damaging it was to put a psychopathic dolt in charge with a sycophantic Senate and an army corps’ worth of flunkeys as enablers and accessories to stupidity. Thinking that we could keep on our perch while undermining how the perch got built to begin with was a catastrophic error of taking our position badly for granted.
    What might yet undo us was less our foreign overreach and more our fetid, wretched provincialism.

  500. This gives me some modicum of comfort, but we’re dealing with an individual who gives not one sh*t:
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/7/25/1963780/-Enough-With-The-What-If-Trump-Refuses-To-Leave-Office-Nonsense-OK?utm_campaign=trending
    Of course, he still has the nuclear codes until Inauguration.
    There are massive anti-Putin protests in Russia.
    Somehow the prospect of two simultaneously cornered sociopaths is not promising.
    Marty, I did make fun, but you have a way of dropping extraordinary news/claims without providing detail or cites and rarely any followup.
    If you spotted a Martian in your backyard, OK.
    But what happened then?

  501. Under the lesser Bush State got marginalized due to the open hostility of another Donald. But my impression was that it ‘merely’ sent the diplomats into hibernation and did not yet involve systematically dismantling the department.
    Still there were bad signs and omens of things to come like making fluency in Arabic a reason NOT to hire people for posts in Iraq (although State may not have been directly involved in that).

  502. Trump has made me ashamed of the US. not sure how i get over that.
    i’m certainly not going to get over my disgust with the GOP and the tens of millions of its braying cretins who put him in the WH and supported him while he careened from one shameful outrage to another.

  503. IMO, one of the worst consequences is the extra doubt it introduces about democracy. I can see how a conniving opportunist type would take advantage, if not this time round then the next: see what idiots 50% of the population are, they voted for and approve of a corrupt, toxic crook like that, the only solution is for us, the wise and educated ones, to take over and relieve the population of this task for which they are manifestly unfitted, for their own good. (Obvs, this would be the message to try and appeal to people like the ObWi commentariat, for example.) Shudder.
    So if by some blessed chance Biden gets in and the Dems take both houses, the first priority should be a wholesale safeguarding of democratic processes.

  505. It’ll take more than 90 days to unf*ck our diplomatic corps:
    https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/07/he-seems-nice-6
    Iceland needs to arrest and hustle this subhuman American filth out of the country and shut down all American diplomatic presence in their sovereign country, until they can be guaranteed this pigf*cking country is thoroughly vetted under a Biden Administration for republican fleas, cockroaches, large bowel complaints, and sadistic, malignant brain fever.
    Then, cancel him from his Keck School sinecure and his grift dermatological bullshit.
    Investigate and hound him. If he is found culpable for ANY damage to our diplomatic standing abroad, execute him with a bullet to the head.
    Purge the entire federal government of this cancer.
    I’m not making fantasy fun now Marty.
    We’re f*cking done with this insane sh*t.
    Total intolerance and canceling for the so-called American conservative movement.
    You gonna vote third party?
    Grow a pair.

  506. Jesus wept JT, I thought Woody Johnson was bad. No wonder they’re deserting in droves.

  507. The first deputy prepared for more than a year and spent months learning Icelandic, only to be blocked from coming to post because Gunter reportedly “didn’t like the look of him” at their introductory meeting.
    must be one of those lefties we’ve heard so much about.

  509. It’s good to have the power to work for good. When we lose power, we cede it to others.
    You had to have been living under a rock not to have seen that electing Trump was the day the U.S. pretty much handed China the 21st century.
    Pretty much.
    I’m not sure that multi-polar world is such a bad thing, in and of itself. But there is a difference between negotiating power relationships in an intentional way, and basically squandering your own credibility and thus leaving the field open to whoever shows up.
    The only way Trump understands for interacting with the rest of the world is to turn it into a pissing contest. So that is how we’ve approached foreign relations.
    Other people and other nations have a broader skill set, one that includes forms of interaction that are less obnoxious. So a lot of people are going to start looking to see what their options are.
    For all of our flaws, we managed, over several generations, to build some measure of credibility and good will in the world. We at least talked the good talk, if nothing else. And that’s not nothing.
    W blew a lot of that up, with his Iraq obsession, and the consequent train-wreck he made of it. Obama won some back, mostly because he wasn’t W.
    And now Trump has f’ing gutted it.
    Should Biden win, he may be able to repair some of that, but I think a lot of places are going to be wary of a nation whose basic stance toward the rest of the world changes every 8 years.
    If Biden doesn’t win, we’re done. We still have a lot of money and guns, so other nations won’t be able to ignore us, but any leadership role we may ever have been able to play will be out the window.
    If you think that will be good for us, I think you’re wrong. If you think that will good for the world at large, it all depends on who steps up to fill the void.

