Biden and the progressives

I’m not sure what to make of President Biden.  He says good things about labor rights, economic inequality, high drug prices and curbing monopoly power.  He listens to progressives and has appointed progressives to important positions in his administration.

The economic legislation he has proposed will materially benefit the majority of Americans.  More importantly, unlike Presidents Obama and Clinton, he hasn’t proposed anything that will be actively harmful, such as deregulating the finance industry or unconditionally bailing out crooked Wall Street financiers.

The question is my mind is: Does he really mean what he says?  Or is he, like Obama and Clinton, merely setting up a plausible excuse for failure?

The economic legislation he originally proposed was an omnibus bill to build needed infrastructure, invest in “human capital” and expand the welfare state.  To get it passed, he and the Democratic leaders in Congress agreed to split the infrastructure part from the welfare part, but on condition that the infrastructure bill wouldn’t be enacted unless the Build Back Better welfare bill also was enacted.

Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona were two of the Democrats who pledged to support the Build Back Better bill.  But now they’re gone back on their word and now oppose the bill.  My morning newspaper reported that President Biden is trying to find out what they would be willing to settle for.

But what is the point of negotiating with people who won’t keep their word?

If Lyndon Johnson had been President or Senate Majority Leader, Manchin and Sinema would be stripped of their committee assignments, no bills they introduced for the benefit of their states would come up for a vote and they would be cut off from support by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—not just because they opposed their party’s program, but because they broke their word.

Another key test for President Biden is the filibuster.  A majority in the Senate has the power to change the rules so that laws can be enacted with 51 votes (or 50 plus the Vice President’s vote).  If the filibuster isn’t broken, the Democasts won’t be able to pass their voting rights act, Republican state legislatures will be able to rig the election laws and Democrats will likely lose the 2022 midterm elections.

One reasonable change in the filibuster is to restore it to its original meaning, which was unlimited debate.  Require those who want to delay a vote to go on the floor and keep talking, rather than just register their opposition and go home.  If President Biden and the Democratic leadership won’t even do that, they are not serious.

Grace and grit in southern West Virginia

Freelance writer Christopher Martin said he went to McDowell County, West Virginia because it was the poorest and least healthy county in the USA.

He found a lot of unemployment and opioid addiction there.  But he also found a surprising amount of optimism and resiliency, based on religious faith.

The area has a lot going against it.  It is hard to get to, accessible only by narrow, winding country roads along mountainsides.  Internet and cell phone connections are bad.

Coal mining, which used to be the basis of its economy, has virtually disappeared.  Walmart came in and drove local businesses out of business because they couldn’t compete.  Then it left, leaving nothing.   Local people say the area never recovered from great floods in the 2000s.

Opioid addiction and gambling addiction are big problems.  Martin saw many grandparents with grandchildren in public places, which he took to be a sign of absent parents.

At the same time, he didn’t see the outward signs of poverty and demoralization he found in big cities—no drug dealers on street corners, no bunches of young men standing around looking for trouble.  Crime exists, the murder rate is about the national average, but people don’t live in fear of crime.

He was surprised by the high level of morale among people he met and how welcoming they were to him, an outsider.  

He struck up a conversation with a retired coal miner and his wife he met at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.  After they were done, the man gave Martin his address and contact information so that, if his car ever broke down nearby, he would know where to walk for help.  Martin said he knows of areas in big cities where a car breakdown could put your life at risk.

He talked to a volunteer at a food bank. a mother of three whose husband died in March.  Despite her hard life, she gave of herself to help others.  She told Martin she had considered suicide, but “God keeps me going.”

A restaurant owner told him that when she was a college student in New York City, she was on a subway and saw a man with a seizure.  She was the only one who tried to help him.  Friends with her told her she was wrong, that the man could be running some sort of scam.  

Somebody once told this woman she only likes McDowell because she has no point of comparison, and she always answers by telling this story.

Most of the people he talked to were Trump supporters to the extent that they had any interest in national politics at all.  But he did talk to one nice young politically progressive couple, recent graduates of the state university at Morgantown.  

Unlike many progressives he’d known, they were not alienated from their home town.  Just the opposite.  They thought the community’s problems could be helped by drug legalization, by construction of a major highway to make the county more accessible and by better Internet service.

Why is modern public art so uninteresting?

Scott Alexander Suskind observed on his blog that contemporary public art is less interesting than older art, and considered a number of theories why.  Two of them seemed the most plausible to me.

One is that the older art is harder and more expensive to do than contemporary art, and contemporaries lack the genius, the money and the availability of low-paid skilled labor that made the older art possible.

The other is that in older times, the tastes of the elite and the masses were the same, and now they no longer are.  Elites no longer want to impress the masses by building something beautiful; they want to show their superior taste by creating something that they can appreciate, but the general public cannot.

LINK

Whither Tartaria? by Scott Alexander for Astral Codex Ten.

Urban Design: Why Can’t We Build Nice Neighborhoods Anymore? by Tyler Cowen for Bloomberg Opinion.  [Added 10/7/2021]

The real Great Game

THE GREAT GAME: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, by Peter Hopkirk (1990)

The Great Game was the 19th century cold war between the British Empire and Russian Empire for control of Central Asia.  To generals and statesmen in London and St. Petersburg, it must have seemed like a global game of chess.

Peter Hopkirk, in his book, The Great Game, told the story mainly from the point of view of the chess pieces —agents of empire, British and Russian, venturing alone, sometimes undercover, into territory where their governments could not protect them.

I read this book as a follow-up to reading Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which was about a young boy being groomed to be a player in the Great Game.  Hopkirk referred to Kim in his book; he said the Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu and Colonel Creighton characters were based on specific individuals.

