I should add, I'm more concerned here with gaining the upper hand in how the issues get framed than I am with electability. Newsom fits fewer prejudices than do Pritzker or Buttigieg. I just don't think that what he is saying cuts through enough to change the conversation, and I think the conversation we are having is a losing conversation for the Dems.
lj- As a note, in Kamala Harris’ recent book, she said that she wanted Buttgieg, but thought that it was ‘asking too much of America’ (if I remember the quote correctly). I’m not second guessing that, I’m just imagining an America where it wouldn’t be asking too much.
I understand this reaction, but what wj had asked for was:
...someone else who a) is willing to stand up, and b) has the media expertise available to get the message out effectively.
I think Mayor Pete offers more of this than does Newsom. And I think that if the Dems want to break through, they are going to have to find someone that is more a brawler than a point fighter. Newsom is all jab with no follow-up, and he's too much of a lightweight to land a knockout with a jab. Both the guys I countered with seem capable of landing some body blows.
wj- <i>I’d vastly rather look to someone else. But that requires there be someone else who a) is willing to stand up, and b) has the media expertise available to get the message out effectively.</i>
Buttigieg? Pritzker? I'd prefer either of them. Don't know where I'd stand on Beshear vs Newsom. Beshear seems like exactly the sort of person that Klein is dreaming of for The Great Centrist Messiah, and I mistrust that instinct immediately.
And despite all this, I am happy that Newsom is taking the stands he's taking and poking the old, gouty, amber colored badgers that he's poking. Newsom is the Killian's Irish Red of American politics, he looks fancy and he's better than a bland American pilsner, but he's still coming out of a big dollar brewery despite the fancy looking label.
bobbyp - I read your link and I will admit that I have thought the same thing about our situation more than once.
I think that the constitution could be saved, but it would take another Lincoln or FDR to do it, and a lot of pushing through structural changes to shore up the weakest parts that are making it so hard to prevent the willful vandalism and disregard of the rule of law. I don't think that their critics are wrong to say that they used extra-constitutional means to achieve their ends, but part of their end in both cases was not just to preserve the union, but to preserve the constitution and keep continuity of government.
Of course both ended up having their work undone, and here we are again.
My fear is that this time the current GOP will force a suspension of the constitution and turn tyrant with the intent of undoing the constitution and replacing it with a Christian Nationalist authoritarian government. If so, then I don't know how the union is going to hold.
That's because you are seeing Republicans as people who have a different worldview and position, and trying to understand them in order to live with them as a part of your community. That's not the way that the core of the GOP thinks about Democrats. To them we are not Americans with a different point of view that must be negotiated. To them we are not really Americans, and their job is to protect America from us.
I'm not saying we should be uncivil to them. I'm saying that we fall outside of their view of what counts as civitas.
Following on russell's comment, I'm going to talk Carl Schmitt again. I know I've written some of this before, but that's all in the archive now, so here it is again for the new site.
I get why russell says that civility is no longer on offer. US conservatism has taken a hard turn into political theology (as described by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political) since 9/11. Schmitt was very concerned with the concept of sovereignty and where the authority to govern resides. For him the sovereign is the person, or entity, that is authorized by the people to make the distinction between friend and enemy, and decide who is or is not a part of the people when conflicts become existential - the State of Exception. I see this political theology deeply reflected in pretty much everything that the Roberts court has given us. They are always thinking about executive sovereignty and crises.
Civility is not on offer because the base of the GOP has decided that Democrats, and Democratic voting states, are on the enemy side of the friend/enemy distinction. If you doubt this, just look at what Vance has said about the shutdown. He says that the Democrats are "holding the American people hostage." That literally puts Democratic officials - and all the Americans who elected those officials - on the side of the enemy with which the GOP will not negotiate.
The GOP and their core voters do not see this as a political disagreement to be negotiated over. They see Democrats as the enemies of America, to be expelled or subdued in the name of The People.
