Month: April 2021

The hell that India has become

April 29, 2021 • 11:00 am

The Guardian has a “long read” piece by Arundhati Roy, a famous writer who lives in Delhi (you may have read her Booker-Prize-winning book The God of Small Things). If you have any interest in India (or let’s just say “humanity”), it is well worth reading.  Click on the screenshot to do so.

Roy deals with two connected topics, the pandemic that’s now ravaging India (the infection rate may soon rise to half a million per day), and the diffidence of the Modi government, which is corrupt, anti-Muslim and Hindu-centric, and absolutely without empathy.

I’ve written about both these things before, but Roy, being “on the ground” in Delhi, has a horrific account of what it’s like to live in the center of the maelstrom. She notes that deaths and infections are likely to be grossly underreported given the largely rural population of India, and that 78% of healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is handled by the private sector, which means that the poor are simply unable to afford healthcare, much less vaccinations or oxygen. The black market that has sprung up around these things, while typical of India in a desperate situation, is further hitting the poor, and, as you may have seen from photographs, the poor are being refused hospital admission (or asked to bring their own oxygen tanks), or are left to die on the sidewalks. There are so many bodies that there’s a shortage of wood to cremate them.

(From Guardian) People with breathing problems caused by Covid-19 wait to receive oxygen in Ghaziabad. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

The Modi government under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) isn’t positioned to help, either materially or psychologically. The fact is that Narendra Modi is basically an evil man—the kind of man who encourages or allows Hindus to kill Muslims. I consider him even worse than Trump, since he doesn’t even pretend to care about the plight that’s destroying India. Yet he’s still too popular to be deposed.  And while earlier he assured the world that India, the world’s second most populous country, had the virus under control, that proved to be untrue.  It’s clear that, like me, Roy is a bitter opponent of Modi and his minions, but you can read about that in the article. I’ll give just one quote:

As this epic catastrophe plays out on our Modi-aligned Indian television channels, you’ll notice how they all speak in one tutored voice. The “system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.

The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.

Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.

The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.

Oh, and a cry for help:

The crisis-generating machine that we call our government is incapable of leading us out of this disaster. Not least because one man makes all the decisions in this government, and that man is dangerous – and not very bright. This virus is an international problem. To deal with it, decision-making, at least on the control and administration of the pandemic, will need to pass into the hands of some sort of non-partisan body consisting of members of the ruling party, members of the opposition, and health and public policy experts.

As for Modi, is resigning from your crimes a feasible proposition? Perhaps he could just take a break from them – a break from all his hard work. There’s that $564m Boeing 777, Air India One, customised for VVIP travel – for him, actually – that’s been sitting idle on the runway for a while now. He and his men could just leave. The rest of us will do all we can to clean up their mess.

No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.

And here’s how to help: consult these articles, which give many links about how and where to give:

New York Times

Washington Post

Remember, India is the world’s biggest democracy, and despite the execrable government, the country and its people need our help. Please donate if you can.
h/t: David

Reader discussion: Biden’s speech

April 29, 2021 • 9:00 am

If you listened to Joe Biden’s address to Congress last night, you know that he proposed sweeping (and expensive) governmental plans, which he proposes to finance with taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Here’s a video of the full speech:

Among his proposals are these, as outlined by the New York Times:

What he’ll do:

The “American Families Plan,” as he called his latest, $1.8 trillion proposal, would follow the “American Rescue Plan,” a $1.9 trillion package of spending on pandemic relief and economic stimulus that he has already signed into law, and the “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion program for infrastructure, home health care and other priorities that remains pending.

The families plan includes $1 trillion in new spending and $800 billion in tax credits. It would finance universal prekindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a federal paid family and medical leave program, efforts to make child care more affordable, free community college for all, aid for students at colleges that historically serve nonwhite communities and expanded subsidies under the Affordable Care Act.

The plan would also extend key tax breaks included as temporary measures in the coronavirus relief package that benefit lower- and middle-income workers and families, including the child tax credit, the earned-income tax credit, and the child and dependent care tax credit.

