The dry sarcasm of @willwilkinson’s photo captions rivals in stupendousness those of @drvolts. This instance from today is a gem:
Will point amid that sarcasm:
“Biden’s victory may not have been legally fraudulent, but Republicans don’t think that this establishes his legitimacy. For true believers… Democratic election victories are fraudulent because Dems are fraudulent Americans. modelcitizen.substack.com/p/codifying-th…
The point there is kindred in spirit to a comment by @zackbeauchamp on a recent far-right screed that, in his words, “[identifies] freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves." vox.com/policy-and-pol…
Right: the stories don’t square, but they don’t have to. The sole _actual_ interest is in power — and the stories, contradictions and all, are merely in service of that interest.
Beauchamp’s piece cites @lionel_trolling, who wrote of the same far-right screed: “The author makes it clear that … actually existing pluralism, and its consequent multiplicity of interests and perspectives, is not real democracy but its perversion.” johnganz.substack.com/p/the-week-in-…
Anyhow, I’m just musing about what’s become of the GOP — if “become” describes a steady state in which “white conservatives [continue to] shrink into a minority bloc, [but a] doom loop provides them a pathway to gain power anyway.” theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
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Here’s what gets me about the institution of the “police union”: in the Department of Defense, do uniformed personnel — entrusted by the state to deploy deadly force —have a soldiers’ union? An airmen’s union?
Uniformed military personnel hold in their hands the most important power a state controls: the power to unleash violence and extinguish life. The state has a clear and compelling interest in maintaining direct, and unquestioned, control over how that power is used.
Law enforcement agencies, in the American experience, hold similar power — and have drifted, since the early 2000s, toward increasing militarization of their capacity to use force.
I was today years old when conservatives taught us that Jim Crow, an oppressive system adopted in some states that were majority Black, came about through “pure, unchecked majoritarianism.”
The idea that Black majorities in the South were too unfit and corruptible to govern was an intellectual cornerstone of Jim Crow. The reactionaries who crushed Reconstruction weren’t coy about that, at all. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
In other words, in arguing against “unchecked majoritarianism,” writers such as Mr. Crank hearten back to Jim Crow, alright — but not on behalf of the side they might think.
This map — showing that Michigan’s highest intensity of cases is in its thumb, and its southeast — makes me wonder even more if the Ontario and Mich. surges are facets of the same phenomenon.
The per capita caseload in Ontario’s southwest looks awful, even in comparison with Toronto. The caseload in Lambton, across from Port Huron, looks awful too. (Source: canadiangeographic.ca/article/mappin…)
I guess he only went with “Hillbilly Elegy” because the book title “My Struggle” was already taken.
It’s rich to assert that anybody is trying to “destroy” Tucker Carlson. If people want to hold his advertisers and paymasters at Fox accountable, though, the reason why is this.
Right. To have a scion of a TV-dinner family — and a Yale Law-educated venture capitalist like J.D. Vance — lecturing society about the “elite” is just absolutely precious.
(I don’t believe COVID has waned — but the vaccines, along with predictions of booming growth, have produced a “light at the end of the tunnel” narrative that may be influencing the extent to which political journos continue to give it crisis coverage.) nytimes.com/2021/03/13/ups…
Schools are laboring to open, viral spread has increased in multiple states, and most Americans have yet to get vaccinated — but the zeitgeist in Beltway newsrooms appears to be “new crisis, who dis?”