OED says "bought the farm" is recent (1950s) USAF slang originally for a fatal plane crash. They speculate it could be about compensation for the farmer whose land was destroyed, but I also wonder if it isn't a humorous extension of "plowing" into the ground.
I think a lot of people found the way that the early centrist blogs performed that even-handedness that russell identifies above to be productive and valuable for getting past ideological positions to something more dynamic. It was widespread enough that people learned how to do it as a sort of generic exercise. A lot of bright people have a hard time knowing how to get at that sort of cross-cutting commentary without falling back on the structures they have learned for writing those sorts of commentary.
That's not always a failure of good faith, sometimes it's just a struggle with form combined with an impatience with impasse.
But the effect of that, of course, is to create a sort of artificial leveling of the sides through equivocation, which hollows out the resulting conversation. That leads to a different form of impatience and frustration.
I don't think the fault lies in CharlesWT so much as in the devolution of what passes for mainstream right wing politics. There's no way to structure things in a way that looks even and balanced when the right has decided that they don't need to listen to, work with, or care about anything and anyone on the other side.
An entire genre of blog commentary cannot function anymore, no matter how we try to replicate it.
Afterword to my earlier comment about "play stupid games, win stupid prizes..."
I'd prefer that the prizes that people won for playing stupid games were the most gentle possible version of the prize that would actually relieve them of the urge to play stupid games and steer them into playing smart games that have prizes we all get to share to our mutual benefit.
CharlesWT - Some journalists who have been beaten to the point of brain injury may wish to quibble.
I assume that this is about Andy Ngo. Important to note that Ngo does not usually wear anything identifying himself as a member of the press, and often follows groups like Patriot Prayer to film confrontations with antifa groups. He also is known for doxxing antifa protesters on his own channel, and selectively editing them.
His lack of any press identification while traveling with Patriot Prayer is going to get him in the middle of things and mistaken for being a member of that group while they are engaging in their own violent provocation. They may not be "attacking a journalist" so much as they are just trying to hold their own in a clash between violent groups, and they have no indication that Ngo is not a member of Patriot Prayer or associated with them.
But also, more than a few of the antifa people may know who Ngo was, and were going after him because of his having doxxed them or one of their friends. Ngo has given Portland antifa plenty of reasons to hate him personally. He could have been targeted for a beat down, but "journalist" is far too innocent and anodyne a description of his role in context. No one is attacking him for being there and trying to document things while staying out of the confrontation. He's an active participant on one side using his ambiguous position as a journalist to cast himself in a more innocent light.
I'm not defending antifa here. I'm sure that more than a few among them were engaged in felony violence. I'm also sure that many among them were also victims of felony violence and that some of that felony violence was committed by the people who were personal associates of Ngo.
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard or read an alt-right associate say "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" to footage of college students being beaten by police, or by a right-wing activist during an escalation. Ngo is an avid player of stupid games. He's made his name as such, and has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, not all of whom are Russian bots.
A bit about antifa violence and videos, including some of Ngo's work - from Bellingcat:
I have a hard time watching any Ngo video and video of neutrally positioned (and clearly identified) journalists being targeted and fired upon with pepper balls and rubber rounds by riot police, and feeling like that's a legitimate comparison for both-siderism.
Any economic philosophy that is reliant on growth is going to be struggling as it runs up against the reality of climate change. As far as population reduction goes, that's going to take care of itself whether we do anything or not.
Let me add +1 to russell's list of black bloc types - RW accelerationists wanting to turn up the temperature and provoke things like the Guard call-up.
No, I don't think that any of them are in the antifa camp in Portland. The people in the camp are either real antifa types, or are undercover feds (again, I think not, but that has been the case with the RW militias, so I leave open that possibility). The antifa folks would not take kindly to finding a Boogaloo Boy in their midst.
But, for example, in Minneapolis after George Floyd there were RW militia kids who were caught driving in from WI to loot and burn and try to provoke a violent response from the authorities.
