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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years ago

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Psycho Analysis: Fu Manchu

(WARNING! This analysis contains DISCUSSIONS OF OUTDATED RACIST STEREOTYPES! This analysis does not support or condone such things whatsoever and merely is here to analyze the cultural impact of the character!)

"Imagine a person, tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."

— The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913)

I think it really goes without saying that the late 19th century and early 20th century were deeply, incredibly racist. One such manifestation of the racism and xenophobia of the times was the villainous archetype known as the Yellow Peril. The so-called “Yellow Peril” is a caricature of eastern cultures, portrayed in a villainous light; the characters are diabolical criminal masterminds who tend to be geniuses, know kung fu, have mystical powers, command barbarian hordes, and dress like the most stereotypical dynastic noble you could imagine. Just think of every single cringeworthy Asian stereotype you can imagine, stuff it into one villainous package, and BOOM! You have yourself a Yellow Peril villain.

You’ve most definitely seen villains that fit some semblance of this trope. Lo Pan of Big Trouble in Little China and Long Feng from Avatar: The Last Airbender are notable examples (and ones that aren’t particularly problematic, as their works don’t rely on some white guy saving the day and instead have Asian heroes). But we’re not here to talk about them, oh no – we’re here to talk about the grandaddy of them all, the villain who codified the idea of a Yellow Peril villain to such… er, for lack of a better word, “perfection,” that even though he has somewhat faded from the public consciousness he has managed to continue inspiring villains up until the present day: Fu Manchu.

While not the first Yellow Peril villain, he is pretty much the face of it. He is what comes to mind when you envision such a villain, which may be because his cultural impact runs so deep – characters such as Batman’s nemesis Ra’s al-Ghul, the Iron Man foe The Mandarin, and James Bond baddie Doctor No among many others all draw inspiration from this legendary Devil Doctor. So what exactly is his deal that has made him such a problematic icon?

Motivation/Goals: So Fu Manchu’s goals started with him being a Chinese nationalist but eventually he moved into your standard world domination, with him developing over time into becoming a sort of noble criminal, a diabolical mastermind with some level of ethics, class, and standards; the man sent his nemesis gifts on his wedding day and always stuck to his word. This doesn’t seem like much now, but you gotta remember, this guy was one of the first big literary supervillains; you’ve gotta cut him a little slack.

Performance: So it is time to discuss the elephant in the room… not once in his long and storied history in film has Fu Manchu been portrayed by an actor of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Indian descent. Fu Manchu has always, always been portrayed by the worst possible option in every single case: a white guy in yellow face. Christopher Lee is perhaps the most well-known white man to play him in a serious work, portraying him in a series of films, though Boris Karloff portrayed him as well.

Peter Sellers portrayed Fu in his last major cinematic appearance, though unlike most other examples that film – The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu – was a parody, which does at least take away a little bit of the bad taste.

The only valid white man portrayal is, of course, from the fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the S.S. As said fake trailer is a ridiculous sendup of exploitation films and trashy cinema in general, the inclusion of a white man playing the fiendish doctor is pretty much part of the joke – but it’s who they got that’s the real treat. We’ll get to that shortly, but before that…

It is honestly really disgusting that in the long history of this character, he has never once been portrayed by an Asian actor. You’d think at some point that someone might at least just cast any sort of Asian due to the unfortunate tendency to view Asian actors as interchangeable, but they couldn’t even do that.

Final Fate: Fu Manchu is notable because he always gets away, even if his plans are foiled; in fact, he’ll sometimes have plans within plans, so even when he loses, he still wins to some degree. But enough about his in-universe fate; let’s talk about the real world fate of the character, where Fu Manchu has a very odd legal status in terms of public domain.

While the first three books are in the public domain, some characters from later books are not considered part of the public domain, which has lead to situations such as Marvel’s Master of Kung Fu not being able to be reprinted for years. On top of this, as the character’s creator Sax Rohmer died in 1959, Fu Manchu is not in the public domain in Europe; this has led to him appearing but not being directly named in Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he is only referred to as “The Doctor” (amusingly, he goes up against Moriarty in that comic, the character he draws inspiration from).

Best Scene: In what is one of the very few non-offensive uses of the character, Fu Manchu is given a brief cameo in the trailer for Werewolf Women of the S.S. that shows up in the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse, and he’s played by… well… just watch:

youtube

Final Thoughts & Score: Fu Manchu is an absolutely fascinating villain born out of incredibly problematic places.

There is absolutely no denying that Fu Manchu was created from a deeply racist place. It’s an unavoidable fact. There is no getting around it. Fu Manchu as a character was meant to demonize the Chinese, to the point where production of films based on him as well as the novels was halted in times of war when the Chinese were allies. These books, these stories, are all extremely problematic by the standards of today.

But with that being said… who, exactly, is the title character? Do you know, without looking it up, who the hero who Fu Manchu antagonizes is, the Holmes to his Moriarty? This is Fu Manchu’s series, and throughout it he projects an air of intelligence, sophistication, and even honor that you wouldn’t expect would be afforded to a character such as him. As far as racist propaganda goes, an extremely charitable person could be able to call this “progressive” in some regard. Positive discrimination is a step up from regular discrimination, right? Again, there’s really no getting around the glaring problems with the character and his origins, but the fact Fu Manchu is one of the first supercriminals in literature and manages to just be unflinchingly cool to the point where you’ll probably end up rooting for him over the bland white protagonists says something for how utterly racism fails when it manages to make the object of its derision infinitely cooler than the race it’s trying to prop up as superior.

By my own criteria, Fu Manchu could only be an 11/10. I can’t deny how much of an impact, for better or for worse, the fiendish doctor has had on pop culture, to the point where he gave his name to and subsequently killed off a variety of facial hair, a feat only matched by Hitler. But this comes with a disclaimer: I cannot stress enough that Fu Manchu is deeply and inherently problematic on a conceptual level, and that despite how genuinely cool and fascinating he is in the right hands it doesn’t and cannot erase that his original purpose was to demonize the Chinese and Asian cultures. He also managed to help perpetuate yellowface and helped to popularize cliches that have plagued Asian villains to this day. While many in his wake have still managed to be cool and engaging in their own right, it really cannot be said how this character has a very complex history. Has he done more bad than good? That’s not for a white guy like me to determine; I’m merely here to determine the overall quality of the villain and determine their impact, and Fu Manchu undeniably has impacted culture. It would be wrong and disingenuous to break my own rules to give him a lower rating due to his problematic elements, but at the same time I cannot sit here and pretend they do not exist.

I would love to see the day where Fu Manchu can be reclaimed to some extent. Look at Shang-Chi, for example; the (at this time) upcoming Marvel film is set to feature the Fu Manchu-inspired Mandarin as a major character, and he is set to be played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, a Hong Kong actor. If one of the characters inspired by him can get portrayed by an Asian actor, perhaps someday in the future Fu Manchu can be reclaimed from his racist origins and given the respectful treatment he deserves. Fu Manchu is a character that is in many ways accidentally incredible and iconic. Born from horrendous racism, and yet the racist screeds depicting him always somehow manage to prop him up as the best character in the lot… it’s the paradox of racist thought, to go so far in demonizing their target they manage to make them more interesting and engaging than the generic protagonists. Fu Manchu is a truly great villain mired in the problems of the time he was created; in the right hands, great work could be done with him.

Bottom line is: Rob Zombie, get Nicolas Cage on the phone and start filming Werewolf Women of the S.S.

#Psycho Analysis #Fu Manchu #racism #yellow peril #racism against asians #racism against chinese #cw: racism

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the-desolated-quill · 7 years ago

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The Pandorica Opens - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

New Who doesn’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to its series finales. Russell T Davies had a horrid tendency to make his finales bombastic, gaudy slushfests that usually had high stakes but very little impact. How does Moffat compare with his first of a two part finale?

Well The Pandorica Opens is a nice, welcome change of pace. Instead of this grand, epic narrative, Moffat keeps everything very small and compact. Yes there are 12,000 spaceships in the sky, but the story is mostly contained within the caverns beneath Stonehenge. The only real threat comes from a lone Cybersuit trying to assimilate a new human host, and that was fantastic. A creative use of Cyber lore that was very reminiscent of a John Carpenter movie. Love it. There also seems to be much more emphasis on characters rather than spectacle, specifically on Amy and Rory.

Oh yeah, Rory is back. Like I said previously, I knew even at the time that Rory wasn’t really dead, but fair’s fair. I wasn’t expecting him to come back as a Roman centurion (I do have issues with this, but I’ll come to that later). A big chunk of the episode is dedicated to Amy and Rory reuniting and Amy not remembering him. Both Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill are incredible together, selling the intense emotions their characters are feeling like its going out of season. The ending in particular was both shocking and moving as Rory cradles Amy’s body after he accidentally shoots her.

Matt Smith is also great. The obnoxious weirdness has thankfully been toned down a bit after The Lodger and there are a number of good moments. My favourite being the sequence with the Cyberman arm, but the scene where the Doctor comedically realises that Rory has implausibly returned from oblivion is a close second for me just because it could have been so easy to have fucked that up and made it feel awkward and forced, but Matt Smith pulls it out of the bag. Alex Kingston also does a good job as a mercifully less smug River Song. Okay the Cleopatra scene was incredibly cringeworthy, but her ‘you’re all barbarians now’ speech to the Romans more than made up for it.