Paying for it:

To pay for that, the president proposed increasing the marginal income tax rate for the top 1 percent of American income earners, to 39.6 percent from 37 percent. He would increase capital gains and dividend tax rates for those earning more than $1 million a year. And he would eliminate a provision in the tax code that reduces capital gains on some inherited assets, like vacation homes, that largely benefits the wealthy.

He also noted that he exceeded his campaign promise vis-à-vis inoculations, helping get more than 200 million Americans vaccinated in his first hundred days in office.

And although Biden still made noises about being a “unifying” President, I think we all recognize that he’s given up on that. And rightly so, because the Republicans are absolutely intransigent.

Over at CNN, 13 of the 15 commenters rated his speech either an A or a B (the two dissenters, giving him a D for substance, are Republicans or worked for Republicans). Here’s what David Gergen, who gave Biden an A, said:

Can Biden Measure up to FDR and LBJ?

Only twice before in history has an American president done what Joe Biden did tonight: issue a clarion call for a transformation of the nation’s social safety net.

Franklin Roosevelt was the first to envision a strong, impenetrable safety net that would protect citizens from cradle to grave. That was the essence of his first 100 days after his election in 1932. Inspired by Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson chose his first congressional speech as the forum for laying the groundwork for his Great Society programs after his 1964 election.

But can Biden be as successful? He certainly gave one of his most effective speeches tonight. For the first 40 minutes of his address, he laid out a menu of delights for the middle class that will surely be popular. His arguments for his plans were well crafted and deftly delivered.

But there is one crucial difference between Biden and his predecessors, Roosevelt and Johnson: those two men began the fight with far more political strength in Congress. Roosevelt’s Democrats held 59 of 96 Senate seats and 313 House of 432 House seats when he was first elected. And coming off a landslide election, Johnson commanded 68 Senate seats and 295 House seats. Biden, by contrast, holds congressional power by a thread.

It is also a fair question whether the price tag for the President’s plans — about $6 trillion in total — is so towering that public support will wane over time. For now, Biden holds the upper hand with the American people. Whether he can keep it may well determine whether he will join Roosevelt and Johnson in the Democratic pantheon.

My own opinion; it was a very good speech, aimed at the average American (I won’t assign a grade)—ambitious for the country but not self-aggrandizing for the man. Biden radiated compassion and empathy.  It was thus a hugely refreshing change from our previous “President”. I am not in the tax bracket that will be asked to pay more, but if I were, I would, and I’d be willing to pay more taxes even now (I note that I’m not strapped for cash). I still worry that Biden will be coopted by the Woke, but compared to Trump, that’s a minor worry, and I count on the rational to reign him in. (Perhaps that’s a vain hope.)

As for the impact of the enormous spending and taxing required, it’s always popular to finance stuff by calling for taxes on the rich and on corporations. Whether this will affect the economy as a whole is beyond my pay grade.

Oh, one more worry. Given that much of this legislation may require 60 votes in the Senate—votes that Biden doesn’t have—can this actually be accomplished? It cannot all be done by executive order, you know.

But I am neither a politician nor a pundit, and the purpose of this post is to ask readers to discuss the speech, how they feel about it, and any worries they have about how the new administration is going. Comments should go below.

Reader’s wildlife video

April 29, 2021 • 8:00 am

Our friend Tara Tanaka (Vimeo site here, Flickr site here) lives on a plot of land in Florida that includes wetlands, and she often films the residents. Today she’s sent us another of her videos, this time of red-bellied woodpeckers (Melanerpes carolinus) raising their young. There’s a scary snake, but it doesn’t get any of the birds.

Tara’s notes are indented, and be sure to enlarge the video when you watch it.

On Feb. 8th we observed this pair mating and their newly excavated cavity in a dead maple tree on the edge of the swamp.  The cavity is very well hidden behind dead branches and Spanish moss, and they even built it right under an overhang of separating bark that keeps the rain out.  I recognize this male’s distinctive face and have been photographing him for years.  I’ve been watching this female for at least two years – she drinks from the hummingbird feeder right in front on my PC.

The first clip was recorded on Mar. 23rd, and at the time we didn’t know if they had hatchlings yet or not, but I’ve since learned that incubation only lasts about 12 days for this species.  From the detailed information I was able to find on birdsoftheworld.org, these nestlings are approx. 15-20 days old, and will fledge at around 24-27 days.