If I see a single person in black with a mask wearing visible antifa markers, I automatically assume that they are false flag assholes. The usually get chased off by the activist leaders, but they hang around just far enough away to provoke.
It does note the breaking of one door at the ICE facility back in June, but also:
July 25: Assistant Chief Craig Dobson says that federal officers are “actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there” during testimony for a lawsuit seeking to compel officers to enforce noise rules at the ICE protests.
...and:
Sept. 4: Fox News airs a long report about the Labor Day protest at ICE. Mixed in misleadingly are clips from 2020 protests, showing chaotic scenes outside the downtown federal courthouse and near an elk statue.
Whatever the case, it doesn't look to me like there is any reason to send in the Guard when the situation is neither dangerous nor volatile. It's noisy sometimes, and people occasionally cause a bit of property damage. It seems like the people causing the damage are being stopped and arrested.
News of widespread violent unrest and lawlessness looks to me to be a right wing media PSYOP.
At times, there have been several hundred protestors at the ICE facility.
And out of those, it's probably this same group of assholes and a dozen of their friends in visiting from somewhere else that are responsible for the water bottles and milkshakes. It's not a war zone. It's not an occupying force. It's not much more of a nuisance that people face when they live next to a live music venue or a biker bar. And it would be less of a nuisance if it weren't for the illegal actions of the current administration wanting to prove they are hard men.
People have a right to protest. But they don’t have the right to make other people’s lives unlivable, assault people, or destroy property.
All reasons why cities have laws, ordinances, and police forces. None of them have asked for ICE to step in. None of them need rescuing. All of them wish ICE and the Guard would GTFO so that the assholes would go home again.
I've known assholes like these. They get bored easily. They will go away if the feds dial back the authoritarian showboating. it will make Warrior Pete sad, but he'll still have tequila to comfort himself.
CharlesWT - C.K. Bouferrache aka Honeybadgermom is very concerned with ANTIFA, Satan, Drag Queens, Christian Oppression in the US, and the poor treatment of the J6 Prisoners.
I get that you aren't endorsing her, just looking at a few of her videos as evidence for ANTIFA presence in Portland, but I have a real hard time trusting her representation of anything given her Q-Anon obsessions and raving.
And in pretty much all of those, what I see is a small group of people being disruptive and annoying. I wouldn't want them as neighbors, but it's not the sort of thing we need the military to come in and deal with. It's not a war zone. It's just assholes with a cause being provoked by assholes with unconstitutional police powers.
Reading through that transcript, I can't help but notice that Klein's fixated on determining what it is that Dems have done to lose "the center." What he thinks of as "the center" seems fairly hard to pin down. Sometimes it seem like he means "the Midwest" and "rural voters." Sometimes it's "people scared of radical change, like LGBTQ+ stuff." He never seems to linger long on any one such group, or to try to dig in and get to the deepest urges that drive each of those groups fears, and I think that's because his question is what can be done to "win them back." He reminds me a lot of the campus Christian groups I was a part of back in the day whose conversations revolved around how to "win hearts for Jesus." We were all looking for ways to appeal to the others around us, to be cool and relatable, to listen to them and find the needs and hurts that they were expressing so that we could understand how and when to convince them to join the team - being all things to all people so that by all means we could win some.
It was a transactional view of people. We cared to the degree that we thought we might be able to win them over. We were nice to everyone, but we didn't really want to spend any time in community with them unless we thought they were "on the path" to our way of things.
I see this most clearly when Klein muses over needing more Democrats in the midwest who will not alienate anti-abortion people. He's adjusting the sales pitch, trying to get a sale by avoiding conflict. It's a good way to win a sale in the short term, but it does nothing to build coalitions or to create understanding across differences. It leaves marginal communities on the margins and makes it seem tactically acceptable to abandon those communities for the sake of avoiding conflict when solidarity becomes hard.