If you’re after decent characterisation and good performances, then The Pandorica Opens should be more than satisfactory. If however you’re looking for a good story to go with it, you’re going to be disappointed because this is where the episode falls flat on its face.

Let’s start with the Pandorica. What is it? It’s a prison. The most powerful prison ever constructed with deadlock seals and time locks and so on to contain whatever’s inside... and is incredibly easy to open.

But who or what is inside the Pandorica? Well according to legend it’s some kind of goblin/trickster/warrior. The most feared being in all the cosmos.

Well gee, I wonder who this could be referring to. I mean it could be anybody. No, but seriously. It’s definitely Omega. (Just out of curiosity, the people who came up with this theory, were you just humouring Moffat or were you really that thick?)

Yes, obviously there’s nothing inside the Pandorica because obviously it’s meant to be for the Doctor. Not exactly a shocking twist, is it? A demented cabbage could have worked that one out what with the painfully obvious hints. But what makes this twist even more annoying is the fact that it doesn’t make even the slightest bit of sense.

So the Pandorica was created by an Alliance of the Doctor’s greatest enemies.

Remember back in Doomsday when the Daleks and Cybermen fought each other? Yeah I didn’t like it either, but Russell T Davies got one thing right. The Daleks and Cybermen would never work together because of their totally opposing ideologies. Daleks are driven by xenophobia and hatred, whereas Cybermen are driven by a desire to ‘save’ humanity. Daleks want to kill and conquer. Cybermen want to fix and improve. Now you’re expecting me to believe that these two polar opposite Who baddies can not only put their differences aside, but are also willing to work with Sontarans, Sycorax, Judoon, Slitheen, Draconians, Autons, Zygons, Silurians... wait! What the fuck are the Silurians doing there?! Why don’t you just throw in the Ood too and be done with it?!

Then there’s the question of why they’re building this Pandorica in the first place, even going to the trouble of visiting Amy’s house and extrapolating memories of Romans and shit. They believe the Doctor is going to destroy the whole of space and time. I get that (actually I don’t, but I’ll come to that), but if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be easier to just kill him? Why are you going to such ridiculous lengths to capture him when you can just blow him up WITH YOUR 12,000 SPACESHIPS?!!!

And why do you have 12,000 spaceships anyway? It only takes a couple of plastic Romans to shove the Doctor inside the Pandorica. Seems a bit like overkill to me.

Also what’s the point of the transmitter? The Pandorica transmits a message to everyone from the Daleks to the Zygons to even Vincent Van Gogh. The message beams across all of time and space. Everybody hears it... except the one person they’re trying to lure to the Pandorica in the first place.

The only reason the Doctor shows up is because River Song defaces an ancient cliff-face. If Van Gogh’s painting was never discovered, the Doctor would never have showed up at Stonehenge to be locked up, would he? Who the fuck came up with this plan? Mr. Bean?

But the stupidest thing of all is that despite the Alliance having the resources to visit Amy’s house, extrapolate memories, create plastic Romans and build a perfect prison based on a children’s picture book, not one of them has the brainpower to work out that the Doctor isn’t the only one that can fly the TARDIS.

Epic fail for the villains, and I wish I could say that’s the end of it, but it gets worse. Let’s talk about Moffat’s crack.

We know how the cracks in time work, right? If the light touches you, you get erased from existence. You don’t just die. You were never born in the first place. Those are the rules. Well, like with the Angels in Flesh And Stone, Moffat once again breaks his own rules for plot convenience. Turns out you’re not completely erased from existence after all. You leave traces behind. Like an engagement ring or a photograph. How can either of those exist if Rory doesn’t exist? Fucked if I know! Also, apparently if you can remember someone, they can magically come back. So how come those soldiers from Flesh And Stone didn’t miraculously return when Amy remembered them? Because Moffat is a shit writer. That’s why. What’s the point of getting invested in a story if the writer just keeps changing the rules whenever he feels like it?

Also I expect you’re wondering how the Alliance were able to recreate a plastic Rory with all his memories from a single photograph despite the fact he never existed. Well apparently... he’s a miracle.

No. Really. You heard that right. According to the Doctor, there are some impossible things in the universe that cannot be explained, and we call them miracles.

I know that Moffat said in an interview once that he’s always seen Doctor Who as a fairytale, but this is taking the piss. You can allude to fairytales, sure. Borrow elements and draw parallels, but at the end of the day Doctor Who is a sci-fi show. If you use actual fairytale solutions to solve sci-fi problems, you’re just cheating the audience and making us question what the fuck is going on.

Somewhere underneath this convoluted mess is an emotional character piece trying to get out. Unfortunately it’s hampered by a writer being too clever for his own good.

#the pandorica opens #steven moffat #doctor who #eleventh doctor #matt smith #amy pond #karen gillan #rory williams #arthur darvill #river song #alex kingston #bbc #review #spoilers

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nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany · 5 years ago

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2:00PM Water Cooler 8/8/2019

Digital Elixir 2:00PM Water Cooler 8/8/2019

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

“They had one weapon left and both knew it: treachery.” –Frank Herbert, Dune

“2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination” [RealClearPolitics] (average of five polls). As of August 7: Biden down to 31.0% (31.6), Sanders down to 15.8% (16.6%), Warren flat at 15.5% (15.6%), Buttigieg flat at 5.5% (5.4%), Harris down at 8.3% (9.4%), Beto separating himself from the bottom feeders, interestingly. Others Brownian motion.

* * *

2020

Harris (D)(1): “Kamala Harris, The Early Years”:

Six weeks after the second largest bank failure in US history and about a week before the government would take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Kamala Harris was asked how the country would be different if she were POTUS for 8 years. This was her answer. pic.twitter.com/fGAyHCnq6S

— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) August 8, 2019

Sanders (D)(1): Sanders goes into the lion’s den…

A thread of Youtube comments from Joe Rogan’s podcast with Bernie Sanders. pic.twitter.com/vUhgjtq9Cd

— rafael (@rafaelshimunov) August 7, 2019

… and comes out riding a lion.

* * *

“The Main Difference Between Warren and Sanders” [Benjamin Studebaker]. “Warren believes in a meritocratic system, where the deserving members of the working class and underclass can work hard and earn their way into the professional class. Sanders believes that all our citizens, regardless of class position, ought to be entitled to a decent life. That’s the difference. That’s why Warren declined to endorse Sanders in 2016. That’s why Warren says she would have accepted an offer to become Hillary Clinton’s Vice President. That’s why Warren still says she’s “capitalist to her bones”. That’s why Warren clapped for Trump when the president said there would never be socialism in this country:” • Excellent piece; I just cut out the bottom line. Studebaker really firing on all eight cylinders here

IA: “Gun policy activists organize Des Moines forum following mass shootings; Democratic presidential candidates will attend” [Des Moines Register]. “In the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, gun policy activists quickly organized a presidential “gun safety” forum in Des Moines Saturday. Despite Democratic presidential candidates’ busy Iowa schedules for this week — with the Iowa State Fair, the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox at the Fair, and several other multi-candidate events — at least 14 have said they will attend. The event starts at 8 a.m. at the Iowa Events Center in downtown Des Moines. The event was organized by Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, groups advocating for gun regulation after previous mass shootings throughout the country.”

The Debates

“Sanders: Democratic debate format is ‘demeaning’” [The Hill]. “Speaking on the ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast, Sanders said ‘you shouldn’t even call them a debate.’ ‘What they are is a reality TV show in which you have to come up with a soundbite and all that stuff,’ he said. ‘It’s demeaning to the candidates and it’s demeaning to the American people. You can’t explain the complexity of health care in America in 45 seconds, nobody can.’” • Drag ’em, Bernie!

Identity Politics

Know your enemy:

White supremacy is often subconscious. & Clearly, our nation has not been inoculated. WS is our nation’s original sin;the driving logic of slavery, of Native genocide, of Jim Crow, of segregation, of mass incarceration,of “Send Her Back.”

It never went away. It was just dormant.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 8, 2019

Apparently, the “driving logic” of slavery had nothing to do with profit — or capital. Really?

“White Supremacy Is Not The Arsonist — It’s The Fire.” [Ryan Dalton, Medium]. • The same objection applies.

L’Affaire Joffrey Epstein

“The Right Kind of Continuity” [Jewish Currents]. “Within the Jewish institutional world, however, Wexner’s relationship with Epstein is significant in a different way. Wexner is among a small number of Jewish community megadonors, billionaires who provide an outsize and growing proportion of funding for communal organizations and to a large extent determine what those organizations look like. Along with Sheldon Adelson, Charles Bronfman, and a few others, he has spent millions of dollars on institutions ranging from Birthright Israel—which has sent over 500,000 young diaspora Jews on free trips to Israel—to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where Conservative rabbis are ordained… Epstein was closely involved with Wexner’s charitable giving; together, for instance, the two men helped fund the construction of a new building for Harvard’s Hillel. Tax filings suggest that Epstein spent six years as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation, and that the foundation gave millions of dollars to pet projects of his own…. These ties are now stoking anxiety and division behind the scenes at Jewish institutions led by Wexner-affiliated professionals.” • As well they might.

