Progressives are supposed to swallow all that they believe in and vote for/with the
party in order to prove they are real Democrats. But when Centrist Democrats vote against progressive candidates (e.g., Ben Jealous) they are given benefit of the doubt. In one
case the progressives are blamed; in the other case, it's the fault of
the progressive candidate. Either way, progressives are to blame.
Hillary lost? It's those damn progressives. Jealous lost? Bad
(progressive) candidate.
Screw you Third Way.
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Thursday, January 17, 2019
The Truth Hurts
This is a great essay in n+1 magazine by Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a combat Marine veteran in Afghanistan. This paragraph from the essay is chillingly descriptive and true. (I don't think this is behind a paywall, if it is I apologize.)
I’ve had exchanges with each that imply recognition of the porousness of authorized propaganda. The linguist, for example, admits the war in Afghanistan has been a disaster and there is no hopeful path forward. But both, despite their time spent on the edge of the abyss, remain beholden to a colonial logic. For them the United States and Israel are flawed but necessary bulwarks against barbarism. For me the empire is rooted in the barbarism it pretends to oppose. It is exhausting having to declaim the same talking points over and over again: That the majority of the United States’ official adversaries were once clients and allies. That almost every intervention comes with an ex post facto assessment from the government acknowledging the failure of the mission. That investigative reporters and historians almost always unearth internal documents betraying motives that not only run counter to public rationales but undermine all claims to humanitarian intent. That the United States supplies the world with a preponderance of its weapons and fuels a plurality of its animosities. That the United States is the only power to have ever dropped the bomb, that it did so twice, and that it did so not to end a world war (a war that was about to end anyway) but to launch what became a half-century-long cold war on superior footing. While not alone as a global malefactor, the United States is the world leader in conventional foreign invasions since 1945, with 12; has engineered at least 38 coups or regime changes since the Spanish American War of 1898; and has offered direct military support and training to dozens of governments with no regard for human rights. The United States incarcerates the most people today, both in absolute and relative terms. It has incarcerated the most people for at least thirty-some-odd years, and it either led the world in its incarceration rate or trailed closely behind the Soviet Union and South Africa for the preceding decades. As early as 1976, one study described America’s rate as the “highest in the world and still rising.” By any standard, the United States empire ranks among the world’s most formidable producers of violence, and one would be hard-pressed to defend such all-consuming production on liberal democratic grounds.
Saturday, January 5, 2019
One Reason I'm a Progressive (Socialist)
Republicans: We believe in capitalism, low taxes, weak unions, fiscal austerity, entitlement "reform", strong borders, privately-run health care, militarist foreign policy. We also support Israel no matter what it does.
Liberal Democrats: We believe all those things too, but we'll take the rough edges off, so everyone will be happy. Trust us, we'll do those same things but we'll do them better.
That's not for me anymore.
Liberal Democrats: We believe all those things too, but we'll take the rough edges off, so everyone will be happy. Trust us, we'll do those same things but we'll do them better.
That's not for me anymore.
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Reading List 2018
Books I read in 2018.
They keep writing them faster than I can read them.
Eimear
McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
Alice
McDermott, That Night
Mark
Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Jean
Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Phil Klay, Redeployment
Kenzaburo Oe, Death by
Water
Michelle de Kretser, The
Lost Dog
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Hernan Diaz, In the
Distance
Jesmyn Ward, Sing,
Unburied, Sing
Philip Roth, The Human
Stain
James Baldwin, Giovanni's
Room
Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean
in the Closet
Chris Hayes, A Colony in a
Nation
Kishwar Desai, Witness the
Night
Katrina Kittle, The
Kindness of Strangers
Jon Mooallem, Wild Ones
Gerald Griffin, The
Collegians
Bruce Feiler, Abraham
George Saunders, Lincoln in
the Bardo
Norah Labiner, Our Sometime
Sister
Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers
Drowning
William Hoffman, Wild Thorn
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half
of a Yellow Sun
Louise Erdrich, The Round
House
Katherine Kilalea, OK, Mr.
Field
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Stuart Rojstaczer, The
Mathematician's Shiva
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
Téa
Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
Timothy Egan, The Worst
Hard Time
Per Petterson, Out Stealing
Horses (trans. Anne Born)
Phyllis Alesia Perry, Stigmata
Annie Dillard, An American
Childhood
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
N. Scott Momaday, House
Made of Dawn
J.M.G. Clézio,
Wandering Star
Rachel Cusk, Kudos
Carlos Eire, Waiting for
Snow in Havana
Mathias Énard,
Compass
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