Coates is coming from that margin and knows the peril of it. He's lived his entire life feeling like he was a target for political violence that saw him in that instrumental, transactional way, not as someone to be won, but as someone to be feared for the sake of winning that same centrist that Klein wishes to add to the D column. Coates sees that the problem for a lot of people is not political violence per se, but rather that political violence was threatening *to touch them.* "Getting out of hand," "spinning out of control" implies that what came before those dangerous moments was not a threat and was happening in a controlled and acceptable manner. Eric Brown? Not *political* violence. Not a sign of a society that had lost its way and was dangerously polarized.
I don't want to tip things over into the same conversations we have had about "white fragility" because I don't see that those conversations have been particularly productive, but I will say that I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional.
I'd like to say more, but I can again feel this threatening to turn into something that requires examples and footnotes and explanations that I don't have the resources or the time to support on the night before I start my Fall teaching, so I'll have to be satisfied with this quick stab at what nibbles at me when I read Klein.
bc - AOC’s response starts out strong but then devolves and illustrates two things: 1) My point above, that it wasn’t really what was in the proclamation but what wasn’t; and 2) her penchant for taking things out of context. I do see her point, but similar things could have been said about Hortman’s legislative agenda.
AOC's statement (https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-statement-charlie-kirk-resolution-and-trump-administrations) deserves a bit of close reading and analysis because I don't think that she said anything out of context. Her argument is pretty straightforward and does not stray into anything that is not relevant to the resolution. AOC says:
House Republicans today brought to the floor a resolution ‘honoring the life and legacy’ of Charlie Kirk. I voted NO.
Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter – one that is especially important to help stabilize an increasingly unsafe and volatile political environment where everyday people feel at risk. We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing. That is a bedrock American value.
These are the grounds for her argument. In divisive political moments where the civil peace is breaking down, it falls to our representatives to come together and denounce the act in a way that is not divisive.
It then only underscores the majority’s recklessness and intent to divide by choosing to introduce this resolution on a purely partisan basis, instead of uniting Congress in this tragedy with one of the many bipartisan options to condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder, as we did with the late Melissa Hortman. Instead, the majority proceeded with a resolution that brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.
Here she is pointing out the "nettlesome" nature of the praise that the resolution authors included in the text and says that this creates division where the situation calls for some unifying theme - a reaffirmation of common cause.
“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.
These examples are not a shift into an ad hominem attack on Kirk. She is providing support for her argument that the majority's statement is divisive. Her examples are chosen to support her earlier claim that "millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry" are being nettled because Kirk's statements that she highlights here do not promote unity. But it's not Kirk's statements that she is objecting to, it's the mischaracterization of him "‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority." And her use of "We" at the beginning is an important qualifier that limits her context. We means "we representatives issuing this resolution" not "we as a society."
Which is why her final paragraph is about the surrounding rhetorical context that has been created by Trump and his FCC.
I don't see anything that is out of context or lacking in relevance to the resolution.
BC - I disagree with many ideas on the left, and despise some. That doesn’t keep me from condemning, say, the murder of Melissa Hortman and her husband. FULL STOP. The senate resolution honored her life and passed unanimously. The resolution honoring the life of Charlie Kirk, however, was opposed by 58 Democrats and 60 more either voted present or did not vote. Most said due to his ideas. Melissa Hortman had ideas too, ones that many on the right disagreed with or found repugnant, but the Republicans chose to honor her life and not temper their desire to send a unified message condemning her murder. I wish the Democrats would have done the same for Kirk.
Here is the text of the Senate resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-resolution/301/text
Here is the text of the House resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/719/text
The former is a fair sight more neutrally worded and measured in tone than the latter. The author of the House resolution had to know that their characterization was going to be more nettlesome and create partisan friction where none need exist.
But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”
What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding.
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
WRT BC's linking of environmental justice to the rights of the unborn, the opposite legal flourish would be to invoke Castle Doctrine as a defense for an abortion in a state with restrictive abortion laws, but liberal firearms laws.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
I should add, I'm more concerned here with gaining the upper hand in how the issues get framed than I am with electability. Newsom fits fewer prejudices than do Pritzker or Buttigieg. I just don't think that what he is saying cuts through enough to change the conversation, and I think the conversation we are having is a losing conversation for the Dems.