  510. Should Biden win, he may be able to repair some of that, but I think a lot of places are going to be wary of a nation whose basic stance toward the rest of the world changes every 8 years.
    Yes. And, honestly, the consistency argument is why Obama (for example) wouldn’t completely remake foreign policy, although meaningful changes, such as making clear that torture was no longer on the table, were made. There’s nothing to salvage from Trump’s legacy. Not a thing.

  511. At least this guy is “volunteering” to do the right thing.
    https://nypost.com/2020/07/23/boston-radio-host-fred-toucher-off-air-says-he-will-enter-mental-institution/?utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=zergnet_5454194
    Don’t hold your breath, however, as Trump is probably on the blower to him as we speak offering (bribing) him the Ambassadorship to the United Nations.
    Russell wrote:
    “but I think a lot of places are going to be wary of a nation whose basic stance toward the rest of the world changes every 8 years.”
    Dealing with America on the policy front is like dealing with a schizophrenic off his or her meds. The rest of the world should jointly declare time-out with no target date for ending it and withdraw from every international treaty and memorandum of understanding until we can make up our minds.
    The World Health Organization should change their acronym to read “WHO? Not you, asshole Americans”.
    Start with fishing rights within “our” waters. Maybe the fish would rather be caught by, hell, they’ll jump into their boats, Japanese and Russian trawlers instead of endlessly being the subject of competing opinions on catch limits every time American f*cks follow their whims and call it freedom.
    Meanwhile all other countries should declare and enforce a no-fly, no-sail zone that starts one mile from our shores, with orders to shoot to kill.
    We are not going to like the new norms, which will basically revert back to Genghis Khan’s diplomatic outreach to his neighbors.
    All countries should declare the American diplomatic passport null and void and frog march the lot of us (if you don’t like masks, you’re gonna love the rendition black hoods) to the airport for the last flight out, with fighter jet observation to make sure we get home safe and sound and still as f*cking arrogant as ever.
    In-country, death panels like the one now operating in the Texas County forced to allow the spread of Covid-19 among their dead residents by conservative murderous fake Christians in Austin, should have only one requirement for deciding which patients get care: their voter registrations.
    If they aren’t registered to vote Democratic, start them on a course of bleach until you can see the bright whites of their eyes and their blood oxygen levels read “suffocated”.
    Am I gettin thru to ya, Mr Beale?

  512. The best single thing we can do to start rebuilding our foreign policy credibility is this. Have Trump lose by a huge enough margin that we can say: “Yes, we made a horrible mistake. But we’ve learned a lesson, and we won’t be that dumb again.”
    Of course the rest of the world will be skeptical. How could they not be? But it’s the best starting point in sight.

  513. It’s good to have the power to work for good. When we lose power, we cede it to others. Maybe they will do better. Think so? I don’t.
    Having power, losing power, ceding power…exactly the sort of exceptionalist hubris that got us into this bind in the first place.
    The US can, and should, work not to project its power, but to use its power and resources to empower others to act for the greater good. The key to US and UK economic dynamism has always been the exploitation of inequality. We’ve hit the end of that as we hit the edges of our closed system. Now is when the fruits of that inequality have to be reckoned with.
    We are seeing here in our cities what embracing the domination mode for dealing with that inequality is turning us into.
    Not all power shifts have to be seen in a competitive framework. Our power is flowing back to the communities from which we took it in the first place to build our empire. Why can we not give away some of our plenty and empower those who have less? Why can’t we find common cause and encourage others to build equitable futures for themselves and others?
    The world needs the balance set less towards sovereignty and more towards interdependency. That’s a hard world to build, but it is a possible world, and a better alternative than the one that we have, and a much better one than the one that we are heading towards.