On Apr. 26th my husband heard and saw the parents very upset – vocalizing and flying back and forth from the nest tree to the large water oak a few feet away.  After much searching, we found a large gray rat snake in the water oak trying to find a path over to the dead tree where the nestlings sat helpless in their cavity.  As soon as we saw the cavity in the maple tree in February we wrapped the bottom of it with wildlife netting to prevent any rat snakes from reaching the nest.  We have already removed one snake that became entangled in the netting and relocated him far away, so it was not possible for the snake to get up the maple, but his determination had him trying to reach the nestlings from another tree.

I always keep water in a small vase mounted on a tree right in front of my office window that I put up just for the woodpeckers, but other birds use it too. Woodpeckers drink from knot holes in trees, but they have become used to the fresh water and drink from it multiple times a day.  During last year’s nest season we had a severe drought, and I think that the constant (the female is drinking now 😊) supply of fresh water, peanut halves and Bark Butter allowed them to raise three healthy young that they brought to my feeding station as soon as they fledged.  In one video this year I even saw the female feeding Bark Butter to a nestling, however both parents typically arrive with beakfulls of grubs and other insects.

I’m sure I’m seeing at least two nestlings – there may be three.  I’ll be holding my breath until they make it out safely!

A note to readers about civility

April 29, 2021 • 7:30 am

Perhaps it’s the pandemic making people peevish (I am one such victim), but I’ve noticed lately that some commenters are calling each other names, saying they’re ignorant, and generally making unconstructive comments that are meant to denigrate somebody else.

As you know, I don’t like that kind of discourse, so please don’t engage in it. If you think someone has made a dumb argument or weak or insupportable points, say so, but do it civilly, and explain why. I don’t like one-on-one altercations, especially when accompanied by personal insults, on my site.

I ask those of you who may have done this to please review the commenting rules (“Da Roolz”) on the left side of the screen, or go here.

I fully understand that someone’s comments may make you mad, but I urge you to resist the temptation to engage in insults, impugning someone’s knowledge, etc. Our purpose here is discussion, learning, enlightenment, and entertainment. And yes, also disagreement. Just do it civilly, please.

I will give warnings if I see it, and repeated violations will lead to you being kicked off and directed to websites where altercations and insults are the usual fare.

Thursday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)

April 29, 2021 • 6:30 am

Grease the new day (as a friend used to say)! It’s Thursday, April 29, 2021: National Shrimp Scampi Day (that’s a dish I’ve never had). It’s also National Zipper Day (this convenient fastener was patented on this day in 1913) and Viral Video Day.  In honor of the last day, here are the 25 most viral videos of 2020. #2, near the end, is the best!

Finally, it’s two UN holidays: Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare and International Dance Day (UNESCO).

Wine of the Day: To drink with my big pot of turkey chili, which should last a few days, I’ve chosen one of my favorite genres of red wine: Rioja! This one, ten years from vintage was about $25.

The experts’ ratings look good, and I’m writing this on Wednesday before I’ve cracked the bottle.

2 hours later (Wednesday), very good again, but not a world-beater. Juicy with ripe cherry fruit, well balanced, but nothing to mark it as a superb wine. I’ll drink another two glasses tonight and see if it improves.

News of the Day:

Joe Biden gave his first speech to Congress last evening, proposing sweeping reforms. Hold your thoughts on that, as we’ll have a discussion post later.

The Supreme Court is considering an important free-speech case in which a high school cheerleader, not chosen to be part of the elite “varsity squad”, ranted and cursed the school on social media. What she said:

“F— school, f— softball, f— cheer, f— everything,” 14-year-old Brandi Levy typed into Snapchat one spring Saturday. Like all “snaps” posted to a Snapchat “story,” this one sent to about 250 “friends” was to disappear within 24 hours, before everyone returned to Pennsylvania’s Mahanoy Area High School on Monday.

Levy was suspended from her junior varsity squad for a year, whereupon her parents filed suit in federal court, and it’s gone all the way up to the Supremes. I think they’re likely to rule in her favor, as Levy’s “speech” was on social media, so why should she be punished for her private free speech? This is not harassment, bullying, or any other form of speech prohibited by the First Amendment. But it’s not a trivial case:

“This is the most momentous case in more than five decades involving student speech,” said Justin Driver, a Yale law professor and author of “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind.”

