In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/16/15

Hello there, and welcome to (what will hopefully be) the first of many installments of In Case You Missed It, where I’ll post links to the most interesting things I read on the web in the previous week and linked on my facebook page.

The big news this week was the first Democratic Presidential Debate. But I also found some interesting think pieces on Columbus Day (or, as we celebrate in my adopted home city of Seattle, Indigenous Peoples’ Day), violence, and socialism in the modern day and age.

And, in what I hope and expect to become a weekly tradition, we’ll end with a dueling WTF?/Fk Yeah! pair of stories to make you scratch your head and cheer. Continue reading “In Case You Missed It: Weekend Reading 10/16/15” →

Fourteen Years After

I wanted to write something about 9/11 today, even though most anything worth saying has been said and said again many times over the years. I think in the end my hero Charlie Pierce got it right when he wrote that “the sad, lasting legacy of that day 14 years ago today, and of all the different things that have been made of it since then, is that it is the day that America finally went mad.”

It’s hard to refute that, from where I sit. Like a nose-punched bully, we ran rampant, and the damage we did to ourselves and the world will take a very long time to repair. We are now an America that’s tortured, that’s executed our own citizens by drone strike without due process of law. We spent a trillion dollars to go to war with a nation that didn’t have anything to do with the attack (and continued our strong alliance with the nation most of the hijackers were actually from), and made room for the Islamic State to come into being when we left at the behest of the government we installed. Domestically, we went from a proto-fascist state where folks with the wrong t-shirts were escorted away from political rallies to a failing state whose political process has been hijacked by a faction who doesn’t believe government should be allowed to govern. And those are just the highlights.

Despite the patriotic memes in my facebook feed, I don’t want to remember 9/11. I don’t want to remember the fear and the pain and the determination to exact vengeance.

No, I want to remember the days and weeks after, when the divisions between us fell away. When we weren’t Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives but Americans united by grief, shocked out of our petty disputes and tribalism by this unthinkable enormity. I want to remember how we all came together, how the world was ready to rally behind us. I want to remember the moment when it seemed possible we could make something good out of this horrible tragedy, when our common humanity united us and we were kinder and more real with each other.

A lot has happened in the fourteen years since then, and those days when what united us was stronger than what divided us seem very far away now. But it’s important we remember them. It’s vital to our well-being, both as a nation and as individual human beings. Because we’re all in this together, whether we remember it or not.

Donald Trump is a Rock Star

This far out from any actual voting and caucusing, it’s hard to say just how serious a candidate for the Republican nomination Donald Trump actually is. But that he’s leaving the rest of his rivals in the dust both in terms of the polls and of media coverage can’t be denied. Theories abound as to why that might be so, most of them centering around the notion that Trump simply says out loud what the most radically conservative bloc of American voters actually believe, which comes across as courageous when his rivals continue to confine themselves to dog whistles.

But when actually asked what’s appealing about him, his fans and proponents have so many reasons they defy broad categorization. So while Trump’s obvious appeal to the 27% surely plays a role, it also seems that he’s got the same kind of projection of personal hopes onto a candidate thing going on that Barack Obama did in the run-up to 2008. Which makes a certain amount of sense, given how underdeveloped his policy platform is.

Put briefly, his support, I think, is based on his being Donald Trump, who is famous for being famous and for doing and saying whatever the fk he wants without thinking twice or ever apologizing for it.

And that, I think, is the crux of it. Donald Trump is a rock star. Continue reading “Donald Trump is a Rock Star” →

Calling a Spade a Spade: Why the Charleston Murders Were a Terrorist Act

Plenty of ink has been spilled in the wake of the blood spilled by DSR (whom I shan’t dignify by further promoting his name) Wednesday night at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and while it may be that I likely won’t say anything that hasn’t been said elsewhere, and likely better, I think it’s worth saying what I have to say, both to add to the general chorus and because I am a white man, which might (might) make other white men marginally likelier to listen, or will at least make it more difficult to discount what I say on the basis of any kind of identity politics.

So, let’s start by calling a spade a spade*: Wednesday night’s murders were an act of racially-motivated terrorism, premeditated, abetted by a culture expressly formulated to preserve and promote violent white supremacy, committed with the express intent of catalyzing a race war.

Harsh language, it’s true. But any honest, good-faith examination of the facts and circumstances leads inevitably to that conclusion, so far as I can tell. Don’t believe me? Let’s unpack, then. Continue reading “Calling a Spade a Spade: Why the Charleston Murders Were a Terrorist Act” →

Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine

So, it’s a pretty classic thought experiment: If you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler before he had a chance to start WWII?

Thanks to my daily internet divagations, I found myself revisiting this classic hypothetical today, and, given my brain’s penchant for the road less traveled (and for giving concrete answers to rhetorical questions), I found myself answering the question with a pretty definitive ‘no,’ though for practical rather than the usual moral or ethical reasons. I offer my rationale below, not as any sort of definitive answer, but as food for thought for hungry thinkers.

It goes like this: Continue reading “Why I Wouldn’t Kill Hitler with My Time Machine” →