  515. If W and Dump had been born into similar circumstances as Bill Clinton or Obama would we have ever heard of either one of them? I say not a chance. They would both have wallowed in well deserved obscurity as local failures. Dump might have peaked by conning his way into owning a used car dealership and quickly driving it into the ground. But in America money and connections can make malevolence and mediocrity look like leadership.

  516. Have Trump lose by a huge enough margin
    A serious question: how big of a margin would it need to be, to signal a widespread repudiation?
    Whatever that number is, how likely do you think it is to happen?

  517. Reconstructed comment that was lost, taken from a different angle in case the old one reappears:
    It’s good to have the power to work for good. When we lose power, we cede it to others. Maybe they will do better. Think so? I don’t.
    I think this way of thinking about power is a reflection of the exceptionalism and hubris that has led us to this moment. We can “have” power or “lose” power or “cede” power.
    What about sharing power? What about empowering others?
    The US is not losing out to other countries who are cheating us. The US is finding fewer ways to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere and then use that exploitation to build a competitive advantage. It’s suffering domestically for the years of exploiting economic inequality to fuel militarism. That model has ceased to be sustainable and the bubble is shrinking.
    Time to stop thinking unilaterally and start thinking about ways to use our power for collective, multilateral good.
    Yes, that’s utopianism. Yes, that’s science fiction.
    The alternative that we are headed towards globally is not good. We need to imagine better social futures and work to make them happen.
    It’s not impractical. It’s an extension of what Germany and the Nordic countries have been trying to do for a while.

  518. A serious question: how big of a margin would it need to be, to signal a widespread repudiation?
    I’d say under 40% of the popular vote (i.e. at 20% margin) and under 200 electoral votes. Ballpark. With the formar being far more important.
    I’d give us a 60-40 shot at Trump being under 40%; about 1 in 5 of getting him below 35%. Depends on just what stupid thing he manages to blunder into in the next 90 days.**
    As for the electoral votes, I’d guess (that is, I haven’t stopped to go thru state by state) 2 chances in 3.
    ** 90 days, rather than the full 100 just because it takes time for the word to get out. If it wasn’t that he’s convinced a lot of Republicans they have to vote in person, it would be more like 75 days. Just another example of him shooting himself in the foot.

  519. P.S. I did some playing on
    https://www.270towin.com/
    My state-by-state forecast (the 50-50 chance) looks like:
    Biden: 333
    Trump: 125
    ? (toss-up): 80
    So looks like my first guess on the electoral votes was off a bit. (Let me note that I think Democrats should campaign and, especially, get-out-the-vote like they’re even money to come in at 271 EV. Just not overlook places that would be on the margins in my actual forecast.)

  520. Re: Dubya 2000, Dubya 2004, Trump 2016.
    Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
    There’s large number of MAGAts that need to be ‘raptured’* before the rest of the world trusts the USA again.
    (*raptured = lifted toward xtian heaven. Preferably by the neck.)

  522. I think this way of thinking about power is a reflection of the exceptionalism and hubris that has led us to this moment. We can “have” power or “lose” power or “cede” power.
    What about sharing power? What about empowering others?
    I’m pretty sure that the post-WWII Marshall Plan, NATO, the UN (and other international organizations), and many other treaties and foreign policy initiatives, including with our economic rival, China, were about power sharing. Not to mention our willingness to welcome international students in droves (obviously to the great benefit of our universities – but still “power sharing”.) Not sure whether you think this concept is original with “Germany and the Nordic countries”.
    Certainly Trump is sharing power with Russia right now, right here. How’s that looking?

  523. A better question would be, How come every asshole in America is a Republican?:
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/07/why-are-republicans-being-such-assholes/
    My doctor asked me to repeat five nouns in order back to him: Man, woman, bite, dog, rabies.
    I repeated: republican, asshole, traitor, murderer, sadist.
    My doctor like my list better and proclaimed me fit as a fiddle to be tied, but free of dementia.
    It was pretty hard for most people. But not for me.
    I’m not even close to counting Trump versus Biden EC tallies yet. I’m operating on the assumption that until I see it with my own eyes, I’ve still got only ten toes until proved otherwise.