The Court may be conservative, but if it rules in Levy’s favor in this case, I think it will have ruled properly. This kind of incident will become increasingly frequent as speech is disseminated on social media.

The feds searched Rudy Giluiani’s home and office yesterday,  acting on a federal warrant. As the New York Times reports,

The federal authorities have largely focused on whether Mr. Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who at the time were helping Mr. Giuliani search for damaging information on Mr. Trump’s political rivals, including Mr. Biden, who was then a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the F.B.I. had sought for months to secure search warrants for Mr. Giuliani’s phones and electronic devices.

Reader Ken, who knows his law, told me this:

To secure such warrants, the government would have had to establish, to a federal magistrate’s satisfaction, fresh probable cause to believe that the search would yield evidence of a crime. The agents reportedly seized Giuliani’s computers and electronic devices.

. . . The search of a lawyer’s premises (not to mention the premises of a lawyer for a former US President) is a big friggin’ deal. See section 9-13.430 of the US Justice Department Manual. Main Justice has to sign off on it, and the government had to be convinced that Giuliani couldn’t be trusted to turn over the materials sought in response to a subpoena.

On a sadder note, astronaut Michael Collins, who stayed in the command module during the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, and who helped ensure tht the lunar module containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin docked properly before their return to Earth, died yesterday at 90 of cancer. He wrote extensively about his journal (they trained for six years for the mission), and memorial tweets show some of his writing:

This is a touching photo and caption:

There are two big vertebrate genome papers in Nature. One paper reports complete genome sequences of 16 vertebrate species in the 8 major lineages, and the other reports a complete sequence for the playtpus and partial sequence of one echidna species, both monotremes—egg-laying mammals. I have yet to read either paper but wanted to call them to your attention. (h/t: Matthew)

Stuff that happened on April 29 includes:

  • 1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans.
  • 1770 – James Cook arrives in Australia at Botany Bay, which he names.
  • 1910 – The Parliament of the United Kingdom passes the People’s Budget, the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public.
  • 1916 – Easter Rising: After six days of fighting, Irish rebel leaders surrender to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end.

Here’s a 6½-minute BBC video summarizing the Easter Rising:

  • 1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor; Hitler and Braun both commit suicide the following day.
  • 1945 – Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops.
  • 1967 – After refusing induction into the United States Army the previous day, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing title.

Here’s a short video about Ali’s refusal of induction. He had applied for conscientious objector status but was refused. After a trial, he was sentenced to five years in jail but remained free until the Supreme Court overturned that decision on the grounds that the refusal of CO status was not accompanied by a reason.

  • 1968 – The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with some of its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
  • 1970 – Vietnam War: United States and South Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia to hunt Viet Cong.

The invasion of Cambodia energized all of us in college, leading to widespread protests and, at Kent State, to the shooting of unarmed students.

  • 1974 – Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings relating to the scandal.
  • 1992 – Riots in Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 63 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.

This was the first time video was taken of a brutal police beating of a suspect. You can see it below, and yet the officers were acquitted. This would never stand today:

  • 2015 – A baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox sets the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1854 – Henri Poincaré, French mathematician, physicist, and engineer (d. 1912)
  • 1893 – Harold Urey, American chemist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981)
  • 1899 – Duke Ellington, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1974)

There aren’t a lot of videos of Ellington’s band, particularly in its best years—the early forties. This one, of his signature tune “Take the A Train” (written by Billy Strayhorn), was made in 1943. I prefer the all-instrumental version. I’m reading a biography of Ellington now.