RussiaGate

“Did Russian Interference Affect the 2016 Election Results?” [Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball]. “No.” From the summary:

— Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recent testimony was a reminder that Russia attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and very well may try to do so again in 2020.

— This begs the question: Is there any evidence that Russian interference may have impacted the results, particularly in key states?

— The following analysis suggests that the 2016 results can be explained almost entirely based on the political and demographic characteristics of those states. So from that standpoint, the answer seems to be no.

So, a well-regarded, mainstream political scientist and horse-race analyst throws in the towel. Scholars Ferguson, Jorgenson, and Xie got this right in 2018; kudos to them. Humble bloggers who were also skeptical of enormous claims made on little evidence may also take a bow [lambert blushes modestly].

Realignment and Legitimacy

“The Destructive Politics of White Amnesia” [Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The New Republic]. “To counter [Trump’s] terrifying demagoguery, the party must be as unified in its repudiation of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny as the Party of Trump has been in enabling them. One would think, therefore, that candidates angling to become the standard-bearer of the loyal opposition should be capable of articulating not only the danger of this political moment, but also how their own party helped create this tragedy. Democratic candidates will never be able to steer a fresh course so long as they continue decades of denial and dissemblance. Joe Biden’s status as the 2020 field’s front-runner, in spite of his cringeworthy efforts to account for his part in that history, speaks volumes about how far today’s Democrats still have to go before they can meet the challenges of Trumpism head-on. A good deal of Biden’s inflated standing comes from an all-too characteristic Democratic posture of risk aversion, compounded by a talismanic faith in Biden’s mystic “electability.” Many party leaders and voters clearly view a Biden candidacy as the safest post-Trump course correction—and Biden as a pragmatic man of the people with the unique ability to build coalitional bridges between coastal elites and the so-called forgotten men and women of America’s heartland.” • Crenshaw, a law professor, coined intersectionality. It will be interesting to see which non-amnesiac she endorses.

“Reapportionment Projections and the Potential Impact of New States” [ESRI (hat tip…)]. “[I]t is estimated that, compared to the current seat apportionment determined by the 2010 Census, nine states will lose one seat, six states will gain one seat, and one state will gain three seats. The final five seats in the apportionment process (seats 431-435) are given to Texas, Arizona, California, Montana, and Alabama. These “bubble” states are at the highest risk to lose seats as a result of any differences between the population projections and the actual Census 2020 counts. On the other hand, the five states that are closest to gaining additional seats are Minnesota, West Virginia, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Florida (four of which are projected to lose a seat when compared to the current 2010 apportionment). Based on these projections this would be the first time since statehood that California would lose a congressional seat.”

Stats Watch

Jobless Claims, week of August 3, 2019: “Declines to even more favorable levels are the results of the latest jobless claims report” [Econoday]. “The current state of the labor market, which is strong, isn’t why the Federal Reserve cut rates last week.”

Consumer Credit, June 2019: “Consumer credit came in below consensus expectations” [Econoday]. “Although the monthly drop indicates a loss of credit-card spending momentum, revolving credit for the second quarter still increased [for] the strongest quarterly growth in more than a year. This is a negative for household wealth but it has been a positive to consumer spending.”

Wholesale Trade, June 2019: “Inventories in the wholesale sector were unchanged” [Econoday]. “Inventories of autos did fall in June but were still up percent on the year. This will likely be a negative for near-term auto production.”

* * *

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 26 Fear (previous close: 25, Extreme Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 43 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Aug 7 at 12:19pm. • Restored at reader request. Note that the index is not always updated daily, sadly.

The Biosphere

“Climate Change and Land: Summary for Policymakers” (PDF) [IPCC]. An “approved draft” of a new report. Handy chart from page 4:

“What is Agrobiodiversity?” [FAO]. Yikes:

* Since the 1900s, some 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers worldwide have left their multiple local varieties and landraces for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties.

* 30 percent of livestock breeds are at risk of extinction; six breeds are lost each month.

* Today, 75 percent of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and five animal species.

* Of the 4 percent of the 250 000 to 300 000 known edible plant species, only 150 to 200 are used by humans. Only three – rice, maize and wheat – contribute nearly 60 percent of calories and proteins obtained by humans from plants.

* Animals provide some 30 percent of human requirements for food and agriculture and 12 percent of the world’s population live almost entirely on products from ruminants.

This all seems a little fragile.

“The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons” [Scientific American]. “Fifty years ago, University of California professor Garrett Hardin penned an influential essay in the journal Science. Hardin saw all humans as selfish herders: we worry that our neighbors’ cattle will graze the best grass. So, we send more of our cows out to consume that grass first. We take it first, before someone else steals our share. This creates a vicious cycle of environmental degradation that Hardin described as the ‘tragedy of the commons.’ It’s hard to overstate Hardin’s impact on modern environmentalism…. [H]e promoted an idea he called ‘lifeboat ethics‘: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water…. But the facts are not on Hardin’s side. For one, he got the history of the commons wrong. As Susan Cox pointed out, early pastures were well regulated by local institutions. They were not free-for-all grazing sites where people took and took at the expense of everyone else. Many global commons have been similarly sustained through community institutions…. Despite what Hardin might have said, the climate crisis is not a tragedy of the commons. The culprit is not our individual impulses to consume fossil fuels to the ruin of all…. The truth is that two-thirds of all the carbon pollution ever released into the atmosphere can be traced to the activities of just ninety companies. These corporations’ efforts to successfully thwart climate action are the real tragedy.” • NC readers have long been familiar that Hardin is in error.

“Into the deep: Deep sea mining is upon us, whether you would risk it or not” [Ocean Bites]. “The deep sea is almost entirely unknown, with only about 5% of it having been explored with remote vehicles and less than 0.0001% of the seafloor having been sampled. This is largely due to how difficult it is to navigate the region….. we don’t know how mining could impact deep sea ecosystems, or even others. For example, global fisheries are an important source of income and food. Mining could stir up sediment from the bottom of the ocean, which could drift in and out of country boundaries, changing shallower ecosystems. Could this impact fisheries? The little we do know about deep sea ecosystems emphasizes how risky this is to them. Animals in the deep sea tend to live a long time, grow slowly, reproduce slowly, and reach sexual maturity later in life. All of these characteristics makes it difficult for these species to recover from disturbances, much less adapt to change…. Maybe one of the most concerning elements of the approach of deep sea mining is its legal ambiguity. Rights to the seafloor are generally controlled by two groups: countries, which have control over the continental shelves off their coasts, and the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which controls international waters referred to as the Area… ISA uses guidelines outlined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to make decisions; in this case, they follow Article 140, which states that mining can be done “for the benefit of mankind as a whole.” But that is the ultimate question. If “benefit” is interpreted economically alone, who benefits?”

Health Care

“Financial Eligibility Criteria and Medication Coverage for Independent Charity Patient Assistance Programs” [JAMA]. “In 2018, among 274 patient assistance programs operated by the 6 independent charity foundations, the majority did not provide coverage for uninsured patients. Medications that were covered by the patient assistance programs were generally more expensive than those that were not covered.” And:

“California auditor blasts Medi-Cal overseer for failing patients in 18 rural counties” [Sacramento Bee]. “In a report released Tuesday, California State Auditor Elaine Howle upbraided the state Department of Health Care Services for its failure to ensure Medi-Cal beneficiaries have adequate access and quality of care in 18 rural counties stretching from Inyo to the south to Tehama and Plumas in the north…. In a report released Tuesday, California State Auditor Elaine Howle upbraided the state Department of Health Care Services for its failure to ensure Medi-Cal beneficiaries have adequate access and quality of care in 18 rural counties stretching from Inyo to the south to Tehama and Plumas in the north…. Anthem has scheduled these Medi-Cal patients with AIDS specialists, psychiatrists, pulmonologists and physical therapists more than 300 miles away, according to the auditor’s report, and Health & Wellness has directed patients to travel more than 300 miles to see dermatologists and 200 or more miles to see ear, nose and throat doctors; kidney specialists; and neurologists.” • California’s Medicaid program.

“Just one season of playing football—even without a concussion—can cause brain damage” [Science]. “In the new study, researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R) in New York followed 38 of the school’s football players. The athletes wore helmets outfitted with accelerometers to track the number and force of hits during practices and games. Before and after each season, the scientists took MRI scans of the players’ brains. The researchers looked specifically at the midbrain, a region on the brain stem that governs primitive, thoughtless functions such as hearing and temperature regulation. When a player’s head is hit from any angle, the brain ripples like the surface of a pond after a rock is thrown, explains study author Adnan Hirad, a medical student at U of R. Although the forces can affect many regions of the brain, the midbrain’s central location makes it likely to sustain damage. The results were striking. Although only two of the 38 players received a concussion, more than two-thirds of them showed changes to the integrity of the white matter of their midbrains. Rotational hits—when a player’s helmet is struck by a glancing blow—were particularly bad for the midbrain’s white matter.”

The Last of the Feral Hogs, I Swear

Lot of dunking on this thread, for some reason. I think it’s interesting:

Ok y’all did it: A thread about hogs, ferality, and race in American history.

