May, 2016 archive
Opening the Windows to Assimilation 1
The strategy is quite simple, really. Microsoft wants to turn your computer into the functional equivalent of a cell phone–something you can use, but cannot control, even as it phones home about your every action.
The Dispossessed 5
Werner Herzog’s Bear ain’t buying the hype. He’s fed up with the
Since the first black captives were sold off the boat in the English colonies in 1619, racism and economics have been mixed.
Chattel slavery was an economic system in which a few gained wealth from the forced labor of others. Racism is a legal-social-political construct developed largely in the late 1600s in Virginia to justify that servitude as something that was “meant to be.”
The two are consequently intertwined, even as they differ in kind.
Racism has been a powerful tool to control not only black and brown people, but also poor white people, a misdirection play to get them to look away, look away, look away from political economy. As Lyndon Johnson said,
Mr. Bear is quite correct. That many of Trump’s supporters may be economically disadvantaged, as well as racist, does not make them or him any less racist. It does, nevertheless, provide cover for media to ignore the racism.
Indeed, media in the United States are adept at not seeing racism, even when the “whites only” and “colored only” signs stare them in the face. One needs look no further back than Andy Griffith’s gentle, mythical Mayberry to see this: A Piedmont North Carolina town with no, nada, zilch, not one black person.*
There are persons running for President who speak capably and knowledgeably about political economy (you and I may or may not agree with their conclusions, but they speak neither from nor to ignorance).
Donald Trump, serial con artist and recidivist bankrupt, is not one of them.
(Follow the link for the rest of Mr. Bear’s post.)
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*It just occurred to me to wonder, was Mayberry a sundown town?
The Snaring Economy Comes to the Big Screen 0
Moved below the fold because it may autoplay on some systems.
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David Dayen on Wall Street’s Foreclosure Three-Card Monte 0
Part One:
Part Two:
Democracy Demagoguery in America (Updated)
2
Robert Kagan sees darkness if Donald Trump is elected. He suggests that the Republicans who are now falling in line–in some cases, falling all over themselves–to support him, because in Republican world, winning is the only thing, do not realize the implications of his rise. Here’s a snippet:
“Conservatives have been warning for decades about government suffocating liberty. But here is the other threat to liberty that Alexis de Tocqueville and the ancient philosophers warned about: that the people in a democracy, excited, angry and unconstrained, might run roughshod over even the institutions created to preserve their freedoms. As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France — that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
It has been a long time since I read de Tocqueville, but I recall the passages to which Kagan refers. The author worried that the American dream would collapse under its own weight.
(If you haven’t read de Tocqueville, you should; it captures a moment in early American history, a moment that is often misrepresented, and remains relevant today.)
Addendum, a Few Minutes Later:
Colin Woodward discusses the European view of Trumpery at the Portland Press-Herald. An excerpt:
The downside is that Trump is seeking to protect these “good Americans” in a fashion familiar to Europeans: by threatening to withdraw normal legal and constitutional protections for those seen as “traitorous others.” For European far-right nationalists like those in Hungary’s Jobbik, the British National Party or the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, this class usually includes some combination of Jews, Roma (also known as Gypsies), Muslim immigrants or foreigners from countries they dislike. For Trump, it’s Mexicans, Muslim-Americans, the journalists in the press pen or the black protester at his rally who maybe should be beaten up; he’s promised, in one such instance, to pay the legal bills of someone who tried to do just that.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
Daniel J. Evans, ex-Republican Governor of Washington, tells a story almost as an aside, an anecdote that encapsulates the excrescence that is contemporary coverage of political news.
You can read the rest–it will take only two minutes–but, really, like Clarissa, this explains it all.
Decoding De Code 0
Excerpt:
The problem that the Republican Party has right now isn’t that Trump isn’t a Republican. It’s that he is the perfect Republican.
Crafty Beers 0
You know that craft brewery? There’s a good chance it’s not. Fred Grimm describes how he got gulled.
What I didn’t notice, as I stormed the ramparts – supposed microbrew in hand – was that the Blue Moon Brewing Co. actually belongs to MillerCoors, which was sold to Molson Coors by SABMiller last year so the Justice Department would look kindly on SABMiller’s giant merger with Anheuser-Busch InBev. And all that.
. . . I’ve been an unwitting consumer of America’s leading anti-craft beer, taken in by an international conglomerate’s ploy to fend off these upstart microbreweries.
I reckon the message is that, if you want to be a been snob, know what you are being snobbish about. Me, I’ll stick to Scotch.
Dis Coarse Discourse 0
In related news of the discourse, John Freivalds, writing at The Roanoke Times, discusses the failure of established media to hold Donald Trump accountable for his lies. Here’s a bit:
Aside:
I believe that excising the qualifier, “until now,” from that sentence would render it more accurate.