  • 1929 – Walter Kempowski, German author and academic (d. 2007)
  • 1933 – Willie Nelson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor
  • 1945 – Brian Charlesworth, English biologist, geneticist, and academic

My colleague and former chairman of my department, Brian is now retired but still very active at Edinburgh. He was a great colleague (we wrote some papers together) and an excellent chair:

  • 1954 – Jerry Seinfeld, American comedian, actor, and producer
  • 1957 – Daniel Day-Lewis, British-Irish actor
  • 1970 – Andre Agassi, American tennis player
  • 1970 – Uma Thurman, American actress

Those who went to their Just Reward on April 29 include:

Don’t ask me to explain Wittgenstein’s philosophy; that’s above my pay grade. But I can show you a photo:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is concerned with enforcing the rules. As Malgozata notes,

This old sign says: “It’s forbidden to dump tires under the penalty of shooting your brains out”. It’s written in a “slangy” language. We found it many years ago on a dump outside a closed, abandoned and ruined factory.
A: What are you looking at?
Hili: I’m checking to see whether people are breaking bans.
In Polish:

Ja: Na co patrzysz?
Hili: Sprawdzam, czy ludzie nie łamią zakazów.

And we have a Leon monologue!

Leon: “What kind of wonder of nature is this?”

In Polish: A coż to za cud natury?

Leon:

Here’s little Kulka:

A meme from Bruce:

From Facebook via Mark: the Jean-Paul Sartre Parking Garage. But how can you pay if you don’t exist?

From Su: A duck trying to connect with the Beyond:

Tulsi Gabbard, who surely counts as a woman of color, here decries the increasing racialization of America, using the Hawaiian conception of “aloha”:

From Facebook. It’s time to do our occasional check-in with Iranian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad. Here’s her reaction (yes, it’s on Fox News) to Iran being chosen to be a member of the UN Commission on Women’s Rights. (The UN is such a joke these days!):

Tweets from Matthew. I believe I’ve posted about Ricky Gervais adopting a foster tabby that he named “Pickles”, but here’s a tweet and some new video:

From the University of Chicago! Two days ago the temperature was about 82°F (28°C), and it was glorious. But they should have included a photo of Botany Pond with the ducks!

Donkeys run free after a winter of being cooped up. Sound up so you can hear as well as see their joy:

This link would make good background music while you’re working; it’s almost like working in the jungle:

This looks to me like a very small slug getting a drink (and getting engulfed by a water drop):

James Carville is worried about the Democrats’ message

April 28, 2021 • 1:30 pm

Ceiling Cat bless the bald pate of James Carville and the gray matter it conceals!  One thing you can count on with Carville is that he doesn’t mince words, and while you may not agree with him, you always know where he stands. In this new Vox interview, cited in Bari Weiss’s column I posted about earlier, Carville is worried about the Democratic Party and its message. If you say, as interviewer Sean Illing does, “Well, we won the Senate, the White House, and Congress, didn’t we?”, Carville will reply like this:

James Carville

We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Click on the screenshot to read:

Carville is high on Biden and what he’s done, but he thinks that wokeness and academic-style jargon is turning off parts of the electorate that the Democrats need. A few of his examples:

Sean Illing

Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.

James Carville

Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.

Here’s the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That’s the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.

So they just have to lose by less — that’s all.

Note that the tweet about abolishing the cops comes from the odious and anti-Semitic Rashida Tlaib:

I don’t get the “lose by less” trope, for the Electoral College is basically an all-or-none affair, so if Democrats loss by less in Republican states (all but two states have a winner-take-all system), it makes no difference for the Presidency. Someone can enlighten me here.

More:

James Carville

Honestly, if we’re just talking about Biden, it’s very difficult to find something to complain about. And to me his biggest attribute is that he’s not into “faculty lounge” politics.

Sean Illing

“Faculty lounge” politics?

James Carville

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in … neighborhoods.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

There’s more, but you should read it for yourself. As for what Carville suggests, well, he’s mainly trying to raise the problem rather than solve it, but he does suggest some approaches. One involves livening up discourse about climate change: fewer boring stats and more slogans. And hit Republican miscreants as hard as they hit the Democrats (his example is to pay more attention to the Right storming the Capitol). As he says (my emphasis):

Sean Illing

There’s a philosophy on the left right now, which says the Democrats should pass everything they possibly can, no matter the costs, and trust that the voters will reward them on the back end.

Where do you land on that?

James Carville

First of all, the Democratic Party can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s the fact. We don’t have the votes. But I’ll say this, two of the most consequential political events in recent memory happened on the same day in January: the insurrection at the US Capitol and the Democrats winning those two seats in Georgia. Can’t overstate that.