Pete might lose, but at least he would be heard.
"
lj- As a note, in Kamala Harris’ recent book, she said that she wanted Buttgieg, but thought that it was ‘asking too much of America’ (if I remember the quote correctly). I’m not second guessing that, I’m just imagining an America where it wouldn’t be asking too much.
I understand this reaction, but what wj had asked for was:
...someone else who a) is willing to stand up, and b) has the media expertise available to get the message out effectively.
I think Mayor Pete offers more of this than does Newsom. And I think that if the Dems want to break through, they are going to have to find someone that is more a brawler than a point fighter. Newsom is all jab with no follow-up, and he's too much of a lightweight to land a knockout with a jab. Both the guys I countered with seem capable of landing some body blows.
"
wj- <i>I’d vastly rather look to someone else. But that requires there be someone else who a) is willing to stand up, and b) has the media expertise available to get the message out effectively.</i>
Buttigieg? Pritzker? I'd prefer either of them. Don't know where I'd stand on Beshear vs Newsom. Beshear seems like exactly the sort of person that Klein is dreaming of for The Great Centrist Messiah, and I mistrust that instinct immediately.
And despite all this, I am happy that Newsom is taking the stands he's taking and poking the old, gouty, amber colored badgers that he's poking. Newsom is the Killian's Irish Red of American politics, he looks fancy and he's better than a bland American pilsner, but he's still coming out of a big dollar brewery despite the fancy looking label.
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bobbyp - I read your link and I will admit that I have thought the same thing about our situation more than once.
I think that the constitution could be saved, but it would take another Lincoln or FDR to do it, and a lot of pushing through structural changes to shore up the weakest parts that are making it so hard to prevent the willful vandalism and disregard of the rule of law. I don't think that their critics are wrong to say that they used extra-constitutional means to achieve their ends, but part of their end in both cases was not just to preserve the union, but to preserve the constitution and keep continuity of government.
Of course both ended up having their work undone, and here we are again.
My fear is that this time the current GOP will force a suspension of the constitution and turn tyrant with the intent of undoing the constitution and replacing it with a Christian Nationalist authoritarian government. If so, then I don't know how the union is going to hold.
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Pro Bono - But I see no reason to be uncivil.
That's because you are seeing Republicans as people who have a different worldview and position, and trying to understand them in order to live with them as a part of your community. That's not the way that the core of the GOP thinks about Democrats. To them we are not Americans with a different point of view that must be negotiated. To them we are not really Americans, and their job is to protect America from us.
I'm not saying we should be uncivil to them. I'm saying that we fall outside of their view of what counts as civitas.
"
Following on russell's comment, I'm going to talk Carl Schmitt again. I know I've written some of this before, but that's all in the archive now, so here it is again for the new site.
I get why russell says that civility is no longer on offer. US conservatism has taken a hard turn into political theology (as described by Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political) since 9/11. Schmitt was very concerned with the concept of sovereignty and where the authority to govern resides. For him the sovereign is the person, or entity, that is authorized by the people to make the distinction between friend and enemy, and decide who is or is not a part of the people when conflicts become existential - the State of Exception. I see this political theology deeply reflected in pretty much everything that the Roberts court has given us. They are always thinking about executive sovereignty and crises.
Civility is not on offer because the base of the GOP has decided that Democrats, and Democratic voting states, are on the enemy side of the friend/enemy distinction. If you doubt this, just look at what Vance has said about the shutdown. He says that the Democrats are "holding the American people hostage." That literally puts Democratic officials - and all the Americans who elected those officials - on the side of the enemy with which the GOP will not negotiate.
The GOP and their core voters do not see this as a political disagreement to be negotiated over. They see Democrats as the enemies of America, to be expelled or subdued in the name of The People.
WTF are we supposed to do with that?