  525. Funny too, about the nous conversation:
    The US hired some ex-Nazis after the war for their scientific prowess, etc. We were then fighting the cold war, against the Soviets, so a lot of lefties have pointed out that, whoa, kind of morally repugnant to have sheltered Nazis. I hate Nazis, so I too am skeptical of their welcome. But power sharing, forgiveness, love-fest, right? We did it.
    Yes, for our own interests. “Germany and the Nordic countries” also are doing things for their own interests. People power share because it serves their interests. Sometimes humanity’s interest is the focus, and rightly so.

  526. The trouble with Drum’s list of possible reasons is that even his last one is implausible. If the Republicans’ (read McConnell’s**) motivation was to get more goodies for his supporters (donors), he would have at least started negotiations far sooner. So why didn’t he?
    I submit that what we’re seeing is the ultimate playing out of the strain of Protestant Christianity which decided that sucess, specifically financial success, equalled virtue. So helping the unsuccessful amounts to rewarding lack of virtue.
    The “prosperity gospel” is directly contrary to Jesus words, repeated on multiple occasions in the Bible. But it’s the philosophical underpinning of “conservative” (reactionary), and especially libertarian, economics over the past half century.
    ** Trump’s motivation is obvious. a) there’s no significant money in it for him personally, and b) it would require admitting, if only implicitly, that he was wrong.

  527. Have we noticed:
    The subhuman right wing in this country tells us, with Trump leading the charge, that Covid-19 is just the common flu, no big deal (just had a non-mask wearing trump-loving acquaintance claim this limbaugh crap to me the other week), it’s going to just go away, we don’t need to take any special measures, hell, these people are sick and old anyway, except for the ones who are not, and we Christians have promised them a afterlife in God’s loving unless of course you are gag in which case God will cancel your soul.
    But, and not on the other hand, with the same Covid-infected hand, we must isolate one sixth of the human population in the world and cut off all trade, trade, and diplomatic intercourse with the dreaded Covid purveyors the Chinese, punish them, because of a little old common flu.
    Meanwhile, we just don’t have enough guns in America:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/us/austin-shooting-texas-protests.html
    Natch, the black guy with the AR-15 gets scragged, I guess Trayvon carrying wouldn’t have done any good for the kid because Zimmerman had his car parked nearby for backup, by a yahoo armed with both a gun and a car, both of which he pointed at the protestors, who tried to defend themselves with NRA-approved weaponry like f8cking conservatives have preached that all Americans should, in their homes, in the streets, in churches.
    Right wingers have been increasingly using cars as weapons to murder protestors. And guns.
    Both. It’s like they read here Charles’ innocent-faced observation, so reason magazine sounding at the time, that if guns are snatched away from people, people will very naturally use their cars and knives to kill instead.
    His fellow Texans now have gone him one better. Bring a gun, a knife, and a car all at once and use them all.
    An armed society is increasingly producing the politest f*cking citizenry on the face of the Earth.

  530. If you mean Garrett Foster, the NYT article says he was white.
    Yeah, but his fiancee is black, and he was pushing her wheelchair, so . . . close enough for 2nd Amendment true believers.

  531. Morals being tricky and subject to hazard, we are better off when no one has so much power that they need not share power to achieve their own goals.
    Also true, resentment is not a good foundation on which to build the future.

  533. Morals being tricky and subject to hazard, we are better off when no one has so much power that they need not share power to achieve their own goals.
    This is pretty meaningless, but go for it!

  535. I stand corrected.
    Thank you.
    It’s goddamned awful. See, to conservatives, all lives do NOT matter.
    He was also legally openly carrying an AR-15 and pointing it downwards when he was approaching the weapon in the shape of a car.
    Only liberals of any color are murdered in cold blood for that, even when they have the cojones to arrive armed and obeying the law.
    Conservatives will just as soon shoot you when you are unarmed.
    Conservatives and their militias openly carry with impunity.
    If ya got em, smoke em.

  536. Only liberals of any color are murdered in cold blood for that, even when they have the cojones to arrive armed and obeying the law.
    . . .
    Conservatives and their militias openly carry with impunity.
    There does seem to be a bit of an asymmetry, doesn’t there? I wonder if it’s that the self-styled militias are careful not to set up their demonstrations when there’s any armed opponents present.