But the Democrats can’t fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people towrite op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.

Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.

So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.

Now I suspect a lot of readers will disagree about Carville’s diagnosis. The part about wokeness, though, resonates with me. The fact is that the vaunted “Blue Wave” just didn’t appear in the last elections, and the midterms in two years  historically represent a loss of power for the ruling party. We do have cause to worry and we should, as Carville notes, be speaking Yiddish rather than Hebrew.

Bari Weiss has a round table on the meaning of “systemic racism”

April 28, 2021 • 12:00 pm

I’ve always thought of “systemic racism” as meaning “racism that is formally ingrained and codified within a system”, like a college or a governmental department. . That is, there are policies or laws that are racist in such organizations. Now, though, I see that the term seems to be used as a substitute for pervasive or endemic racism. In other words, “systemic racism” now seems to have become a synonym for “racism,” with the “systemic” apparently adding no information except a highfalutin tone. Sometimes, though, as in the first contributor below, it’s taken to mean “unwritten practices by a group that have the effect of being racist.”

Over at her Substack site, Common Sense, Bari Weiss has a round-table column in which six people, whose names appear in the title below, try to explain what “systemic racism” means, at least to them.  I like this kind of post, as you get to see different points of view. The people she collects, while generally on the “anti-woke” side of things, are not all like that.

Click on the screenshot to read it. First, there’s an intro by Weiss:

One bit of [academic] jargon — much like “equity” and “social justice” — is the phrase “systemic racism.”

All of a sudden, it was everywhere. We were supposed to say it. We were supposed to root it out. But what did it actually mean?

Is systemic racism merely legal discrimination? Or does it capture the legacy of slavery and segregation? Is it meant to describe ill-conceived policies, like the response to the crack epidemic? Or is it something far more expansive, sweeping up any kind of racial disparity as evidence of its existence?

We are talking past one another. Perhaps that’s because people are scared to admit ignorance. Perhaps that’s because those who use the phrase mean for it to be elastic. Mostly I suspect it’s because no one wants to seem like they are in anyway denying racism’s evil by asking any questions about it at all.

It seems to me that these are exactly the reasons why we need to discuss this morally freighted and confusing phrase.

So today I invited a group of writers I admire and who challenge me to weigh in on the question: What is systemic racism?

It turns out that it means different things to these six people, but only one meaning adhering to how I construed the term.

To Lara Bazelon, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco and head of the criminal and racial justice clinics, it is not anything enshrined in law, but a practice used consistently by the criminal-justice system in Louisiana, which allows a judge to double the maximum sentence of anyone convicted of a felony if they have a prior felony conviction. This got one of her clients, apparently innocent, 60 years without parole (his original felony, at 17, was for a drug sale). This invocation of the “double-time” law is used “overwhelmingly against Black people, many of them teenagers”. I believe her; the only question I have is whether, because blacks may well constitute most of those convicted, they are subject to the law on a per capita basis more often than whites. I suspect they are.

To Bazelon, then, “systemic racism” is not enshrined in law, but a common practice by an institution that is unfair towards black people.

Kmele Foster is co-host of the podcast “The Fifth Column, sees “system racism” as a blanket term for anything that results in inequity (outcomes disproportionately leaving out minority groups).  And, like others in the group (see below), he notes that one cannot truly say that inequality of outcomes reflects existing racism:

When invoked by activists or academics, the concept is deceptively matter-of-fact. If America’s laws and institutions tend to generate racially disparate outcomes, then, irrespective of intent, the country is “systemically racist.” This definition makes it easy to fold everything from the impact of Covid-19 to police-involved killings to standardized testing into the same politically charged and counterproductive framework.

Each of these issues has been contaminated by racial politics, but perhaps none more so than education.

In New York and San Francisco, concerns over “systemic racism” have led lawmakers to largely abandon their responsibility to actually fix chronically failing schools. What have they done instead? Degraded admissions standards for their best-performing magnet programs because there were too many Asian and white students. Launched campaigns to rename schools deemed to have offensive names. And, most disturbing of all, they’ve committed themselves to making public school campuses ideological battlegrounds —condemning the very idea of merit and insisting that black students should not be held to the same standards as their white peers.