— Gabriel Rosenberg (@gnrosenberg) August 6, 2019

Class Warfare

“The College Wealth Divide: Education and Inequality in America, 1956-2016” [CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP13864]. From the abstract: “Using new long-run micro data, this paper studies wealth and income trends of college and non-college households in the United States since 1956. We document the emergence of a substantial college wealth premium since the 1980s, which is considerably larger than the college income premium. Over the past four decades, the wealth of American households with a college-educated head has tripled. By contrast, the wealth of non-college households has barely grown in real terms over the same period. Part of the rising wealth gap can be traced back to systematic portfolio differences between college and non-college households that give rise to different exposures to asset price changes. Non-college households have a lower exposure to the equity market and have profited much less from the recent surge in the stock market. We also discuss the importance of financial literacy and business ownership for the increase in wealth inequality between college and non-college households.” • Oh, man. “Financial literacy.”

EPI updates its productivity-pay gap chart:

“Here’s why the economy feels so bad when it sounds so good” [Business Insider]. “Americans are broadly pessimistic about what’s coming next, the Pew Research Center found earlier this year. Increasingly, they believe that our political and economic systems work only for those with power. This is because neither the stock market nor employment data captures what’s ailing most American families: rising costs for critical, necessary items. Meanwhile, despite wages eking up a little bit since the financial crisis, adjusted for inflation, Americans haven’t gotten a significant raise since 1999. This is why Americans are drowning in debt. As for the stock market, most people aren’t involved…. Employment numbers don’t tell you anything about that. Having a job doesn’t mean as much as it used to because wages simply don’t cover the same costs they used to.”

“Karl Marx Is Useful for Our Time, Not Just His” (interview) [David Harvey, Jacobin]. “The question of sovereignty is: Does the state control finance, or does finance control the state? In Greece, for instance, the latter is clearly the case — there, state sovereignty is pretty irrelevant, a minor part of the power relation running the country. Interestingly, this is even what’s said in the United States. When Bill Clinton came to power after the 1992 election, he laid out an economic program. His policy advisor Robert Rubin — who came from Goldman Sachs, and later became secretary of the Treasury — said, “You can’t do that.” Clinton said, “Why not?” Rubin replied, “Because the bondholders won’t let you.” Clinton supposedly said, “You mean my whole economic policy and my whole chances of re-election are dependent on a bunch of fucking bond traders?” And Rubin said yes. So Clinton implemented neoliberal measures like NAFTA and a whole set of welfare measures and did not deliver what he’d promised — free health care. I think we’re in a situation where it’s the money changers who rule, not the politicians.” • This is an interesting interview, and more “moderate” than the headline conveys. Harvey also has interesting things to say about the contrast between the US and the Chinese responses to the 2008 Crash.

“False Freedom: Sharing the Scraps from the Perilous Gig Economy” [Steven Greenhouse, Lit Hub]. “The digital on-demand economy resembles globalization in that it has created a larger, and often a worldwide, labor pool, putting workers in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, and other industrial nations in competition, via the internet, with workers in India, China, and elsewhere. Like globalization, the app-based economy often pulls down wages in the industrial world, even as it creates new opportunities for workers in poorer nations.”

“Foundation announces gift of more than $768,000 to unpaid Blackjewel miners” [WYMT]. “Two major announcements regarding relief for unpaid Blackjewel miners took place at the Harlan County Courthouse and at the Letcher County Extension Office Monday morning. Ross Kegan, former Vice President of Operations of Black Mountain Resources, spoke in Harlan County on behalf of the Richard and Leslie Gilliam Foundation. He said the foundation will give a total of $492,000 to Harlan County CAA so that each Blackjewel miner in the immediate-needs database will get $2,000. Another announcement took place in Letcher County at 11:00 a.m. and then another is expected to happen in Virginia. Kegan said the foundation is giving another $276,000 to Blackjewel miners in the area, which will also amount to $2,000 each.” • Foundation bails out unpaid workers in Harlan County, while DSA is silent. Another win for noblesse oblige!

News of the Wired

Not all programmers get free meals and massages. Thread:

if you have a cable modem, there’s a really good chance that it has a “DNS ALG”, which is a type of software that has no excuse to exist whatsoever, serves no identifiable purpose, and is absolutely batshit

— Utterly dispassionate, documentary hog slaughter (@gravislizard) August 8, 2019

* * *

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MF writes: “Spotted these while waiting for a table at a local restaurant with a friend. She tells me that these are Canna lilies, likely canna indica or a hybrid of canna indica with another canna species.”

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2:00PM Water Cooler 8/8/2019

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Yutong Yuan

A couple of months ago, I found myself in the curious position of examining Joe Biden’s head.

On television, the former vice president comes across as perpetually tanned and coiffed — always with the aviator glasses and the crisp shirtsleeves. He still works out every morning, often lifting weights and riding a Peloton bike, and his face is still golden, his brow remarkably unfurrowed for a man of his 76 years. Up close — like, six inches up close — Biden is slighter than you might imagine. From my aft position in a press gaggle in Dearborn, Michigan, I could see the baby-pink of his scalp peeking through wisps of gleaming white hair and the faint mottling near his ears. They caught me off guard, all those fragile little human details you miss on television.

And it was a very human summer for Biden, if you’re going by “to err is human” standards. On June 18, speaking at a New York City fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel (a swank spot on the Upper East Side where Woody Allen has a standing gig to play jazz clarinet), Biden began talking about the need for consensus-building. According to the pool report, he broke into a southern drawl as he brought up a segregationist senator from Mississippi: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ��son.’” Herman Talmadge — “one of the meanest guys I ever knew” — was another southern segregationist Democrat who Biden worked with. “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.”

The outrage was swift. The following day, fellow White House hopeful Sen. Cory Booker put out a statement. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” it began, adding, “He is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together.” Biden responded by saying Booker should apologize. “There’s not a racist bone in my body,” he said. “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career.”

So a month later, when a reporter in the sweaty Dearborn gaggle started by asking what Biden made of Booker calling him “the architect of mass incarceration” — a reference to his involvement with the passage of the 1994 crime bill — Biden let out a little gust of a sigh before answering. “Cory knows that’s not true.” He seemed weary of the question, and aware that it wasn’t going away.

Biden has largely led in the polls since entering the Democratic primary. Yet his front-runner status is complex: a cornerstone of his primary support is the black community — a recent poll from YouGov and The Economist showed Biden with as much as 65 percent of black support — even as his decades-long record on racial issues has transmuted into something deeply troubling to some Democratic voters. Though Sen. Elizabeth Warren has nipped at his heels in recent polls, Biden remains a peculiar front-runner — numerically indisputable yet, perhaps, fatally flawed.

Biden has a number of swirling factors to thank for his strength with black Democrats. He was President Obama’s vice president and has staked out a spot in the primary’s relatively uncrowded moderate lane — one that ideologically suits many black voters just fine. He’s also hit on a lurking note of pessimism among some black voters about what sort of person they think might be “electable” in a country that made Donald Trump president after the first black man had the job. Biden’s general election proposition, after all, involves winning over white Trump voters who some Democrats have spent the past three years accusing of racism and xenophobia.

Something about the man himself seems to be resonating with black voters, too. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a Democratic power broker, told me that Biden’s greatest asset with black voters might well be his own life story, which is strewn with personal tragedy. “We can be no more noble than what our experiences allow us to be. And black voters, by and large, see so much of their experiences in Joe Biden.”

The cornerstone of Biden’s candidacy is support from the black community and his long-standing relationships in it. In June, he attended Rep. James Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” and spoke to Rev. Al Sharpton.

WIN MCNAMEE / SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

But while Joseph Robinette Biden, the Irish-American speaker of self-conscious Scrantonese, is black voters’ current choice in a Democratic primary featuring two viable black candidates, there’s a sense that the winds could shift at any moment. He spent the better part of the summer relitigating his decades-long voting record. His opponents have pressed him on what they say is an antiquated outlook on race relations in America, all in an effort to chip away at his support among people of color. Prominent Democrats openly fret that he might be too old for the job. The supposed ephemera has accumulated against him even as the numbers check out nicely on paper.

The oddity for present-day Joe Biden is that he was sure America already knew him and what he was all about. But the politics of 2019’s Democratic Party can be slipshod and capricious. Its candidates are viewed more often than not through a kaleidoscopic refraction of peoples’ frustrations with the system or their anger at the president. Biden isn’t really “Uncle Joe” these days, but he presents a pretty enough picture; squint and you’ll see the halcyon Democratic era of the Obamas. If things stay that way — for black voters most especially — Biden might yet win a presidential nomination. But one or two ticks off the mark and the colors and patterns all change. Suddenly Biden could look like a wholly different man.

Biden’s current resonance with black voters is perhaps chiefly owed to Obama, a man he once called “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

In one sense it’s ironic that Biden’s Achilles heel is the past, since a central argument of his campaign is that he can turn back the clock — but not too far back. He wants voters to remember him from the placid (by comparison) days of the Obama administration. Further back in Biden’s past, things get iffier. To that end, it is Obama’s name that Biden seems to mention most on the campaign trail — so much so that at the recent NAACP national convention, moderator April Ryan asked Biden if he used the former president as a “crutch.” (The answer was no. He then went on to talk about Obama some more.) Obama, it should be noted, is wildly popular among Democrats these days — a Gallup post-presidency poll found that he had a 95 percent favorability rating.