  537. There does seem to be a bit of an asymmetry, doesn’t there?
    Ya think?
    But prog leftys yell at people on Twitter, so even stevens.

  538. I think it’s a reflection of the inate cowardice of people who need a gun to validate their manhood. I guess inate cowardice is why they relate so much to Trump.

  539. ‘A necessary evil’…
    The current favourite for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination:
    https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cotton-targets-curriculum-on-slavery/?news
    …“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
    Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said….

  540. from the co-author’s epilogue in The Autobiography Of Malcolm X:

    I knew that Malcolm X had an almost fanatical obsession about time. “I have less patience with someone who doesn’t wear a watch than with anyone else, for this type is not time-conscious,” he had once told me. “In all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure.”

  541. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/how-trump-could-win-reelection/612205/
    We ain’t seen nothing yet.
    He wants federal troops to be attacked by protestors so he can go Bolsonaro, Erdogan, and Orban all over them on camera, while literally beating the sh*t out of the liberal press.
    He and Pompeo are ginning up war against China and Iran. Running our naval ships up close to the Chinese in the South China Sea and bringing our fighter jets close to collision with Iranian passenger jets.
    An incident will happen.
    What will the American people do? Change horses in the middle of the onset of World War III?
    It’s absolutely Putinesque in its diabolical ruthlessness.

  542. To go full Putin, Trump would get his Little Green Men to blow up a Federal building, then blame it on Antifa.
    Never go full Putin.

  543. ‘it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,”’
    Well, in a way Cotton confirms the 1619 Project’s thesis, doesn’t he, in that first phrase?
    The only change I would make to the second phrase is to add the word “inadvertently”, as in “the union was inadvertently built in a way to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
    Just as it was inadvertently built in a way to put the exclusion of women in the voting franchise on the course to its ultimate extinction.
    We can celebrate the happy inadvertence of the Founders, most of them unwittingly, placing those long-fused landmines in the masterful language of the founding documents (Abigail Adams took note of this slip up between the lip and the cup to her hubby repeatedly, to which he expressed shock that she would find her inclusion somehow foretold in the words, whaddaya nuts, nowhere in the constitution does it say …), as half the citizens in this country had to cool their heels for more than a century, while the other half, white men like myself, came around ditheringly and foot-draggingly, to place the inadvertent full meaning into full, codified operation.
    How does Cotton explain, however, the strenuous efforts of his Party now to curtail those out of control full meanings because those now included inadvertently may vote for the wrong party?
    He is introducing legislation to stop funding for schools that teach the 1619 re-interpretation of HIS re-interpretation of whatever the original interpretation was, which I think was also John Adams’s amazement that Abigail was already at that early date reinterpreting his and his fellows’ words.
    But I would like to defund schools that accept the Supreme Courts’ District of Columbia versus Heller that reinterpreted the Second Amendment to allow individuals the absolute right to own firearms.
    Apparently, the matter was a bit hazy up until Heller when conservatives discovered the right to be eternal and certain all of a sudden after living with it as a collective right for roughly 70 years after the prior reinterpretation.
    I hope now we can conclude that the Second Amendment also includes automobiles, since it seems to be a matter of natural law that they too can be owned and used as weapons.
    Constitutional interpretation and reinterpretation seems like an ongoing blind wine-tasting to me.
    It’s all a matter of the palates of those chosen to do the tasting.
    Or like seances. Whomever can most convincingly scrape the legs of the chairs on the floor or throw their voices into the Founders ambiguous mouths claims successful communication with the dead.

  544. What nous said – hegemony, hubris and exceptionalism will be the end of us.
    But I think this type of thinking is so deeply ingrained after decades of subtle propaganda, that it will take another generation to get over it.