It’s a perverse ratcheting down of expectations and a reflection of an ideological program more concerned with racial parity than meaningful progress.

Linguist John McWhorter again raises the clear fact that inequities of outcome do not necessarily reflect current racial progress. He agrees with Foster about how “systemic racism” is used: as an untested way to explain inequalities of outcome:

The idea behind the phrase is that inequities between whites and blacks on the societal level, such as in scholastic achievement, wages, wealth, quality of housing and health outcomes, are due to racist bias of some kind, exercising its influence in abstract but decisive ways. As such, the existence of these inequities represent a sort of “racism” that must be battled with the same urgency and even indignation that personal “prejudice” requires.

The problem is that sociology and social history are more complex than this interpretation of “systemic racism” allows.

. . . I find the term “systemic racism” to be the most nettlesome term in the English language at present.

As you might expect, McWhorter’s pal and fellow discussant Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown, agrees: “systemic racism” is a spectre invoked to explain inequities. But he goes further, making the controversial statement that equality of opportunity has already been attained by African Americans:

But acknowledging this complexity is too much nuance for those alleging “systemic racism.”

They ignore the following truth: that America has basically achieved equal opportunity in terms of race. We have chased away the Jim Crow bugaboo, not just with laws but also by widespread social customs, practices, and norms. When Democrats call a Georgia voter integrity law a resurgence of Jim Crow, it is nothing more than a lie. Everybody knows there is no real Jim Crow to be found anywhere in America.

. . . My deep suspicion is that these charges of “systemic racism” have proliferated and grown so hysterical because black people — with full citizenship and equal opportunity in the most dynamic country on Earth — are failing to measure up.  Violent crime is one dimension of this. The disorder and chaos in our family lives is another. Denouncing “systemic racism” and invoking “white supremacy,” and shouting “black lives matter,” while 8,000 black homicides a year go unmentioned — these are maneuvers of avoidance and blame-shifting.

That will not win him any friends among blacks! And is there really equality of opportunity if you’re behind in the race from the day you’re born?

Kenny Xu is identified as “the author of “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” forthcoming in July.”  Xu’s take on systemic racism is pretty much a hybrid of Bazolon’s and McWhorter + Loury’s: a habitual form of racial discrimination that results in inequity of outcomes and is not part of written policy. His example, however, is Harvard’s policy of discriminating against Asian-Americans, which, based on their scores, should constitute about 40% of Harvard’s undergraduate population when it actually constitutes less than half that. Although Harvard was found not guilty in court of discriminating against Asian students by lowering their “personality scores,” this case is going to a higher court, and I think it has merit. There is some rationale for affirmative action that might lower the Asian-American population at Harvard below that stemming from their academic credentials alone, but a more-than-50% cut seems grossly unfair.

Chloé Valery is identified as “the founder of Theory of Enchantment”, a “compassionate antiracism program” based on the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr.  She takes “systemic racism” as I understood it, using as an example the Jim Crow laws of the post-bellum South as well as slavery.  She argues that racism reflected the “spiritual desiccation” of whites who compensated for their emptiness by grossly mistreating blacks. You can hear the echo of Dr. King in her words, which seem curiously disconnected from the question at hand, but are still eloquent:

Spiritual desiccation had taken over American life and this poverty drove white citizens to overcompensate by beating and murdering those who were different from them.

Perhaps for this reason alone, it is worth considering the limitations in using the metaphor of a mechanical “system” to describe racism, since racism becomes more likely when we are cold and mechanical, machine-like, numb to the conundrum of our own lives and those around us. If we want to combat the scourge of prejudice, we ought to commit to reversing this process, and take responsibility for the beauty of our own lives, both its tragedies and its joys.

My conclusion: we should completely ditch the term “systemic racism” because it is confusing and means different things to different people. You can always apply more accurate adjectives to be more specific, like “ingrained racism” for the Louisiana case. Or, not use “racism” at all in cases in which it’s a convenient but untested excuse for inequity of representation. I myself don’t use the term “systemic racism” because it is imprecise and can be understood in diverse ways.