The continued Obama name-dropping might have seemed cringeworthy following Biden’s opponents’ critiques — verging on an I-have-black-friends line of defense — but it was also powerful. Many black voters buy the idea that if Biden was good enough for Obama, Biden’s good enough for them. Sheila Hill, an NAACP convention attendee from Arlington, Texas, was emblematic of many voters when she put her fondness of Biden in familial terms: “Joe came up like he’s a member of the family, like he might sit down and have a bite to eat, pull him up a plate, let him get some greens and cornbread. And you know how everyone was introduced? He didn’t need to introduce himself because he’s part of the family.”

A lynchpin of the Biden campaign’s strategy is embracing President Obama’s legacy whenever possible.

SAUL LOEB / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

A couple of days later, in the midst of the Booker vs. Biden news cycle, I was sitting in the Indianapolis Airport when I spotted Rev. Al Sharpton across the terminal. I was coming home from the National Urban League Conference, where I had squished myself into an uncomfortable chair to watch the crowd titter as Rep. Tim Ryan walked on stage to Johnny Cash. I had spent the morning with one ear on the speeches and one eye on Twitter, where Biden acolytes were touting a general election head-to-head poll that put him several points up on Trump in Ohio, the only Democrat ahead of the president. Sharpton had been there too, addressing the assembled members of the civil rights group.

“I think that he certainly enjoys a lot from the Obama connection,” Sharpton said, wearing a beautifully tailored suit and reclining in his seat just in front of the gate. “That’s what I think Biden’s hidden advantage is, deservedly or not: he gets associated credit for Obama dealing with Trayvon [Martin] and Obama dealing with policing commissions.”

(Despite numerous requests for this story on black voters, the campaign did not make Biden available for an interview with FiveThirtyEight.)

Sharpton, for one, seemed unsurprised by Biden’s lead over Sens. Kamala Harris and Booker. “You can’t now take the black vote for granted, and Joe has relationships,” he said. “And they’re long-standing relationships. You need a Jim Clyburn in South Carolina, I don’t care who you are.” By his estimation, Harris and Booker still had a chance to win over black voters, but their paths were far from assured. “I think that racial politics has changed — not dramatically, but to some degree — post-Obama because the novelty is no longer there.”

Sharpton, who expertly fielded the handshakes of a stream of strangers as we spoke, has himself entertained white candidates like Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem. He was judging the 2020 Democrats, he told me, on the strength of their platforms. For what it was worth, he liked Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan, a framework to solve fiscal and societal inequities that affect the black community.

The quiet stirring of businessmen near the gate told me it would soon be boarding time. I asked Sharpton how much time Harris and Booker had until it was too late. The end of September, he answered. “Unless of course, Joe does something absolutely off the wall,” he said, chuckling. “Which is not beyond the possible — we are talking about Joe.”

Biden has caught heat from activists for unpopular policies of the Obama administration, like deportations.

BASTIAAN SLABBERS / NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

There’s a bookstore near my office that I sometimes browse on my lunch hour, a happy way to avoid the harsh fluorescence of office life. Over the summer, a book caught my eye: “Hope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery.” The cover featured a cartoon Obama dangling from the end of a rope ladder — which itself was dangling from an airborne helicopter — while grasping for Biden, trying to pull him up. A few shelves away was the title, “Hugs from Obama: A Photographic Look Back at the Warmth and Wisdom of President Barack Obama.” While bookstores on Manhattan’s Upper West Side cater to a specific subset of America, the books’ mere existence tells a person something: a lot of Democrats still really like Barack Obama and his moderate-in-2019 policies. That’s why the lynchpin of the Biden strategy is embracing the former president’s legacy and coalition whenever possible.

Sometimes, though, that strategy can catch Biden heat. At the second Democratic debate at the end of July, he said that illegal immigrants should “get in line” and wait to enter the country legally. Julián Castro, Obama’s former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, skewered the administration’s deportation policy. “It looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” Castro told Biden in a heated exchange.

Biden faced fallout from this exchange. Activists said that he had been echoing conservative talking points, so he met with Latino leaders in person to smooth things over.

“To me that was surprising because I had written that line for Barack Obama multiple times in every immigration speech we ever did,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau told me. “Even language that was, in the Obama years, approved and fine and culturally sensitive — it’s suddenly not.” (A former senior Obama White House advisor said of the debate, “On the Obama side we’re not defensive. The party and the country are in different places than we were in 2008. It would be silly to run on the exact same policies and ideas that we implemented.”)

That’s in part because of the conversation happening online. A favorite line of the Biden campaign is that Twitter isn’t real life, a nod to the fact that young, progressive, vociferously anti-Biden voices seem most amplified on the social networking site but are less representative of the broader base of the party. “We’re not going to let Twitter dictate this primary process for us,” said Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to the Biden campaign. “If we did, frankly, I think we’d spend all our time talking about 1994,” a reference to the 1994 crime bill, Biden’s support of which has helped label him as almost-Republican in certain circles.

The campaign operation has been focused instead on messaging Biden’s moderation and his close ties to Obama. On the morning of the third debate in mid-September, the campaign tweeted out a video with the caption, “Barack Obama was a great president. We don’t say that enough.” Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager, wrote, “Barely a week goes by where some Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t directly or indirectly criticize Pres. Obama. The attacks are out of touch with the majority view of the Democratic Party voters.”

In order to win the nomination in a crowded race, Biden needs to cultivate support across demographic groups, to at least feint at his ability to win back the Obama coalition in the general election. His bedrock of support is black voters. Black voters made up around one-quarter of the 2016 Democratic primary electorate and are a crucial demographic group for any candidate. According to Gallup, 63 percent of non-Hispanic black Democratic voters self-identify as moderate or conservative. This, even as the Democratic Party overall has gotten more liberal — 2018 was the first year that over half of Democrats (51 percent) identified as liberal (in 1994, that number was only 25 percent.)

But while black voters have remained more moderate or conservative, white voters have become increasingly likely to identify as liberal — 65 percent of non-Hispanic white Democrats called themselves liberal and have become rapidly more liberal on issues of race over the past 10 years. With white liberals comprising a key demographic not just in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, but also in the media, it’s no wonder that Biden’s campaign has felt the pile-on of Twitter chatter.

Yet Biden has given his progressive critics ample opportunity to say he’s carelessly retrograde when he talks about race. In early August, for example, he said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” While he immediately tried to correct himself, Biden has a long-time reputation for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Favreau told me there was “an anxiety that lasted throughout the White House [years] — ‘will Biden say something sort of off?’ Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch — it was that he was a blowhard,” he said.

While a summer of attacks hasn’t shaken Biden’s black support overall, younger black voters don’t seem to like what they see as much as older black voters. CNN polling analysis from this summer showed that Biden’s overall support from black voters is 44 percent, but his support with black Americans under the age of 50 is lower, at 36 percent. CNN modeling suggested that his support is likely less than 30 percent among black voters under the age of 30. A recent poll suggested that Warren might be making inroads with black voters. She has also gained overall on Biden in key states like Iowa and in some national polls.

Younger voters, black ones included, are concerned about issues of race and justice — things like fixing the school-to prison-pipeline, lowering incarceration rates for black men and curbing police violence. Which is why Biden’s vote on the 1994 crime bill has become such a problem and a fixation for the campaign. It might be that younger voters, who previously only knew Biden as the friendly older man next to Obama, are perturbed when they see the crime bill through 2019 eyes: mandatory life sentences after “three strikes” for federal crimes and incentivizing states to pursue harsher sentencing.

Biden, January 1990

LAURA PATTERSON / CQ ROLL CALL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Obama has reportedly expressed worry that Biden World advisors are too old school for the candidate’s good. Some of his advisors, like Sen. Ted Kaufman and Mike Donilon, have been with Biden for decades.

But younger advisors have come on board, too — Schultz and his deputy, Kate Bedingfield, are of a newer generation — and Sanders, a high-profile hire who served on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, is 29 years old. I asked Sanders, who is black, what if any advice she had given to Biden about talking to younger black voters. “I’m not going to divulge the particulars of the conversations that I have with Vice President Biden, but what I’ll say is that he and I have a good rapport, we have a good relationship and the nature of our relationship is that Joe Biden is a frank guy, he’s authentic and he speaks his mind and he empowers the people around him to do the same.”

The polls, Sanders said, bore out that Biden’s approach was working. “Anyone who purports that we don’t understand this moment or our campaign doesn’t get it — I think we uniquely understand this moment because this has been our argument from day one.”

But the crime bill remains a vulnerability for the campaign, something that engenders defensiveness from the candidate. In June, while answering a question about prison reform he brought up the crime bill, “which you’ve been conditioned to say is a bad bill,” he told the audience.

Biden has spent a lot of time in a defensive crouch about the legislation. His proposed criminal justice reform plan outlines ways to reduce incarceration, a pointed policy rebuke to the effects of the 1994 bill. But at events, he goes to lengths to defend what he calls the good parts of the bill — including the Violence Against Women Act — and his surrogates are quick to say that people are purposefully leaving out the historical context of what America was like when the legislation was passed. Clyburn — who has not yet endorsed a candidate — recalled for me a town hall meeting he had back in the 1990s in a mostly black town in South Carolina. “I spoke out against mandatory minimums, I spoke out against the crack cocaine policy. I almost got physically attacked in that place. There wasn’t a white person in the room,” he said. “To them, crack cocaine was a scourge in the African American community and they supported this crackdown.”