  545. We can’t travel abroad to flaunt our homegrown American ugliness, hegemony, hubris, and exceptional willful malignity, so we get it all over our fellow countrymen and women:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/deluded-anti-mask-tourists-swarm-covid-plagued-puerto-rico?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
    I’m pretty sure most of these conservative Covid-carrier zombie freedom lovers traveling from the “homeland” don’t realize Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of their very own country, but rather are under the impression that Puerto Ricans are a brown-skinned bunch of servile slaves there to let us put our drinks down on their heads while they wait for the next Puerto Rican who will suck our dicks without a mask on.
    Puerto Ricans should shoot a bunch of them as they disembark from their planes and leave the remains on the airport tarmac and I expect their behavior will change, though Trump would drum up enough camo-ed troops to send down there and terrorize the island.
    Drive cars into the virus tourists on the beach like republicans would.

  546. Trump would drum up enough camo-ed troops to send down there and terrorize the island.
    Now you’re being silly. Trump doesn’t have unlimited anonymous thugs at his disposal. And he’s got to save them for terrorizing places where there are people who could actually vote against him. Which Puerto Rico isn’t.

  547. OK, this seems kind of remarkable. To me, anyway.
    I know W jumped ship a while ago, but when you’ve lost Reagan….

  548. “Puerto Ricans should shoot a bunch of [MAGAts] as they disembark from their planes”
    Anyone know where one could get a lethal-level Paper Towel Cannon?
    Asking for a fiend.

  551. OK, this seems kind of remarkable. To me, anyway.
    I know W jumped ship a while ago, but when you’ve lost Reagan….
    As with so many things Trump, he might well have been OK. Except that he didn’t bother to follow procedures. In this case, he’s legally required to ask permission first.
    The Reagan Library likes to see itself as non-partisan. So he might not have gotten permission anyway. But by not asking, he guaranteed he’d get slapped down.

  552. Nah, Reagan’s motto was “Never speak ill of a fellow Republican”.
    Trump might have been taken to the woodshed for his habitual skirting of Nancy’s fake manners, but the Republican Party is a big tent under which under which assholes of every caliber will find shelter.
    I give you Louis Gohmert of the great state of Texas, which will never let us down:
    https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a33435227/portland-protests-street-violence-deescalate/
    Gohmert is a big Second Amendment licker.
    Turn the guns on him and his militias. Put those automobiles into high gear as well.
    Remove the Republican Party from the face of the Earth.

  554. SF. FFS.
    but if you’ve set up a committee dedicated to finding out if schools are named after people who:

    “…engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
    [from their charter]

    … you’re going to narrow the field quite a bit.
    just give them numbers, or name them after chemical elements or quarks.

  555. just give them numbers
    why not? thought it was a fairly common practice, if not now, then certainly back in the olden days.

  556. Until college, none of the schools I attended were named after people. Seemed to have no bad effects on my learnins.

  557. My schools, including college, all had geographic names. But since some geographic features (not just towns) are named for people, those could be problematic as well.
    Not just cities named Columbus either. If you live in Danville, are you sure the particular Daniel it was named for was of unimpeachable-under-today’s-standards character? Even if nobody outside the town historian can tell you who he was?
    Just to be clear, I have no problem with changing the name of something named explicitly to glorify those who committed treason. Or led the Klan.** But taking things to the extreme only discredits the changes which really should be made.
    ** And I think it would be entirely fitting if a bridge named for Klan leader Pettus was renamed for Congressman Lewis.

  560. Not enough quarks to go around.
    Even the chemical elements are too few for a medium size city (“c’mon! we need to find some more!”)
    Isotopes, there should be enough. But I expect that particular fashion would be short-lived.
    Numbers would be interesting, particularly if extended to irrational and complex numbers.
    “Yes, I attended an irrational imaginary high-school, why do you ask?”

  562. Well, of course Trump wouldn’t go to where Lewis is lying in state. That would be an act of class, and Trump has none.

  564. quarks would have been sufficient in my town. though maybe there would have been snickering when the Hudson Falls Bottoms took the field.

  568. “there would have been snickering when the Hudson Falls Bottoms Beauties took the field.”
    Okay, yeah, snickering.
    But it could be paired with the Charm school, which is something.

  569. I also suspect it will be overshadowed by the international ones threatening nuclear holocaust.
    That, at least, shouldn’t be a problem. Trump is such a massive coward that if there is the slightest chance of him personally getting hurt (which anything going nuclear would), he’ll cave in a heartbeat. No eyeball-to-eyeball for him! Not even from the deepest bunker under Cheyenne Mountain.

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