Hopkirk gave a clear explanation of the geopolitical background, but his book also can be enjoyed as a series of real-life action-adventure stories.  The careers of some of the British political officers read like fiction.

While still in their twenties, they mastered local languages and customs well enough to disguise themselves as natives and penetrate unknown territory.  They were explorers, map-makers, spies, diplomats and sometimes commanders of troops in the field.

They command admiration—regardless of whether you think the game of empire was worth playing.

Their field of operation was mainly in what later became the Soviet Central Asian republics, but also included the Caucacus, Tibet and Xinjiang.  The Central Asian region historically has been a center of civilization, but in the 19th century, it had been overrun by warlords, bandits and slave traders. Dealing with them was no job for the timid or the trusting.

One political officer, Eldred Pottinger (not an action-hero name!), at the age of 26, was operating undercover in Herat in 1835. A Persian army with Russian advisers attacked and beseiged the city, and Pottinger offered his services to the local ruler.

He soon established himself as an effective and tireless leader. At one point, the besiegers broke through and the Herat commanders panicked, but Pottinger rallied them and drove back the attackers. In negotiations that followed, one of the Persian-Russian demands was that the Herat send Pottinger home.

This was only one of his exploits.  He died at age 32 of a fever.

Hopkirk focused mainly on British agents.  He did justice to Russian agents.  He barely mentioned the “pundits,” native Indian agents, because permanent records were not kept on them.

The pundits were regarded as more expendable than the white agents, but many of them, like Kipling’s fictional Mahbub Ali and Hurree Babu, faithfully served an empire treated them unequally.

In general, there was a high level of competence and realism on both sides. The one big exception was the occupation of Afghanistan in 1839, which replaced its ruler, Dost Mohammed, with a more compliant ruler. General Elphinstone, the commander, allowed his troops to outrage local sensibilities by drinking alcohol and seducing local women, but refused to take reasonable measures for security. The upshot was an evacuation and retreat, in which literally all but one of the 16,000 retreating troops were massacred.

What followed was 20 years of back and forth struggle for control of Afghanistan, which ended with the British inviting Dost Mohammed back.

The reasonable case for considering ivermectin

Some physicians think invermectin is useful as a treatment for Covid; others don’t.  I don’t have the medical or scientific knowledge to judge who is right.  

My view of invermectin is a form of Pascal’s Wager.  It is cheap and, if used as prescribed by a physician, it is safe.   If vaccines have failed or are not available, a person infected with Covid has everything to gain and nothing to lose by trying it.

I am vaccinated.  I think everybody who has access to vaccines should get vaccinated, unless they already have had Covid or have a good medical reason not to.  

But the vaccines now in use do not prevent infection or the spread of the disease.  You can catch Covid from a vaccinated person.  

Vaccines may not prevent breakthrough Covid.  A friend of mine who was vaccinated spent a weekend suffering intense pain, fever and chills, which I think was probably breakthrough Covid.

This doesn’t mean the current vaccines are useless.  They rally the body’s immune system to fight the virus.

What it does show, in my opinion, is the need for a treatment, or a sterilizing vaccine, that will actually kill the virus.

If ivermectin is such a treatment, this would be great for everyone. 

The small-scale clinical trials showing the benefits of ivermectin have sometimes been flawed.  All or almost all have been too limited to bring about conclusive results.  

That is why there should be large-scale clinical trials to settle the question one way or other other.  If ivermectin is not what it’s cracked up to be, then there should be an intense program, equivalent to Operation Warp Speed, to develop one.

It is established medical practice in the USA and other countries to allow government-approved drugs to be used for treatments of diseases other than the ones they’ve been approved for.  

I don’t believe in self-medication for serious conditions, but I believe physicians should be able to use their own judgment about legal treatments.

I  also believe physicians and scientists should be able to post discuss medical treatments on the Internet without being censored.

If I were dying of Covid, I wouldn’t want to be put on a ventilator, I would want my physician to try ivermectin.  If I were the president of an African country that couldn’t get vaccines because majority-white countries such as the USA and Canada want to give their citizens third doses, I would certainly  distribute ivermectin.

Military recruiting videos around the world

Anti-woke folks have been posting three military recruiting videos on the Internet—one each from China, Russia and the USA.

The Chinese video shows a Chinese husband and father, leaving his family to live a life of hardship and danger in order to protect his family and nation from enemies.

The Russian video shows a tough, muscular Russian trooper, ready to face and deal with whatever comes.

The US American video shows a nice young woman, who has been raised by two lesbian women, who has found the U.S. armed forces accept her for what she is.

The anti-wokesters say the videos show the difference in the martial spirit of the leaders of the three countries.

Someone like the young US American woman probably would not be a match for someone like the Chinese or Russian man on the field of battle.  And the nature of the video does say something about the feminization of US American society.  

Then again, actual warriors make up a small percentage of US American armed forces.  Most of them are technicians and support staff whose war is waged at a distance.

I spent all afternoon reviewing military recruitment videos from different countries.  I don’t think that, in isolation, any particular military recruiting video proves anything about the character of the nation that issued it.  Even so, the different kinds of reasons they offer for joining the military are interesting, at least to me.

Woke-ness as a U.S. soft power weapon

Enemies of the woke?

The economist Tyler Cowen says the U.S. government should use the “woke” movement as an instrument of U.S. soft power.

Although Cowen himself deplores the excesses of woke-ism, he pointed out that it is a genuinely popular movement, which has taken hold in large corporations, private universities and the mainstream press, and is spreading around the world.

Why not take advantage of this? he asked.  Almost every country has some group of people who are oppressed, or feel oppressed.  Point this out, identify with this group of people and you have a movement that looks to the USA for inspiration and help.