Biden’s grappling with his pre-Obama history is fraught, in part, because before being Obama’s vice president, he wasn’t much of a known figure in black communities. When Biden briefly ran for president in the 1988 election — a June to September endeavor that ended in a plagiarism scandal — he had little apparent appeal in the black community. A pre-scandal poll from that summer shows that he didn’t even register with black voters — he was at 0 percent while Jesse Jackson, one of the first major black Democratic candidates, had 48 percent of the black vote.

Still, hopes for Biden were high, particularly in the political media. One Los Angeles Times story from that June called Biden “the white Jesse Jackson” and noted that his opposition to federally mandated busing was savvy, “a sign of both his keen political instinct and a social imagination — a sense of the real-life consequences of government action that is rare in Washington.” Biden opposed busing because it threatened to destroy “the consensus on civil rights within the white middle class that permitted progress’ for blacks,” the story surmised. Even on hot-button issues like race, Biden was proud of his ability to foster compromise and centrism. It’s a legacy that hasn’t aged as well in a Democratic Party which is more apt to burn its one-time idols than study their historiography.

The day after the second debate, Jonathan Kinloch, a black Democratic Party official in Detroit, sat with me at a local cafe eating forkfuls of something sweet while saying something bitter: “Based on where we’ve come over these past three years and looking at the person, that Tasmanian Devil in the White House, it’s going to take another same sort of type of white man to go toe-to-toe with him.”

Kinloch doesn’t think America is going to elect a black candidate, not right now. “I’ve come to only one conclusion: Trump was elected out of eight years of repudiation for having a black man in the office. I think right now, where this country is, the flames that have been fanned by Donald Trump, we have to take a measured approach to this upcoming election.”

Biden faced blowback in July’s Democratic primary debate for his comments about fostering compromise with segregationist senators and for his stance on federally mandated busing.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

This is the sort of electability argument that the Biden campaign can’t quite say out loud, but to which some black voters seem at least partially resigned. They might not love Biden’s semi-frequent verbal washouts but Trump in the White House grates on them more. It’s this logic, as bright and shining as their candidate’s teeth, that Biden allies allude to. Whatever his sins, whatever his prior stances, Biden’s 2020 intentions are pure — certainly purer than Trump’s. And, the theory goes, he’s got the sort of mass appeal that will talk sense into Obama voters who defected to Trump the last go-round. (Recently, a whistleblower complaint surfaced claiming that Trump leaned on the Ukrainian president to find damaging information on Biden and his son Hunter. In response to the news, Biden said that Trump was going to such extremes only because “he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”)

There’s a risk, of course, that in trying to appeal to everyone, in refusing to play too woke, Biden risks flagging enthusiasm from black voters come the general election. The black vote disastrously didn’t surface for Hillary Clinton in 2016. There’s also some serious doubt that any candidate besides the singular first black president could inspire high turnout in the black community. In a Detroit press gaggle, I asked Biden how he planned to get Obama-era levels of votes in the black community in key general election states. I got a typically-rambling response in return. “They want to know someone — first of all, are they telling them the truth, are they laying out straight exactly what they’re going to do? No double talk. What are you going to do. And then secondly, ‘Do I believe you understand me? Do I believe you know my heart?’ I’m not a black man, to state the obvious, but I’ve gone out of my way to understand the best I possibly can what the concerns are.”

Some of the weirdness of the 2020 primary, including Biden’s leading it, is that for a party professing to be fighting for the soul of America — like, for real for real this time — there isn’t much soaring idealism afoot. It’s a contest about pragmatism. As Jill Biden put it, “You may like another candidate better but you have to look at who’s going to win … Joe is that person.”

“People are not excited, they’re not inspired,” said Anton Gunn, Obama’s former South Carolina political director. “Young people want to be inspired, everyone wants to be inspired. I don’t think we have a sense from anyone in the field that’s inspiring.”

When I spoke with Jackson, I asked what he thought about black voters’ support for Biden, his old rival. “The absence of Trump is not the presence of justice,” he said. “In the days to come I’m sure those who put forth the most hope for tomorrow and plans will gain the most traction in time. That may be Biden, but the question is wide open.”

The morning of the second debate, I met Rep. Cedric Richmond, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a co-chair of the Biden campaign, in the lounge of a downtown Detroit hotel. Various suits wandered the halls and a forlorn offering of pasta salad stood sentinel in one corner. I asked Richmond about the same thing I asked Sanders: had the campaign done any additional preparation with the candidate to ready for a new racial discourse?

“I didn’t know we had a new language on race,” Richmond answered wryly. Millennials, he went on, “are the beneficiaries of things that they don’t know they’re beneficiaries of — for example, murder was at an all time high in the early ‘90s. The streets were violent. You had children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sons being killed in the streets, you had rampant carjackings, you had drug dealing everywhere. The African American community was up in arms asking people to do stuff.”

For black voters, Richmond said, the stakes of the 2020 election were clear: “Donald Trump could be a one man end of Reconstruction.” Beating him is what matters. Dwelling on Biden’s vocabulary is just frippery by comparison.

Biden supporters cheer during the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention in June. South Carolina, with its predominantly black electorate, is crucial to Biden’s success in the primary.

LEAH MILLIS / REUTERS

Richmond told me the campaign sees a path to victory through the South, a region packed with black votes. Dave Wasserman, editor at The Cook Political Report, agreed. “I think his strengths lie on Super Tuesday,” he said of the slate of March 3 primaries a month after the very first contest in Iowa. Candidates like Warren are more likely to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, Wasserman said. Biden campaign officials have told reporters they don’t think he needs to win Iowa, where liberal white activist voters hold sway. “But when you’re talking about a massive one-day clearance sale on Super Tuesday where it’s all about mass appeal and name recognition and strength — particularly black voters in the south, that’s where Biden really needs to hold on,” Wasserman said.

South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary is a bellwether for Biden’s Southern strategy with a primary electorate that’s almost two-thirds black. Biden was at 43 percent in a recent CBS News/YouGov poll of the state, and it is a must-win for him. But strategists there hardly seem to think that things are sewn up for Biden. “I don’t believe polls because the same polls at this time in 2007 would show Obama was losing to Hillary Clinton by 18 points,” Gunn said. Obama would go on to win South Carolina. ”We kept organizing. Organizing is about touching people and knowing how many voters you’ve identified.” Booker’s field organization looked pretty good to Gunn, though he said it wasn’t as robust as Obama’s had been in the 2008 primary. “Definitely don’t write off Booker,” said a senior South Carolina Democrat who asked for anonymity to more freely discuss the campaign. “He has the best operation.”

I headed to South Carolina in late August, just as my inbox was signaling crunchtime of the presidential campaign slog: Buttigieg in L.A., Warren in Washington state, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Biden in South Carolina.

As a rule, Biden campaign events — which take place less often than other 2020 candidates’ — tend to be large affairs. His late August town hall in Spartanburg was no exception. Massive rollup American flag displays were stretched taut at either end of an echoing room. The campaign’s “Biden President” logo was slapped up everywhere. The omission of the word “for” was a not-so-subliminal message about the job he wants. A large contingent of media typed in back; a brawny blonde reporter joked with a brawny salt-and-pepper reporter about some home state sports thing.

Basically every Biden event — every 2020 campaign event for that matter — is a chance for a secular revival. And Biden is good at being churchy; he knows what to give a crowd. He can be folksy and familiar — the ghost of Uncle Joe — as well as discursive on issues of morality. When talking about guns or abortion he is most eloquent; you get the sense that Biden has devoted a whole lot of time inside his head to those topics. He starts every town hall or speech by setting the stakes with a mention of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017: “It shocked the whole world.”

Biden’s speech is riddled with “I’m being serious” and “seriously, folks” and “no kidding, folks,” to the point where it’s become a running joke in the press corps. I spoke with a former speechwriter of his who thinks that the “folks” tics might be something Biden has developed over time to deal with the stutter he had in childhood. “It’s how he handles transitions,” he told me.

Biden has struggled to gain ground with younger voters despite his strong showing in the polls overall.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

The childhood stutter is one of many personal details that voters have learned about Biden over the years — people have a relationship with him. Those I spoke with who know Biden all tended to say the same thing: he actually is an earnest guy. The care is real. But there’s also a carefully refined rubric of folksiness at work, all mixed with a 76-year-old’s out-of-date sensibilities. Those things can rub some people the wrong way, but both might be political strengths in the general election. “Above all else, it’s just human, it’s a storytelling voice,” Biden’s former speechwriter told me about the candidate’s preferred public voice. “It actively tries to connect with the people who are literally in front of him. Not with some kind of abstract, ethereal voter demographic or anything like that. It’s personal.” In Spartanburg, for instance, Biden talked about women deserving equal pay, but framed the problem through the lens of blue-collar men wanting their wives to be paid more. It wasn’t exactly a politically correct formulation of the issue, but its practicality rang true.

There is a gentle affect about Biden, too. When telling stories about his adult children, he refers to them as “honey” — the doting dad. Stories about his parents start with “Joey …” and suddenly he’s the adoring son. He apologizes for blocking the sign language interpreter. When he shakes hands with people, he stares deeply into their eyes — the kind of eye contact that some have called creepy but others find intoxicating coming from a very famous person. Biden has an ability to make people feel as if he has really listened. One voter I talked to in Spartanburg, Vanessa Logan, emailed me later to say that she’d asked Biden a detailed question; he had made sure his aides got her contact info so they could send her his book for a more in-depth explanation.

