I don’t think you need to read this. At least not yet.

Banking

Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Credit Suisse, 2023


Fig. 1. “The monument sign in front of the parking lot of the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters at 3003 West Tasman Drive, Santa Clara, California.” Photograph by Minh Nguyen, March 13, 2023, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is mostly inside baseball. It’s important to people who have money to throw around on financial markets, but not so much, at least as far as I can tell, to the rest of us. At least not yet.

I’m suspicious that might change because if we take Max Weber’s observation that any system of exchange privileges whomever is most able to say no, at the expense to those who are less able to say no, with the benefits and handicaps from each transaction accruing,[1] as a law, then a corollary, particularly visible in the “gig economy,” is surely that risks and costs will somehow be borne by those least able to bear them. And in the case of UBS buying Credit Suisse, folks who in the ordinary course of events would have been protected were in fact wiped out.[2]

If my corollary holds true, then somehow more ordinary folks will somehow be bearing a cost that Swiss regulators aimed at a particularly privileged class of bondholder.[3] I obviously have no idea how. But that will be when all this becomes important to the rest of us.

And that’s why I’m archiving this article. Not because I particularly think you should read it. At least not yet.

Bill Cohan, “A Bear Stearns Shit Sandwich in Switzerland,” Puck, March 29, 2023, https://puck.news/a-bear-stearns-shit-sandwich-in-switzerland/


Gilead

Competitive authoritarian regime project


Fig. 1. President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Clarence Mitchell during signing ceremony of the voting rights act. Yoichi Okamoto, August 6, 1965, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Neil Vigdor, “Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses,” New York Times, March 29, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/us/politics/republicans-young-voters-college.html

Evangelical Protestants


Fig. 1. “You shall have no other gods before me.”[4] Photograph posted to Twitter by Antonia Lee Donnelly, February 16, 2020,[5] fair use.

So here’s an odd and somewhat dissonant thing. It turns out that many white Christian nationalists aren’t actually practicing Christians. Kelefa Sanneh compares many Christian nationalists’ identification as Christian to that of being Jewish: One can be a secular Jew, which is to say, Jewish by heritage even if not in actual practice. But the markers of white Christian nationalism are pretty much what you’d expect: fearful of societal change, ethnocentric, segregationist, and theocratic.[6]

Kelefa Sanneh, “How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?” New Yorker, March 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism

Gilead

White Christian nationalism (Trumpism)


Fig. 1. In terms of geographic area, Pennsylvania is very much a white Christian nationalist kind of place. Photograph by author, January 5, 2023.

Kelefa Sanneh, “How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?” New Yorker, March 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism


  1. [1]Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2017), 94-101.
  2. [2]Bill Cohan, “A Bear Stearns Shit Sandwich in Switzerland,” Puck, March 29, 2023, https://puck.news/a-bear-stearns-shit-sandwich-in-switzerland/
  3. [3]Bill Cohan, “A Bear Stearns Shit Sandwich in Switzerland,” Puck, March 29, 2023, https://puck.news/a-bear-stearns-shit-sandwich-in-switzerland/
  4. [4]Exod. 20:3.
  5. [5]Antonia Lee Donnelly, “Now I've seen everything,” Twitter, February 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/DonnellyAntonia/status/1229227422836559873
  6. [6]Kelefa Sanneh, “How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?” New Yorker, March 27, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/how-christian-is-christian-nationalism

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