I think he underrates the degree to which this is already being done, and the degree to which the world is already polarized around woke-ism.

This wouldn’t be new.  In the old Cold War days, it is said that the Central Intelligence Agency promoted logical positivism and abstract art in order to discredit the Soviets’ historical materialism and socialist realist.

Look at the campaign against Hungary for being anti-immigration and suppressing pro-gay educational materials in its school system.  Look at how foreign aid is used to pressure African governments to be less anti-gay, just as the G.W. Bush administration used aid funds as a lever to suppress birth control and abortion.)

Then look at the nations that attended the recent meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  One thing Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan have in common is that they are anti-woke.

China, for example, has cracked down on portrayals of effeminate men in the entertainment media.  RT News ridicules American social liberalism.  The governments of Iran, Pakistan and India are committed to religious nationalism—different religions, but united in being anti-woke.

Putting the merits of these issues to one side, I think anti-woke patriotism is a source of national unity and woke identity politics is a source of disunity.  A completely cynical government would export identity politics to its rivals and enemies while emphasizing national unity at home.

Conflicts over wealth and power can be compromised, but not questions of religion and ideology.  But that’s the point.  It is easier to get people to fight in your interest if you can convince them they’re fighting for their religion and their ideals.

LINKS

Woke entry in Wikipedia.  I myself define woke-ness as a civil rights movement in support of ethnic identity and the sexual revolution.

Woke Movement Is Global, and America Should Be (Mostly) Proud by Tyler Cowen for Bloomberg Opinion.

Eurasia takes shape: How the SCO just flipped the world order by Pepe Escobar for The Cradle. 

Kipling’s Kim and Kipling’s India

KIM by Rudyard Kipling (1901) with an introduction and notes by Jeffrey Meyers (2002) 

I read Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim as part of a reading group hosted by my friend Linda White.

Rudyard Kipling was a British imperialist.  He believed the British Empire was, for all practical purposes, permanent, and that it was a force for good.  The first belief proved wrong, and there are few who would defend the secondW.

So why read Kipling’s Kim?

Kim is an interesting story about the coming of age of a young boy and his struggle to define his identity.  Like Huckleberry Finn, Kim is often mistaken for a boy’s book because its central character is a boy, but it isn’t. 

Kim is also an idealized but fascinating portrait of the diversity of India, with its varied religions and ethnic groups.

Kim is the first, or one of the first, espionage thrillers, a new genre in which the spy is the hero and not the villain.

And finally, Kim is a work by one of the masters of the English language.

Kipling was, as we newspaper reporters used to say, a great wordsmith.  Anybody who loves writing can benefit from reading his sentences closely and noting his word choices and the rhythm of the sentence.

He is one of the few 20th century writers admired by both critics and the general public

His books of poetry were best-sellers.  Their rollicking rhythms stick in the mind, like Broadway show tunes.  He also wrote novels short stories, including the Mowgli and Just-So stories for children.  Henry James praised his prose style and T.S. Eliot edited an edition of his poetry.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

The hero of Kim is Kimball O’Hara, the orphan son of an Irish ex-soldier and a servant woman.  We meet him at age 13.   Kim has allowed to run wild in the streets of Lahore (now part of Pakistan).  He speaks local languages better than he speaks English, and is so sunburned nobody thinks of him as white.  

He earns money by begging and carrying messages.  The closest thing he has to a mentor is Mahbub Ali, an Afghan horse trader who turns out to be an agent of British intelligence.

As the novel opens, Kim encounters a Tibetan lama and decides to follow him on his religious quest.  They have adventures as they travel along the Great Trunk Road, meeting varied people.  These passages show Kipling’s genius as a descriptive writer, both of people and of the sights and sounds of India.  

He makes contact with his father’s old regiment, which takes him in.  He attends the regimental school briefly, then a Catholic school that serves India’s native Catholics.  These include the Thomas Christians, whose ancestors were supposedly converted by the Apostle Thomas, and mixed-race descendants of Portuguese seamen and traders who came to India in the 16th century—another example of India’s diversity.

Manbub Ali and Colonel Creighton, the secret head of British intelligence in India, are impressed by Kim’s talent for languages, disguise and deception and determine to groom him for a career as an espionage agent.

Vaccines and COVID-19 death rates

Click to enlarge

Hat tip to David Zweig.

I’ll be 85 years old in December.  This chart from England makes me very, very glad that I was able to get vaccinated.  

I wasn’t able to find the original link to the chart, but the links below have the basic information.

LINKS

COVID-19 confirmed deaths in England (to 31 January 2021) by Public Health England.

Risk for COVID-19 Infection, Hospitalization and Death by Age Group in the USA by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Another look at critical race theory

CRITICAL RACE THEORY: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, introduction by Cornell West (1995)

Up until a couple of years ago, hardly any of US Americans outside academia has heard of something called “critical race theory.”   Now public opinion polls show about two-thirds of us have heard of it, and more than one-third think they have a good idea of what it is.  Republicans think it will be a winning issue for them in the 2022 elections and beyond.

Critics blame critical race theory for everything they dislike about affirmative action, cancel culture and Black Lives Matter protests.  Defenders say it mere consists of facing well-established and obvious facts about racism and racial prejudice in the past and present USA.

For the past month, I’ve been reading up on what critical race theorists have to say for themselves.  My latest reading is the 1995 Critical Race Theory anthology, which consists of writings of the founders of the movement.  I admit I read only some of the 27 essays and skimmed the rest.  I have links below to 15 that I have read.

I don’t claim this makes me an expert on a topic to which some have devoted years of study–only that I know more than those who haven’t read anything at all about it.

Critical race theory arose from the disappointment in the results of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.  

