There is new blog post entitled, “When the Sword of Damocles hangs instead over the powerless.”
Heather Somerville, “Uber Sells Self-Driving-Car Unit to Autonomous-Driving Startup,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-lyft-face-a-no-sharing-economy-11603710180
There is a new blog post entitled, “On social movement theory.”
There’s plenty of reason to doubt the devotion of megachurch pastors to anything but money. But if you actually do believe, you might ask, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
Many—at least three quarters, according to exit poll data[1]—evangelical Protestant voters sold their souls to Donald Trump,[2] won a Supreme Court majority[3] (and a generally more conservative judiciary), but are still hemorrhaging followers.[4] “The price is their Christian witness, the credibility of their redemption by God.”[5]
Surely, it also mean the loss of even more followers in the years ahead.
Sarah Jones, “White Evangelicals Made a Deal With the Devil. Now What?” New York, December 6, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/white-evangelicals-made-a-deal-with-trump-now-what.html
Katie Shepherd manages to draw an equivalence between armed protesters against pandemic lockdowns and the election outcome and Black Lives Matter protests.[6] This is the kind of bullshit that leads me to unsubscribe. And no, I have still not forgiven the New York Times for its coverage of the 2016 election.
Katie Shepherd, “Armed protesters alleging voter fraud surrounded the home of Michigan’s secretary of state,” Washington Post, December 7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/07/michigan-sos-benson-armed-protest/
This is really a nothing new issue. Sometimes, I’m just documenting shit.
Weekly reminder that anticommunism and antiblackness are longstanding bedfellows. pic.twitter.com/dQbrV0fM10
— Dr. CBS (@blackleftaf) December 2, 2020
Folks can also stop w the 4D chess like lawsuits are “loss leaders/fundraising”. It’s not like he *not* trying to win in court.
They’re just that bad.
— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) December 5, 2020
John Fetterman might be right, Trump certainly is delusional, and Trump certainly surrounds himself with sycophants who pursue frivolous claims, but I don’t know that Fetterman is right, and I don’t know how Fetterman can make that claim.
— Josh 🌹 (@RabidSocialist) December 5, 2020
There is a new blog post entitled, “It’s worth it, they say.”
When @BarackObama met Frederick Douglass pic.twitter.com/6BEeJPfYPe
— Eli Valley (@elivalley) December 4, 2020
You might have heard yet another explanation for Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him, even as his claims of fraud get a cold reception in court.[9] He’s using those allegations to fundraise, with most of the money going to a slush fund that he can do pretty much whatever he wants to with.[10] I’ve actually been hearing about this for days, but this is the first article I’ve seen about it.
John Cassidy, “Donald Trump’s Latest Grift May Be His Most Cynical Yet,” New Yorker, December 3, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/donald-trumps-latest-grift-may-be-his-most-cynical-yet
Simon Lewis, “Trump unveils $207 million fundraising haul after election in effort to overturn result,” Reuters, December 3, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fundraising/trump-unveils-207-million-fundraising-haul-after-election-in-effort-to-overturn-result-idUSKBN28E012
Aram Roston and Brad Heath, “Trump campaign spent more than $2 million on election lawyers, including Jenna Ellis,” Reuters, December 4, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-trump-expenses/trump-campaign-spent-more-than-2-million-on-election-lawyers-including-jenna-ellis-idUSKBN28E2VG
So it’s already pretty well established that Joe Biden is picking a bunch of neoliberal assholes for his cabinet.[11] But even the New Republic is now saying that Biden’s picks are a disaster for the Left and indeed that the Left has no effective voice in the Democratic Party.[12]
Osita Nwanevu, “Joe Biden’s Cabinet Is a Lost Cause for the Left,” New Republic, December 3, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/160432/biden-cabinet-progressive-defeat-2020
Lenny Bernstein, “With hospitals slammed by covid-19, doctors and nurses plead for action by governors,” Washington Post, December 3, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/doctors-demand-covid-restrictions/2020/12/03/88c1afc6-34e1-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html
George Monbiot attributes Brexit to a ‘civil war’ between “warlord capitalists,” roughly mapping to capitalist libertarians and anarchocapitalists, and “housetrained capitalists,”[1] who don’t map neatly to any of the conservative tendencies I have identified. For the “housetrained capitalism,” I would be tempted to suggest neoconservatism, which takes the U.S. political and economic system as ideology; however, the impetus for neoliberalism, which neoconservatism embraces as a moral imperative,[2] comes directly from Monbiot’s “warlord capitalists,” but is corrupted by power.
Karl Marx’s mistake, identified by Michael Bakunin,[3] was to think that the machinery of government could be used to render itself obsolete and dismantle itself, leading to an egalitarian society, that is, communism, properly understood. (The Russian Revolution instead replaced one elite with another.[4]) Monbiot describes a “pollution paradox” and entirely misses that irony:
[Boris] Johnson’s government [in the United Kingdom] is what warlord money buys. It could be seen as the perfect expression of the Pollution Paradox, a concept that I think is essential to understanding our politics. What this means is that the dirtier or more damaging an enterprise is, the more money it must spend on politics to ensure it’s not regulated out of existence. As a result, political funding comes to be dominated by the most harmful companies and oligarchs, which then wield the greatest political influence. They crowd out their more accommodating rivals.
It isn’t just about pollution. Damaging enterprises with an interest in buying political results include banks developing exotic financial instruments; property developers who resent the planning laws; junk food companies; bosses seeking to destroy employment rights; and plutocrats hoping to avoid tax. It’s why we’ll never have a healthy democracy without a radical reform of campaign finance.[5]
It is capitalism, specifically Monbiot’s “warlord” kind, and even more specifically, the anarchocapitalist kind, that would dismantle government but replace it entirely with an economic hierarchy instead of communist egalitarianism.
George Monbiot, “Caught in the Crossfire,” November 27, 2020, https://www.monbiot.com/2020/11/27/caught-in-the-crossfire/
So one question has been how a delusional raging narcissist understands having to leave the White House:
This is the set-up. trump must be victorious against the forces of evil. trump is going to leave a martyr. https://t.co/LaCEEbDSAn
I am hearing from two reliable sources that Trump is planning to make a long speech or release a long statement about the "witch hunt" and how he and his family were targeted and harassed for years and then announce pardons for his family and others consistent with Flynn pardon.
— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) December 1, 2020
— Palli Davis Holubar #HandMarkedPaperBallots (@palliddh) December 2, 2020
Sasha *and* Malia retweeted this. Pay attention, Obama! https://t.co/1Oy0aECsWJ
With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence.
It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police. https://t.co/Wsxp1Y1bBi
Obama: You lose people with "snappy" slogans like "defund the police" https://t.co/qjrPY9eY2M pic.twitter.com/ynqQHnvN3u
— The Hill (@thehill) December 1, 2020
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) December 2, 2020
— soc bo (@EmbraceTheBase) December 2, 2020
Barack Obama seems never to have recovered from having to repudiate his pastor and having to claim a false equivalence between Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and a cop.