On “WTF moments at cultural borders”
OED says "bought the farm" is recent (1950s) USAF slang originally for a fatal plane crash. They speculate it could be about compensation for the farmer whose land was destroyed, but I also wonder if it isn't a humorous extension of "plowing" into the ground.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
I think a lot of people found the way that the early centrist blogs performed that even-handedness that russell identifies above to be productive and valuable for getting past ideological positions to something more dynamic. It was widespread enough that people learned how to do it as a sort of generic exercise. A lot of bright people have a hard time knowing how to get at that sort of cross-cutting commentary without falling back on the structures they have learned for writing those sorts of commentary.
That's not always a failure of good faith, sometimes it's just a struggle with form combined with an impatience with impasse.
But the effect of that, of course, is to create a sort of artificial leveling of the sides through equivocation, which hollows out the resulting conversation. That leads to a different form of impatience and frustration.
"
I don't think the fault lies in CharlesWT so much as in the devolution of what passes for mainstream right wing politics. There's no way to structure things in a way that looks even and balanced when the right has decided that they don't need to listen to, work with, or care about anything and anyone on the other side.
An entire genre of blog commentary cannot function anymore, no matter how we try to replicate it.
"
Afterword to my earlier comment about "play stupid games, win stupid prizes..."
I'd prefer that the prizes that people won for playing stupid games were the most gentle possible version of the prize that would actually relieve them of the urge to play stupid games and steer them into playing smart games that have prizes we all get to share to our mutual benefit.
"
CharlesWT - Some journalists who have been beaten to the point of brain injury may wish to quibble.
I assume that this is about Andy Ngo. Important to note that Ngo does not usually wear anything identifying himself as a member of the press, and often follows groups like Patriot Prayer to film confrontations with antifa groups. He also is known for doxxing antifa protesters on his own channel, and selectively editing them.
His lack of any press identification while traveling with Patriot Prayer is going to get him in the middle of things and mistaken for being a member of that group while they are engaging in their own violent provocation. They may not be "attacking a journalist" so much as they are just trying to hold their own in a clash between violent groups, and they have no indication that Ngo is not a member of Patriot Prayer or associated with them.
But also, more than a few of the antifa people may know who Ngo was, and were going after him because of his having doxxed them or one of their friends. Ngo has given Portland antifa plenty of reasons to hate him personally. He could have been targeted for a beat down, but "journalist" is far too innocent and anodyne a description of his role in context. No one is attacking him for being there and trying to document things while staying out of the confrontation. He's an active participant on one side using his ambiguous position as a journalist to cast himself in a more innocent light.
I'm not defending antifa here. I'm sure that more than a few among them were engaged in felony violence. I'm also sure that many among them were also victims of felony violence and that some of that felony violence was committed by the people who were personal associates of Ngo.
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard or read an alt-right associate say "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" to footage of college students being beaten by police, or by a right-wing activist during an escalation. Ngo is an avid player of stupid games. He's made his name as such, and has hundreds of thousands of subscribers, not all of whom are Russian bots.
A bit about antifa violence and videos, including some of Ngo's work - from Bellingcat:
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/11/18/million-maga-march-unravelling-a-violent-viral-video/
I have a hard time watching any Ngo video and video of neutrally positioned (and clearly identified) journalists being targeted and fired upon with pepper balls and rubber rounds by riot police, and feeling like that's a legitimate comparison for both-siderism.
On “Japan unleashed”
Any economic philosophy that is reliant on growth is going to be struggling as it runs up against the reality of climate change. As far as population reduction goes, that's going to take care of itself whether we do anything or not.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
Let me add +1 to russell's list of black bloc types - RW accelerationists wanting to turn up the temperature and provoke things like the Guard call-up.
No, I don't think that any of them are in the antifa camp in Portland. The people in the camp are either real antifa types, or are undercover feds (again, I think not, but that has been the case with the RW militias, so I leave open that possibility). The antifa folks would not take kindly to finding a Boogaloo Boy in their midst.