After a heroic struggle, in which churches were bombed, protesters were jailed and beaten and some were murdered, African-Americans, with the support of white allies, achieved full civil rights and protection of the law.  And then they found that most of them were as poor and just as unequal as they were before.

Some responded by trying to broaden the struggle to achieve equality for all Americans, and not just black people.  This was the idea of the Poor People’s Campaign planned by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. just before his death.  It was the idea behind Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns in 1984 and 1988 and the current Poor People’s Campaign led by the Rev. William J. Barber II. 

Others decided that African-Americans needed to double down on black interests and black identity, and not worry about white opinion.  Instead of thinking of themselves as citizens who were denied their individual rights, they should think of themselves as part of an oppressed nation, like people under colonial rule.

During this time, there was a movement among legal scholars called critical legal theory.  Critical legal theorists said it was a mistake to look at the law as a quest, however flawed, for justice.  The whole purpose of the law, they said, was to codify and maintain injustice.

The moral was that if you are lawyer, prosecutor or judge who believes in social justice, you need not think about whether the law is being correctly applied.  You should only think how to interpret the law in ways to help the oppressed.

The critical race theorists picked up this idea and applied it to race.  It is not an accident that most of the original critical race theorists were law school professors and published their findings in law journals.  

Their idea was that whole social structure, including the law, is set up to serve the interests of white people and repress black people.   The purpose of critical race studies is to show how this works.

Derrick Bell’s parables of despair

THE DERRICK BELL READER edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic (2005)

I’ve been reading up on critical race theory to prepare for a presentation I’m going to do Sept. 21 at a Zoom meeting at First Universalist Church of Rochester, N.Y.

At the time I agreed to do the presentation, I’d read a college textbook called Critical Race Theory: an Introduction.

I thought I understood the topic reasonably well, although I was turned off by the authors’ rejection of ideas that I hold hear—liberalism, universalism, the possibility of solidarity across racial lines.

Since then I’ve been reading more about the topic, and especially works of the late  Derrick A. Bell Jr., who is considered the father of this school of thought.

Although I haven’t changed my mind about CRT,  I have come to respect Bell and take his ideas and the ideas of his followers more seriously than before. 

Bell had a distinguished career as a civil rights lawyer for the U.S. government and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a second distinguished career as a law school professor, scholar and writer.

Bell was the first African-American to be a tenured professor at Harvard Law School.  He resigned in 1992 in protest against Harvard’s failure to hire a black woman as a tenured law school professor. 

The video above shows young Barack Obama, then a Harvard law school student, speaking at a protest in support of Prof. Bell.  The video then segues into a review of Bell’s life.

Bell thought that racism is baked into the white American mind.  The only times that African-Americans advance is when these advances benefit elite white people, and such advances are small and temporary.  He said black people should protest racial inequality, not because there is a realistic hope that it will be overcome, but for the sake of self-respect and honor.

Some of the most interesting parts of The Derrick Bell Reader are a series of fantastic stories, or parables, illustrating his ideas and feelings.  They are not proof of anything, but they are windows into his mind.  They are thought experiments.  You are invited to think about them and decide whether you agree.

###

The Chronicle of the Space Traders

In this story, extraterrestrials land on the East Coast on Jan. 1 and offer the USA a bargain.  They will provide the means to solve the USA’s international trade, pollution and energy problems.  In return, they ask one thing: the nation’s African-American population.  The country is given 16 days to decide.

There are some objections.  Black Americans are a cheap labor force, but also a market for U.S. business.  More importantly, they serve as a target for the resentments of poor and working-class whites, which might otherwise be targeted a white elites.

But the benefits of the trade to white America outweigh the benefits.  A Constitutional amendment is rushed through, and, on Martin Luther King Day, the USA’s black population leave the country the same way their ancestors arrived, naked and in chains.

Bell said that when he tells this story to his law classes, almost all his students, both black and white, agree that US Americans would make the trade.

White privilege and affirmative action

The late Derrick Bell, pioneer of critical race theory, used to say that white people who oppose affirmative action in college admissions were hypocritical or naive.

Affirmative action for black people, he said, has much less impact on the chances of the average student than all the preferences given to the white elite.

Special consideration is given to children of donors, children of alumnae, graduates of expensive private schools and athletes skilled in sports such as rowing or polo that only rich people participated in.

Bell died in 2011, but facts, including a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, support what he said.

Some 43 percent of white Harvard students admitted between 2009 and 2014 got bonus points for being ALDCs – athletes, legacies (children of alumni), dean’s list (from families of big donors of potential donors) or children of faculty or staff.  Fewer than 16 percent of black, Hispanic or Asian students benefited from such preferences.

The study also indicated that three-quarters of the white students who got bonus points would have been rejected if they hadn’t got the points.   Most of them come from upper-crust families.  Such families are also able to give their children the benefit of private schools or well-funded public schools in rich school districts.

All this matters because Ivy League universities such as Harvard are gatekeepers for the top jobs in banking, law, government and academia, and only about 4 or 5 percent of applicants are admitted.

So why, asked Derrick Bell, is all the emphasis on the extra help African-Americans get from affirmative action policies?

One answer is that affirmative action for rich white families is seldom talked about, but affirmative action for racial minorities is talked about constantly, both by those who favor it and those who oppose it. 

When proponents of affirmative action bring up white elite privilege, they do not challenge white elite privilege; they use it as a talking point to defend their own programs.

Affirmative action for minorities is an example of what Bell called racial fortuity, although I am not sure he would have agreed.  

Racial fortuity happens when black people’s interests and white (usually elite white) people’s interests happen to coincide.  

Affirmative action serves the function of lightning rod for resentment of non-elite white students who can’t get into colleges such as Harvard.