This attentiveness coupled with the routine vulnerability Biden shows is partially why people can’t help but be a little fond of him. “He’s down to earth, has a lot of warmth,” Sheran Littlejohn, a middle-aged black voter who came out to see Biden during his South Carolina swing, told me. “At first I thought about Kamala Harris, but then she started coming down on her own party. She went after Biden.” Somehow, even as Biden is running to protect America from Trump, he’s made voters feel like they want to protect him.

A few hours after the Spartanburg event I was at Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, where it was sweltering hot even a little after 5 p.m. The only breeze came from the pep band flag twirlers entertaining a waiting crowd and the ladies in it who sat fanning themselves. Biden was running late, so I dipped into the library for a few minutes of A/C, then strolled through the crowd. I found Rosa Webber, 64, under the shade of a Magnolia tree, waiting for the event to begin with her friends from the Gaffney Women’s Democratic Club.

Webber had already made up her mind about who she’ll be voting for, come February’s primary. “If he was good enough for Obama, he’s good enough to be my president,” she said of Biden. But Anita Chambers was still candidate shopping. She liked Biden and Harris, but, “also, what’s her name? Elizabeth Warren. I like her. She’s very outspoken, very direct.”

Webber didn’t think any of the women could win, though. I asked why and before she could answer, Annette Byers, 75, interrupted: “Because the men, they’re going to do females just the way they did Hillary.” Webber agreed. “Yeah, the men are not going to vote for women. I don’t think it’s time for the women to step up.” Chambers tried to say something positive about the promise of a reinvigorated women’s movement. Byers wasn’t moved. “They will cheat her out of the election just like they did with Hillary. They will lie, lie, lie.” The conversation ended soon after, as a man with a honey-soaked accent got on the microphone and commenced proceedings.

Biden’s long career in the public eye means that voters have formed a long-standing relationship with him. This familiarity has helped him weather blunders and flare-ups throughout the campaign that might have endangered lesser-known candidates.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

Jalon Roberson, a 22-year-old senior at Limestone, said that when he and other black students talked 2020, he found most of them were still on the fence about whom to support. Roberson liked both Biden and Harris, but saw issues with both. “I like that she’s devoted to law, but a lot of her past doesn’t line up with the angle she’s taking now,” he said of Harris. “A lot of black males are going to jail, getting put away, but now she comes out and she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m for black people, I eat pork chops, blah blah blah.’ I feel like she’s trying too hard to appeal to black people. I feel like there is a way to try and come across as sincere but you have to first acknowledge that you’re an outsider and say, ‘Hey, I want to appeal to you guys.’”

Biden, Roberston said, seemed like a moral guy, a good person. But, “he was in Iowa and he slipped up and he said poor kids are just as talented and bright as white kids. And I know that’s not what he meant and that’s not how he meant it to come across, but you can tell that there is an unconscious bias.” Roberson wanted to ask Biden about how to tackle that bias.

Roberson did get a question in, just not that one. As the beginning of golden hour set in over the crowd and the hottest part of the day came to an end, Biden was taking questions from the crowd in blue-and-white shirtsleeves. “A lot of young people my age, my race, we are trying to find the incentive to vote Democratic. Why should we trust the party, and how would your administration go about holding the party accountable?” Roberson asked him.

A good question, a fair question, Biden said. He began to weave his way through the folding chairs, a meandering walk to make eye contact with students seated a little further back on the lawn. One young black man stood on a short brick retaining wall in sunglasses, a pink button-down and a hoodie. Biden made his way toward the young man while he answered, hoping to drink up some eye contact. Just as Biden approached, almost standing in front of him, the young man flipped his hood up defiantly and Biden skillfully pivoted away. A confrontational moment avoided.

The answer continued for another few minutes, and the young man kept his eyes on Biden throughout. Biden mentioned the number of incarcerated black men and the crime bill — how most black people had supported it at the time. He talked about racial profiling in Newark, New Jersey — his favorite dig at Booker. Then, “We have systemic racism in the United States of America and it’s a white man’s problem. White men are responsible for it, not black men.” The young man on the wall said, “I agree,” to that, and clapped. It was a good answer for Biden, overall. He got applause for lines about teaching prisoners how to read, positioning prisoners to get proper housing after their time served. But Jalon Roberson and the young man in the hoodie are college kids, not prisoners. It struck me that Biden’s answer wholly ignored most of the issues that the black students at Limestone and elsewhere told me they were most worried about: student debt, raising the minimum wage, the environment. Biden’s defensiveness of his past had dominated the answer. Though he did throw in a sentence or two at the end about the American Dream — “that’s why we have to rebuild the middle class and this time, we bring everybody along” — he didn’t offer any specifics.

Biden had wanted desperately to prove himself worthy to the audience of students, but a vast gulf of age and experience separated him from Roberson and the young man in the hoodie. “Let’s hear it one more time for the next president of the United States, Joe Biden!” the MC intoned over the microphone. Everyone clapped. That was that.

If Biden wins the nomination — his third attempt to do so — he will be 77 years old. The party he leads has changed rapidly during his time in public life, becoming more liberal and diverse.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Clyburn said about Biden’s tragedies. How the way he dealt with them had raised Biden in the esteem of many black voters, given the systemic hardships inflicted on them and their families over a couple of centuries in this country. Biden repurposed his suffering so it could be something more — a blessed experience, Clyburn said.

I’ve also spent a lot of time wondering why Biden ran for president this time around. He says publicly it has a lot to do with the wishes of his son Beau, who died in 2015, that he stay involved in public life. There’s ego at work, of course — it takes a massive one for a person to ever even consider running for president. But why after running for president twice, and losing soundly each time, would you do so again at age 76?

Biden might feel some sense of vocation this time around. Being a Catholic, he would recognize the Sunday school-ness of it all: what are you called to do? The way he gets fierce when he talks about winning back the Midwest, the bluster he spits when speaking about Trump’s misdeeds — it makes you think that there’s something twinging inside Biden that says, without a hint of irony, “I alone can fix this.” He wants to give people enough time to come to terms with a new American paradigm, while offering the familiar visage of an older white man standing guard. Biden sees himself as a singular salve and so do many black voters, pragmatic about the ability of America to readily accept change.

Biden isn’t alone, of course. There’s a moral imperative for each of the top three primary contenders, all in their 70s. Bernie Sanders and Warren proffer a promise of a golden, hopeful new system; Biden the restoration of one that was pretty good, if not perfect. If anything, the Democratic primary is something of a paean to old age, to lifelong ambitions and vocations yet to be fulfilled. It’s a monthslong slog as a trio of older white people bid to lead a country more black and brown than it’s ever been. I can see them — with more years behind them than ahead, in a world so different from the one they were born into — lingering longer than the rest of us over the most hashed-out lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

“You and I are old / Old age hath yet his honour and his toil / Death closes all: but something ere the end / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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blueraith · 7 years ago

Text

Because I Was So Fucking Bored

I decided to take up reading Actual Published Books (TM) again. A lot of fanfiction was updating as fast as my eternally bored, temporarily out of work, crazed, self needed. It was one of the very few leisurely activities I could take on without getting constantly questioned. I couldn’t decide what fictional book I wanted to buy, and didn’t want to take the time to research any, so I decided to go non-fiction. Besides, haven’t read a non-fiction book in literally years.

In the end, I settled on The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans. Always wondered how the fuck Germany allowed themselves to be taken in my Nazism, and also because of recent events. My high school always hand waved the World Wars. Like, ‘oh, yeah, then there was this war with the Germans, ‘Murica came in and kicked their asses, saved some Jews, and that was the end of it. Read this diary about this kid and that’s about as far as we’re gonna take you.’

So, I’m reading this book, and I can’t help but draw some alarming similarities to what happened with Germany, and what is happening now. Similarities, mind you, not one-to-one causation, before any mentions of Godwin’s Law comes up. Because, as it turns out, the German political landscape was much more complicated than ‘Eviillll Natzis!’ At least, before said evil Nazis came to power. What I was most alarmed by, was America’s rising fanatical Nationalism and how that relates to both World Wars. (I have also been listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast on World War I.) Turns out that both world wars had countries with raging cases of nationalism out the wazoo. But Dan doesn’t really get into the meat of nationalism like this book does.

There were several reasons Germany ultimately dove into that fanatical, and outright murderous case of nationalism. First, the book points out that one can’t assume that Germans were fatigued or lazy in their voting. The opposite is actually the case, Germans were apparently great voters. Turn outs of around 80%. That’s insane by American standards. These Germans lived in a very different time. Politics were often the center of their social lives. These guys made clubs for pretty much everything. If you were interested in joining a book club, for instance, you’d probably have to join one that fit your political ideals. If you were a Social Democrat, then you’d join a Social Democrat book club. But wait, there are two different types of Social Democrats, because the party split along nationalist issues. So, if you were more into nationalism, you’d probably want to join a Independent Social Democrat book club.