But, for example, in Minneapolis after George Floyd there were RW militia kids who were caught driving in from WI to loot and burn and try to provoke a violent response from the authorities.
If I see a single person in black with a mask wearing visible antifa markers, I automatically assume that they are false flag assholes. The usually get chased off by the activist leaders, but they hang around just far enough away to provoke.
"
Here's some local media reporting of the situation:
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2025/09/tracking-the-rise-and-fall-of-portland-ice-protests-key-developments-as-trump-troops-arrive-soon.html
It does note the breaking of one door at the ICE facility back in June, but also:
July 25: Assistant Chief Craig Dobson says that federal officers are “actually instigating and causing some of the ruckus that’s occurring down there” during testimony for a lawsuit seeking to compel officers to enforce noise rules at the ICE protests.
...and:
Sept. 4: Fox News airs a long report about the Labor Day protest at ICE. Mixed in misleadingly are clips from 2020 protests, showing chaotic scenes outside the downtown federal courthouse and near an elk statue.
Whatever the case, it doesn't look to me like there is any reason to send in the Guard when the situation is neither dangerous nor volatile. It's noisy sometimes, and people occasionally cause a bit of property damage. It seems like the people causing the damage are being stopped and arrested.
News of widespread violent unrest and lawlessness looks to me to be a right wing media PSYOP.
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At times, there have been several hundred protestors at the ICE facility.
And out of those, it's probably this same group of assholes and a dozen of their friends in visiting from somewhere else that are responsible for the water bottles and milkshakes. It's not a war zone. It's not an occupying force. It's not much more of a nuisance that people face when they live next to a live music venue or a biker bar. And it would be less of a nuisance if it weren't for the illegal actions of the current administration wanting to prove they are hard men.
People have a right to protest. But they don’t have the right to make other people’s lives unlivable, assault people, or destroy property.
All reasons why cities have laws, ordinances, and police forces. None of them have asked for ICE to step in. None of them need rescuing. All of them wish ICE and the Guard would GTFO so that the assholes would go home again.
I've known assholes like these. They get bored easily. They will go away if the feds dial back the authoritarian showboating. it will make Warrior Pete sad, but he'll still have tequila to comfort himself.
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CharlesWT - C.K. Bouferrache aka Honeybadgermom is very concerned with ANTIFA, Satan, Drag Queens, Christian Oppression in the US, and the poor treatment of the J6 Prisoners.
I get that you aren't endorsing her, just looking at a few of her videos as evidence for ANTIFA presence in Portland, but I have a real hard time trusting her representation of anything given her Q-Anon obsessions and raving.
And in pretty much all of those, what I see is a small group of people being disruptive and annoying. I wouldn't want them as neighbors, but it's not the sort of thing we need the military to come in and deal with. It's not a war zone. It's just assholes with a cause being provoked by assholes with unconstitutional police powers.
On “Ad futurum”
I'm 25+ years out-of-date and out of practice with SQL, and am more of a danger than a help at this point.
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
Reading through that transcript, I can't help but notice that Klein's fixated on determining what it is that Dems have done to lose "the center." What he thinks of as "the center" seems fairly hard to pin down. Sometimes it seem like he means "the Midwest" and "rural voters." Sometimes it's "people scared of radical change, like LGBTQ+ stuff." He never seems to linger long on any one such group, or to try to dig in and get to the deepest urges that drive each of those groups fears, and I think that's because his question is what can be done to "win them back." He reminds me a lot of the campus Christian groups I was a part of back in the day whose conversations revolved around how to "win hearts for Jesus." We were all looking for ways to appeal to the others around us, to be cool and relatable, to listen to them and find the needs and hurts that they were expressing so that we could understand how and when to convince them to join the team - being all things to all people so that by all means we could win some.
It was a transactional view of people. We cared to the degree that we thought we might be able to win them over. We were nice to everyone, but we didn't really want to spend any time in community with them unless we thought they were "on the path" to our way of things.