Book note: Strike the Hammer

STRIKE THE HAMMER: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940-1970 by Laura Warren Hill (2021)

I’ve lived in Rochester, N.Y., since 1974, more than half my life, and I thought I knew its history well.  But I learned important things from Laura Warren Hill’s Strike the Hammer that I never knew.

Most people who live here know that there was a two-day uprising in black neighborhoods in the city in 1964, leading to a new awareness by the city’s white leadership of racism and the need to do something about it.

I call the violence an uprising rather than a riot because it was organized, which is not to say it was pre-planned.  Churches, community institutions, black-owned businesses and businesses owned by whites with good relationships with the community were spared; police stations and other white-owned businesses were targeted.

I knew the uprising was triggered by police arrest of a drunken young man who disrupted a neighborhood street dance, when a false rumor spread that a police dog had bitten a young girl.

But I didn’t know of the outrages that put the community on hair-trigger.  In 1962, Rochester police beat a respectable young black man, not accused of any crime, so badly that he suffered two broken vertebrae and was confined to a wheelchair.

Early in 1963, police invaded a Nation of Islam mosque with police dogs while a religious service was in progress because of an anonymous tip about someone with a gun.  A few weeks later they arrested a young man for a traffic offense and beat him so badly he was hospitalized for 21 days.

Another thing I hadn’t known is that Malcolm X, then a leader of the Nation of Islam, was a frequent visitor to Rochester and had a warm relationship with Minister Franklin Florence, Constance Mitchell, Dr. Walter Cooper and other black civil rights activists.

The national NAACP forbid its local chapters to engage in joint actions with Malcolm X or the Nation of Islam because of its bizarre anti-white theology and antisemitism.  Black NAACP members in Rochester simply disregarded these instructions.

After the uprising, the Rochester Area Council of Churches, which was mainly led by literal white people, offered famed community organizer Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation a $100,000, two-year contract to advise Rochester’s black leaders.

Alinsky agreed, but only on condition that the invitation come from the black community itself.  Hill quoted Minister Florence’s recollection of Alinsky:

One thing that stayed with me, with Saul, he said, “Never mind my being invited here by the Council of Churches.  I refuse to come to Rochester unless you invite me.”  But here’s…the genius of Saul and organizing—he said, “You would have to get three thousand names of people in your neighborhood…before I come in with you.”…

“Now—” We’d raised with him, “Well, who’s paying you?”  He said, “That wouldn’t be your business, but I’ll tell you.”  He said, “Our contract is with the Council of Churches to come in and offer you a service, provided you invite me.”

I said, “Well, what about their money?”  He said, “Well, I’m going to take their money, but I’m not taking their money to do their bidding.  I’m taking their money because they won’t give it to you.”

The clincher for Florence was that Malcolm X vouched for Alinsky.  He said Alinsky was possibly the best community organizer in the USA, and black people should always be willing to learn new skills, no matter who the teacher.

Why can’t US Americans be like Canadians?

The bond of unity of most nations is the idea that they are one family, a family of common lineage usually speaking a common language and adhering to a common religion. Sometimes this is cemented by having a hereditary monarch as a symbolic national father or mother.

We US Americans lack a common lineage.  We consist of all kinds of people—descendants of the original white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, African slaves, native American peoples and Spanish-speakers acquired by conquest, plus immigrants from literally every continent in the world.

So maybe we need an American creed, or an American myth, to bind us together.

But wait a minute!  Canada, our good (and often better) neighbor does all right, without any obvious sense of Canadian exceptionalism.  How do they do it?

A Canadian friend of mine summed up her idea of her nation this way:

Canadians suffer from boredom and blandness.  Even the most conservative politician in Canada believes in universal health care run by the government.

There were some differences here concerning the role of the private sector in healthcare, but in general those differences were worked out years ago.  Canadians put up with high taxes.  Doctors are basically civil servants.

What myth warms our hearts?  Fairness and multiculturalism? 

Refugees and immigrants in Canada are enjoyed.  Their story adds a little spice to the Canadian meat and potatoes.  They are not pushed to become CANADIANS.  What would that even be?  It would be very unusual in Toronto to walk down the street for one block and not hear 3 or 4 languages spoken.

One very common problem is people in their 40s who have parents who came to Canada 30 years ago and never learned English.  I know a lot of people in that situation, who feel an obligation to be their parents’ interpreters at a moment’s notice (even though they have demanding careers and young children to raise).

There are no illusions that Canada is the leader of the Free World, no sense that we are shining beacons on a hill, no sense that we set the world’s agenda.  We try to do our fair share of the world’s peacekeeping. 

This makes Canadians a bit like children. We put the government in charge and then complain mightily about everything they do.

What made the USA and Canada different?

The USA had to fight for its independence.  Canada never had to.  The leaders of the USA in 1776 were mostly descendants of the original British settlers, but they had to figure out a rationale for independence not based on lineage. 

The rationale was that we US Americans stood for the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

COVID-19 and the war on populism

Hat tip to Bill Harvey.

Thomas Frank had a good interview last week on the Breaking Points TV show.  It’s worth watching.

He talked about how failure to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, instead of being blamed on the failed health care system, is instead blamed on people who are skeptical of established authority.

The problem is that there are good reasons to be skeptical of authority.  It was Anthony Fauci, who is nowadays considered to the voice of science, who in the early days of the pandemic said that it was not to be taken seriously, it was just like the ‘flu, and that masks were useless.

It was the Centers for DIsease Control that, in the early days, advised the U.S. government not to screen air travelers coming in from China. 

Established authority nowadays tells us that vaccination will prevent the spread of the disease, when, so far as is known, it merely suppresses the symptoms and does little or nothing to stop the spread.