And that’s really a symptom of why Germany fell into control of the Nazis. Their political parties were insane. There were six major political parties at any given moment during the Republic years. (The years following the end of WWI and the start of WW2. Wiemar Republic years, basically.) The Social Democrats were the most popular, but their parliament was ultimately unstable because of how many parties there were, and there could be more, smaller parties, than those six if the major parties had any schisms like the Social Democrats ultimately did.

Another was the resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, which is probably the most well known symptom of the rise of Nazi Germany. Germany, and the world, fell into a great depression, but nowhere was this economic collapse more pronounced in Germany. They suffered a case of hyper inflation, one of the worst cases history has seen before or since, and the treaty was not helping any matters with the reparations. Many Germans resented that their government’s money had to go to these other countries, more specifically the French in particular, while their economy collapsed around them. And this hyper inflation was extreme. Before its start, around four German marks were needed to match an American dollar. Towards its height, well over a billion marks were needed to match the dollar. That’s right. Over a fucking billion. I’m not exaggerating whatsoever. Prices in stores were often written in chalk because they would change on the hour.

But these two issues are specifically German. America did go through a depression recently, but nowhere to the extreme as the pre-WW2 hyper inflation that Germany suffered. We have two political powers, and therefore aren’t as unstable and hard to predict as Germany’s six.

Where we are similar to pre-Nazi Germany is our growing sense of nationalism and paranoia that something is out to get us. In Germany’s case, it was the Jews, the ‘societal unfit,’ and the gays. Ours are illegal immigrants, Muslims, quite frankly black people, and—similarly—the gays. In Germany’s case, many far-right pundits blames the Jews first and foremost for their country’s complicated and far reaching issues. They blamed the Jews for the economy, accused them of getting rich while of the rest of the people’s misfortune. They blamed them for society’s move to secularism, ironically, and for ‘stabbing the army in the back’ during WWI.

In our case, American alt-right figures blame illegals for taking jobs that not a single white, middle class, American male would ever want to take on. They blame the Muslims for not ‘policing their own’ and committing what are honestly statistically rare terrorist attacks, and are ignoring the fact that growing nationalism and xenophobia are causing a radicalization of young, conservative, white males who are actually committing more acts of terrorism than radical Islamics are. Black people are protesting against issues of institutional racism, and white people are attributing this only as an unjust attack against their ‘people’ and ‘culture’ along the right. And the right are blaming LGBT issues for ‘distracting from the real issues’ and are attributing the community to a growing sense of immorality. Also similar to the Germans and their views of ‘the gays’ pre-Nazism.

And, now that I think about it, perhaps our political spectrum is similar to the Germans’ all those years ago. With the split of the conservative voting block into the Republicans and the Tea Party movement, and the Democrats with an as of unnamed voting block that is more socialist in nature. These were more than likely Bernie Sanders voters. Both splits are, in my opinion that I have admittedly not researched very heavily so take this with a grain of salt, probably what caused such an odd choice of presidency that Trump is. He is not what the good ol’ boys would have wanted in the Republican party. The GOP utterly failed to see where the wind was blowing with their more rural and working class voters and didn’t adjust. Just kept throwing up rich white guys with political pedigrees for generations behind them. My own family often spoke of how they wanted someone in power who wasn’t ‘part of the system’ and ‘politically corrupt.’

As for the left, the Democrats had a similar issue. Bernie Sanders isn’t someone they ever would have chose for their front runner. And depending on who you ask, allegedly sabotaged him appropriately. Anecdotally, I have seen many left and liberal voters complain that the system was broken, declared they wouldn’t vote, or even voted for Trump themselves because, while some of Sanders voters were economically left, they were extremely to the right on social issues. This likely doomed Hilary’s chances in the long run.

And this isn’t even getting to Germany’s issues with staunch, traditionalist values. Many Germans feared a loss of cultural identity following their loss of WWI. This was the time of the Roaring ‘20s, remember, and world wide rise of secularism. Feminism was sweeping through several countries, Germany included. Sex was increasingly on the rise thanks to contraceptives. All of this saw a swift backlash of the religious, sexist, or traditional. The Catholic Church, both in the Vatican, and the leadership in Germany, wrote harshly against contraceptives. Men, young and old, of the far-right started ever more clubs against both feminism and voting rights. There was this rather extreme doubt towards the Wiemar Republic during this time. The Army and courts staunchly refused to uphold laws in any neutral capacity. The courts in particular were egregious. Often giving slaps on the wrists for actual political assassins of the far-right because their ‘selfless nationalism’ was ‘inspiring.’ This due almost entirely to the fact that the judges in these courts were from the time of Imperial Germany and still wanted the Kaiser to return to power. The resented the democracy, and so did the army. Many traditional Germans wished for a return of an authoritarian figure as staunch, powerful, and unyielding as the Bismark had been. In fact, here’s were the Treaty of Versailles comes back because Republic supporters had signed it, many traditional, far-right Germans blamed the Republicans for forcing them in this humiliating position.

Again, this is not a one-to-one comparison. Thank God, because America would be in a lot of trouble if we were in such a mess as Germany was back then. In all of that, where we are most similar to Germany is this growing backlash among young men towards issues like feminism and the left. I am on Reddit quite frequently. I see, anecdotally admittedly, many young men grow a resentment towards what they call ‘feminazis’ and, more rarely thank the lord because this term is particularly cringeworthy, ‘libtards’. Reddit is primarily made up of young men from 18-30 years of age. Most of them are American or Canadian, and white. There are some alarming Reddit communities where some of their more radical members’ resentment towards women and feminism is extremely apparent. The Red Pill, and its many spin off communities, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and at its most radical, Incels. Which, disgustingly, stands for involuntary celibate. Now, those are extremists. There is a more general sense of sexism within the most popular communities too. Any /r/news story that features a woman getting arrested is likely to have an upvoted phrase of ‘pussy pass denied’ in there somewhere. There is even a subreddit of the same name, actually. I regularly see young men post about fearing marriage because apparently women are all out to get what are likely, given how young Reddit actually skews, non-existent, imaginary assets. TumblrInAction is a community entirely dedicated to these guys going out, finding the most radical feminist posts they can, reposting them of Reddit where they mock them, perpetuate lies that this is what modern feminism looks like wholesale, and pretends that many of the more extreme posts aren’t satire in and of themselves. In many parts of Reddit, feminism has grown synonymous to crying wolf by ‘special snowflakes,’ ‘SJWs,’ and ‘feminazis.’ Or, women who have become manhating, boogeymen out to get them in particular. Granted, this is just Reddit. I use them as an example here because this is a community largely made up of young men and it is easy to watch them propagate ideas and thoughts among their many communities in real time. I am certain there are other sites where this can be done, but I honestly have no desire to visit some of the more extreme.

Where this concerns Germany, there was this growing sense among the far-right that German women were not doing their duty in raising and tending to the next generation of noble, strong, young German children, though they were most concerned with boys. German women had gained the right to vote, they were getting jobs increasingly, and the birth rate was falling due to the use and education of contraceptives. As I mentioned, clubs were literally made to protest feminism. There were also clubs created that focused on hiking, camping, singing nationalist songs, all excluding women. For the most part, far-right Germans blamed their women straying from the ‘German ideal’ on Americanization. This was also a time when censorship was lifted, and movies, books, art, and radio shows were increasingly embracing modernism.

I’m not about to claim that America is about to become a dictatorship as murderous as Nazi Germany. But with the rise of nationalism, the fact that many white supremacists and racists have come out of the woodwork and homophobia too, it has become apparent that we are forgetting what can happen when these types of ideals are allowed to perpetuate without consequence or thought. Nazism ultimately dehumanized many of the groups they victimized to an alarming degree. Portions of America are doing this to a lesser, but still alarming, degree. The right has grown to fear these groups as a threat against them and the stranglehold their constituents have held for decades, when in reality, they aren’t ‘losing’ anything by the country becoming more egalitarian across the board. And as this is happening, both political sides are becoming more radicalized in response to the other. I cannot claim who ‘started’ the whole thing, nor do I care to. I believe this problem is more along a feedback loop, a circle of cause and effect. It does not matter who started it, ultimately our politics are becoming more partisan. Our government is becoming increasingly unwilling to cooperate across the aisle. And this is creating a political fatigue for voters across the nation. Moderates are growing less in number because the noise, irrationality, and extremism is becoming exhausting.

And this issue is getting perpetuated wholesale, across the board. I cannot even begin to assess how to fix it without sounding like a keyboard warrior. There are extreme and hostile minorities in feminism. And, despite it being a minority, for some reason, groups of young men, like those on Reddit, seem to believe that they are the majority. They react by dismissing feminism entirely, which fuels the extremists on the left, Reddit reads it again.... And the problem moves up and up. The left focuses on immigration amnesty, the right reacts with xenophobia, the left tries to streamroll over the issue because of the racism, the right reacts with more racism....

Ultimately, the Nazis came into power because of a variety of reasons, but you can boil it down to nationalism, political instability, and a growing sense of paranoia from without and within. You can see similar themes in America right now. How to fix it, who knows. All I know is that America’s radicalization is ultimately growing more violent and reactionary on the right. Hopefully they won’t grow as bad as Nazis. You know, despite the fact that there are literally neo-nazis coming out of the woodwork lately.

#politics #i was super duper bored during the hurricane #this is my report on what i have read so far

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