This Rebecca Solnit piece is premised on the idea that, without the media inventing and pushing the story, people would not look at Biden and see him as terrifyingly feeble, that the "pundit class" has created this impression theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
I do think it's true that "The media"--by which is implicitly meant the kind of huge, heavily capitalized mainstream conglomerates that have the loudest megaphones--has a problem with addressing Trump's radicalism in the right perspective. This has been true for a decade.
But at a certain point, you're just demanding that The Media--which is owned by capitalists who dislike or hate liberals--do the work the democratic party should be doing
Having kids has really helped me understand how much and how deeply we learn and internalize a hatred and contempt of so many of the traits that children have, precisely because we vest our self-worth and self-respect in the conceit that we have grown up and shed them.
We have contempt for people who "behave like children" and we moralize--implicitly or explicitly--about the consequences of adults displaying the kind of disregulation, impropriety, and joyous unsocialized play that children naturally have; when an adult does it, we are angry
I find it impossible not to read any discussion of "children in public" through that lens
it is kind of funny that Powell tries so hard to say that settler colonialism is a new trendy theory and then has to admit the person he thinks is most responsible for founding it died seven years ago
Anyway, there's something uniquely aggravating when this kind of centrist anti-intellectualism, because at least the right just makes everything up and makes no pretense of reading or citing; Powell reads and cites just enough to demonstrate that his own unwillingness to learn.
He makes broad generalizations which the quote he cites to support it... doesn't. He derives ideologically amenable conclusions from material that doesn't point in that direction. But it FEELS like he's engaging with the material, because he's trying to make it feel that way.
When people say that "Israel has a right to exist," they of course mean the specific form of its government--which views Palestinians as a demographic threat--must be preserved. Any other form of existence is unthinkable, and must not be imagined.
White South Africans (like Elon) in the 80s believed that if apartheid fell, they would be massacred, that white supremacy was all that kept them safe. It's all over the literature, feverish apocalyptic dreams of the slaughter that he fall of apartheid would bring.
It's an unsummarizable story, of course, and it continues, but those people were just wildly wrong. They were forced to imagine it, and it happened, because the entire fucking world didn't stand with them and insist on South Africa's right to exist undemocratic and unchanged.
The way the right has turned "homeless person" into a thing you are supposed to be afraid of, synonymous with crime--rather than feeling empathy for a human being who we have so comprehensively failed, as a society--is bad
I remember walking to work once through the pre-dawn darkness--through the SCARY SCARY SF DOWNTOWN--and seeing a woman getting out of her tent, in nice normal clothes, clearly getting ready to go to her job, and I have not thought about "the homeless" the same since
(so-called liberals do this too, of course, and they are on the right whether they know it or not)
not to be slavoj zizek but the thing here is that the peach is not the object of desire, the object of desire is the husband who can simply eat the peach (she is trapped in the need to be the martyr, thus cannot eat fruit)
this is why she made merch that says "eat the damn peach"; the desire is to desire the peach (instead of a desire for self-denial). she wants to be what she portrays the husband as being: enjoys things, doesn't stress, sorta lazy
a lot of these are just sad, but in some of them, the joke really is that she is being absolutely insane and wishes she wasn't