Nobody is being called to account for this.  The bulk of the press, the political establishment and the medical establishment say that everything that has gone wrong, and everything that is predictably going to go wrong, is the fault of right-wingers who refuse to get vaccinated.

There are all kinds of reasons why people don’t get vaccinated.  There are medical reasons.  There are economic reasons.  There are religious reasons.

And of course there are conspiracy theorists who think the pandemic is a Democratic hoax.  I don’t share their views, of course, but conspiracy theories flourish in times like these, when established authority can’t be trusted.

Whatever the reasons people have for not getting vaccinated, ridicule and scapegoating are not good methods for bringing them around.  They are, however, good tactics for diverting blame for failure from the people in charge.

Dance! Dance! Dance! a mashup

The plan is for all Americans to get COVID

The Biden administration’s plan for fighting COVID-19 is for all Americans to get vaccinated. But that won’t stop the spread of the disease.  Being vaccinated just means you’re less likely to die or need hospital care if you get it.

But there is nothing in place to stamp out the disease and very little to stop the spread of the disease.  This means that all of us Americans are bound to get it, sooner or later.

I’m in favor of vaccination.  I’ve received two shots myself.  I would like as many people as possible to get vaccinated.   Mandatory vaccinations are nothing new.  Schools and other institutions have every right to require masking and vaccinations.

The thing of it is—the vaccines now available are not sterilizing vaccines, at least not as far we know.  They do not kill the virus, just rally the body’s defenses to resist it.  Other things being equal, a vaccinated person is just as potentially infectious as an unvaccinated person.

The way to stop the spread of the virus would be to require everyone entering an indoor public space to be tested, whether vaccinated or not.  As in China, there would be a temperature check, and everybody running a temperature would get a test.

Those infected would be isolated and treated until the infection goes away.  Do this long enough and the virus dies out.

Why isn’t this being done?  Probably because the U.S. pubic health system and medical care system don’t have the capacity to carry it out.

Of course, there are other ways to slow the spread.  Indoor ventilation would be a big help.  Indoor masking also would be a big help. 

But the disease won’t be stopped until there are treatments that kill the virus, as penicillin kills bacterial infections.  There is no national effort to develop one.

The Biden administration is content to push vaccination alone, vaccination and nothing else, and it blames people who don’t get vaccinated for the spread of the disease. 

The unvaccinated are conflated with deplorables who believe in crazy conspiracy theories, and both groups are conflated with Trump voters.  They will be the scapegoats for the comeback of COVID-19 this winter.

I’ve even heard people say that the unvaccinated do not deserve to be treated for the coronavius. 

Would such people say that cigarette smokers do not deserve medical care lung cancer? that sexually active gay men do not deserve medical care for AIDS? that people who’ve attempted suicide, and failed, deserve no medical care at all?

Pushback against the war on ivermectin

The American Medical Association has joined the campaign to discourage people from using invermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.  But not all physicians are willing to accept the AMA’s judgment.

The following is a letter from Jane M. Orient, M.D., executive director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, to Gerald E. Harmon, M.D., president of the American Medical Association.

The AMA has taken the startling and unprecedented position that American physicians should immediately stop prescribing, and pharmacists should stop honoring their prescriptions for ivermectin for COVID-19 patients.  The AMA is thus contradicting the professional judgment of a very large number of physicians, who are writing about 88,000 prescriptions per week.  It also contradicts the Chairman of the Tokyo Medical Association, Haruo Ozaki, who recommended that all doctors in Japan immediately begin using Ivermectin to treat COVID.

AMA claims that ivermectin is dangerous and ineffective despite the safe prescription of billions of doses since 1981, and the mostly favorable results of 63 controlled studies in COVID-19.

AMA does not specify any recommended early treatments, but simply urges face masks, distancing, and vaccination.

Our members would appreciate clarification of the AMA’s stand on the following questions:

• What are the criteria for advocating that pharmacists override the judgment of fully qualified physicians who are responsible for individual patients?
• What are the criteria for forbidding off-label use of long-approved drugs, which constitute at least 20 percent of all prescriptions?
• On what basis does AMA demand use only within a clinical trial for ivermectin, but call for virtually universal vaccination outside of controlled trials, despite FDA warnings of potential cardiac damage in healthy young patients, and no information about long-term effects?

We believe that these questions get to the heart of issues of physician and patient autonomy, as well as scientific principles such as the need for a control group in experiments.

We look forward to your response.

Ivermectin is a drug originally developed as a cure for parasitic disease, and has come to be used as an off-label treatment for bacterial and virus diseases.  Many reputable physicians prescribe it for COVID-19—not as a substitute for vaccination, but as a supplement for vaccines or as an alternative when vaccines are not available or not medically recommended.

Vaccines do not cure COVID-19.  They protect infected people against the worst symptoms of the disease.  We need for a treatment or a “sterilizing vaccine” that will kill the disease.

Everything I know about ivermectin leads to me think that it might be such a treatment, but I’m not a physician or an epidemiologist and I could be wrong.  If not there should be a search for a treatment—a search as intense as last year’s search for a vaccine.

The chief disadvantage of ivermectin from the standpoint of the pharmaceutical industry is that it is cheap, safe and not patented, which means that it is relatively unprofitable.  Using Occam’s Razor, this is the simplest explanation for the industry’s behavior.

LINKS

AAPS Letter to AMA Re: Ivermectin and COVID.

As US Prepares to Ban Ivermectin for Covid-19, More Countries in Asia Begin Using It by Nick Corbishley for Naked Capitalism.

US as Failed State: Covid Booster Shot Mess by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Does the USA need a new founding myth?

The U.S Constitutional Convention, 1789

A myth is not necessarily false.  It is a story that people tell about themselves.

The founding myth of the USA is the idea that we are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

The American dilemma, as Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his classic 1944 book on race and racism in the USA, is the incompatibility of what he called the American creed with American reality.  The great sin of us contemporary white Americans as a group is the refusal to face up to this contradiction.

Most of us Americans like to think of the USA as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and don’t like to look at evidence that this isn’t so.  That’s why, for example, so many white Southerners insist that the Civil War was fought over state’s rights, not slavery.

As a boy, I was taught by my parents and teachers, including my Sunday school teachers, that everyone deserved equal rights regardless of race, creed or color, and that everyone, regardless of social standing, should be treated with courtesy and respect. I believed that being a good person and a good American were one and the same thing.

My core beliefs are still the same.  My opinions have changed radically over the course of my life, and especially within the past 10 or 20 years.  Like Albert Camus, I want to love justice and still love my country, and struggle to reconcile these loves.

But the USA as a nation is turning its back on the historic American creed even as an aspirational goal.

MAGA Republicans normalize voter suppression.  Woke Democrats normalize censorship.

We have normalized military aggression, torture, assassinations, bombing of civilians, corporate crime and imprisonment of dissidents and whistleblowers.

Although the American founding myth is fading, a new myth cannot be conjured up just by calling for one.  The power of a myth depends on believers thinking of it, not as a myth, but as just the way things are.

If you recognize a myth as a myth, it has no power over you, although the afterglow of your previous belief may persist for a time.

The most likely candidate for a new unifying myth is a patriotism based on American exceptionalism rather than historic American ideals.  During the past 20 years, we Americans have been called upon to take pride in the USA not because of our freedom and democracy, but our might and power.

Patriotism is defined as unconditional support for war and domination.  The military is our most respected institution.

Do white Americans really benefit from racism?

THE DERRICK BELL READER edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2005)

The late Derrick Bell, pioneer of critical race theory, was of two minds about whites and racism in the USA.

He frequently wrote about how white racial prejudice hurts whites as well as blacks, and how whites have actually benefited from advances in civil rights, but that, despite these facts, racism is so embedded in the psychology of white people that we will never be able to see this.

At other times, and at least once in the same article, he wrote that the reason racism will never disappear is that white people benefit from racism. 

Which is it?  In his terms, if the first is true, there is a possibility, however dim, of waking up white people to our self-interest so that we join forces with black people for justice. 

If the second is true, there is little hope for African-Americans.  Demographic trends show black people remaining in the minority in the USA, and history shows white people can stay in the majority by expanding the definition of white.

The answer depends on how you look at it.  If there had never been plantation slavery, never been lynch law, never been a black underclass, all of us Americans, white and black, would be better off.

On the other hand, if all Americans had been white, but we still had plantation slavery, lynch law and an economic underclass, then white people would have taken the places historically filled by blacks.

Prior to our Civil War, many writers reported on how a slave economy hurt white people.  They contrasted conditions on opposite sides of the Ohio River.  On the Ohio side, they could see well-built farmhouses and barns, fields full of grain, thriving small towns and businesses, all the product of enterprising white people. 

On the Kentucky side, just opposite, visitors saw whites living in poverty and decay, ramshackle buildings, poorly-fed children.  This was the result of the inability of white workers to compete with slave labor, and the belief that physical labor was degrading and only black people should do it.

The heritage of slavery to this day affects white people as well as black people.  The poorest white people in the USA are the ones living in the areas where slave labor was most predominant.

Derrick Bell argued that just as slavery and racism held back the South in comparison to the rest of the USA, so the heritage of slavery and racism holds back the USA in relation to the rest of the Western world.  The USA is the Mississippi of the OECD nations.

In his essay, “Wanted: a White Leader Able to Free Whites of Racism” (2000), reprinted in The Derrick Bell Reader, Bell remarked on how the USA lags behind less affluent countries in terms of health care, housing, child care and care of the aged, and on how the USA refuses to abolish the death penalty or improve prison conditions.

The reason, he wrote, is that white people, consciously or unconsciously, are convinced that efforts to promote the common good will help black people at our expense.  So we cut off our noses to spite our faces.

Deplorables and liberal hate speech

When I was a small boy, one of the things my mother forbid me to do was to say I “hated” someone.  I could say I was angry with them or annoyed with them or use some other word, but to hate someone is to wish they were dead, and I certainly didn’t want that, did I?

Nowadays I hear and read complaints from self-described progressives about un-vaccinated people who get COVID, and how wrong it is for these willfully ignorant Trump supporters to be given space in hospitals when decent, rational liberal people need the space.

The idea is that if willfully un-vaccinated people (although presumably not including un-vaccinated African-Americans and Hispanics, I presume) die of COVID, maybe they have it coming, maybe they should be allowed to die, because they had a choice to be vaccinated and didn’t take it.  I’m guessing the people who talk this way don’t literally mean what they say, but still……

On the other hand, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the exterminationist rhetoric of a blogger named Chris Ladd,  who wrote that democracy can only be saved my meeting radical Trump supporters with deadly force.

Ashli Babbit, the traitor shot by police during the attempted coup, deserved what happened to her.  Every other traitor who mounted those steps that day deserved the same end.  The only tragedy in that incident is that she was the only attacker killed.

No, her death wasn’t “unfortunate,” any more than every death of every living thing is unfortunate.  Violence used to protect our most fundamental institutions was necessary, just, and in the service of a brighter future.  Babbit’s death deserves just as much regret or discomfort as the death of one of the 9/11 plotters or some random Nazi.

The loss of any life is regrettable and also often necessary.  If we cannot embrace what happened to Ashli Babbit, and make sure it happens to others like her, we will very soon live in a post-democratic, disintegrating former nation.

He called for the suppression of the Republican Party.

There’s little need to worry about what happens to hardened Trump cultists.  There aren’t as many of them as it seems and they have minimal cultural and financial power.  Faced with a real confrontation, with real material consequences, the number of them who will continue the fight will drop off precipitously, leaving the rest to be easily isolated and neutralized. ……

For now, isolate Republicans from every center of cultural influence by any available means.  Make it expensive and risky for anyone to identify publicly with the GOP.  When Republicans attempt their coup, as they will, make sure they have nothing to support them but their small band of idiot cultists and the financial backing of a handful of millionaire weirdos.

Bring whatever organized violence is necessary to blunt Republican attempts to destroy democracy.  And don’t flinch.  On the backside of that coup, rout them from every remaining position of public trust and jail as many of them as possible.

In a different post, Ladd said the founding myth of the United States is white supremacy.  Americans, he said, defined ourselves as not being the non-white “other.”  We need a new founding myth, he wrote, one in which we demonize the right-wing deplorables.  In other words, we substitute one powerless minority for another as national scapegoats.

Ladd equated Republicans with Trump supporters, white evangelical Christians, white supremacists and terrorists, and people who take ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment—all, in his view, incapable of rational thinking.

If you created a Venn diagram of all the groups he mentioned, it would be complicated and confusing.  Many Republicans despise Trump.  On the other hand, a small but significant number of former Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

White evangelical Protestants are not all of one mind and, as a group, they are not racists in any meaningful sense of that word, unless you think that religious and political conservatives are by definition racist.  Actual white supremacists, whose works I read on the Internet, despise the Republican party and feel betrayed by Trump.

Although Donald Trump was anti-lockdown and anti-mask, he advocated vaccination and launched the successful Warp Speech program to develop vaccinations.  While he was in office, many liberals warned against the possibility of vaccines being released before they were ready, then changed their minds right after the 2020 elections.  Republicans are not the only ones who are politicizing medicine.

Certainly the Jan. 6 mob deserve to be punished for their acts of assault, trespass and vandalism.  But most of them sincerely believed they were defending democracy, not attacking it, by protesting election rigging.  There never was a possibility they would threaten the transition of government.  And so on.

On the other hand, if you created a Venn diagram of those who are trying to suppress discussion of ivermectin, and a Venn diagram of those who oppose winding down the forever wars, I think they would pretty much overlap.

Big money in politics keeps forever wars going

After his appearance on Breaking Points, Matt Taibbi commented:

A lot of people want to look at the bright side with this withdrawal, and they should, up to a point.  However much he may have botched the planning, Joe Biden deserves credit for sticking to his timeline.  It is good news that the United States can eventually recognize that a war has stopped serving any purpose, and actually decide to leave a country ten years after the last theoretical reason for staying has expired.

However, the fact that both the government and the national commentariat remain essentially captured by contractor money remains as big a problem as ever, as this episode shows.  We haven’t even reached the stage of being able to identify the financial connections of the people occupying center stage on the national televised debate over military policy.  It’s a terrible look that the people willing to point things like this out mostly all work for independent media outlets, while the New York Times and Washington Post have to be harassed to do the ethical minimum on that score.

If we properly identified the sponsors of the people with the biggest voices in media and politics, a lot more of what America does at home and around the world would make sense.  We need more of that, and thanks to Krystal and Saagar for bringing the topic up.

On Afghanistan, the Revolving Door and Media Failure to Disclose Contracting Ties of Guests by Matt Taibbi for TK News.

The passing scene: Links & comments 9/1/2021

Here are some links to writings I found interesting.  Maybe you will, too.

Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us – What’s the Secret? by Atul Gowande for The New Yorker.

The average Costa Rican’s income is about one-sixth that of the average US American.  Yet Costa Ricans enjoy longer life expectancies, and are healthier by many other measures.

Atul Gowande wrote that Costa Rica, more than most nations, emphasizes public health—preventing infectious disease outbreaks, malnutrition, toxic hazards, sanitary problems and the like.  It also has clinics that provide free medical care to the whole population, rural as well as urban, poor as well as rich.

Costa Rica is admirable in many ways.  Surrounded by military dictatorships, it has been a democracy with no army for 72 years and counting.  It also is a leader in renewable energy and environmental preservation.

The Great Game of Smashing Nations by John Pilger for Consortium News.

One of the rationales for keeping troops in Afghanistan is to protect women from being oppressed by the Taliban.  But, as John Pilger pointed out, the women of Afghanistan were doing just fine in the 1980s.  Half the university students were women, and women made up 40 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants.

But Afghanistan was friendly to the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government recruited fanatic anti-feminist jihadists to overthrow the Afghan government, in order to draw the Soviets into a quagmire war.  The plan succeeded.  The people of Afghanistan, especially the women, paid the price.

Mob Justice Is Trampling Democratic Discourse by Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic.

In today’s USA, you can lose your job and become a social outcast if someone accuses you of violating social codes have to do with race, sex, personal behavior or even acceptable humor–codes that, as Anne Applebaum wrote, may not have existed five years ago or even five months ago.

I’m reminded of the McCarthy period in the 1950s, which I’m old enough to remember.  You could be accused of being pro-Communist for trivial reasons or no reason at all.  The difference is that, in that era, most academics and journalists defended freedom of speech and association, which is not the case today.

Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment, an interview on Conversations with Tyler.

Zepnep Tufekci, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, is doing some of the best writing on the COVID-19 pandemic.  She was born in Turkey.

Here she is interviewed by the economist Tyler Cowen about the pandemic, Turkey and her ways of understanding things.