I see this most clearly when Klein muses over needing more Democrats in the midwest who will not alienate anti-abortion people. He's adjusting the sales pitch, trying to get a sale by avoiding conflict. It's a good way to win a sale in the short term, but it does nothing to build coalitions or to create understanding across differences. It leaves marginal communities on the margins and makes it seem tactically acceptable to abandon those communities for the sake of avoiding conflict when solidarity becomes hard.
Coates is coming from that margin and knows the peril of it. He's lived his entire life feeling like he was a target for political violence that saw him in that instrumental, transactional way, not as someone to be won, but as someone to be feared for the sake of winning that same centrist that Klein wishes to add to the D column. Coates sees that the problem for a lot of people is not political violence per se, but rather that political violence was threatening *to touch them.* "Getting out of hand," "spinning out of control" implies that what came before those dangerous moments was not a threat and was happening in a controlled and acceptable manner. Eric Brown? Not *political* violence. Not a sign of a society that had lost its way and was dangerously polarized.
I don't want to tip things over into the same conversations we have had about "white fragility" because I don't see that those conversations have been particularly productive, but I will say that I think the sort of tactical approach that Klein seems to want to take makes it nearly impossible to have a deep conversation about our shared issues that does not turn transactional.
I'd like to say more, but I can again feel this threatening to turn into something that requires examples and footnotes and explanations that I don't have the resources or the time to support on the night before I start my Fall teaching, so I'll have to be satisfied with this quick stab at what nibbles at me when I read Klein.
On “Un morceau de blog”
The Ur scene for "What Would Brian Boitano Do" - from South Park
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNJmfuEWR8w
On “Precursors”
bc - AOC’s response starts out strong but then devolves and illustrates two things: 1) My point above, that it wasn’t really what was in the proclamation but what wasn’t; and 2) her penchant for taking things out of context. I do see her point, but similar things could have been said about Hortman’s legislative agenda.
AOC's statement (https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/media/press-releases/ocasio-cortez-statement-charlie-kirk-resolution-and-trump-administrations) deserves a bit of close reading and analysis because I don't think that she said anything out of context. Her argument is pretty straightforward and does not stray into anything that is not relevant to the resolution. AOC says:
House Republicans today brought to the floor a resolution ‘honoring the life and legacy’ of Charlie Kirk. I voted NO.
Condemning the depravity of Kirk’s brutal murder is a straightforward matter – one that is especially important to help stabilize an increasingly unsafe and volatile political environment where everyday people feel at risk. We can disagree with Charlie and come together as a country to denounce the horror of killing. That is a bedrock American value.
These are the grounds for her argument. In divisive political moments where the civil peace is breaking down, it falls to our representatives to come together and denounce the act in a way that is not divisive.
It then only underscores the majority’s recklessness and intent to divide by choosing to introduce this resolution on a purely partisan basis, instead of uniting Congress in this tragedy with one of the many bipartisan options to condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder, as we did with the late Melissa Hortman. Instead, the majority proceeded with a resolution that brings great pain to the millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry today.
Here she is pointing out the "nettlesome" nature of the praise that the resolution authors included in the text and says that this creates division where the situation calls for some unifying theme - a reaffirmation of common cause.
“We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was: a man who believed that the Civil Rights Act that granted Black Americans the right to vote was a ‘mistake,’ who after the violent attack on Paul Pelosi claimed that ‘some amazing patriot out there’ should bail out his assailant, and accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges – it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.’ His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans – far from ‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority in this resolution.
These examples are not a shift into an ad hominem attack on Kirk. She is providing support for her argument that the majority's statement is divisive. Her examples are chosen to support her earlier claim that "millions of Americans who endured segregation, Jim Crow, and the legacy of that bigotry" are being nettled because Kirk's statements that she highlights here do not promote unity. But it's not Kirk's statements that she is objecting to, it's the mischaracterization of him "‘working tirelessly to promote unity’ as asserted by the majority." And her use of "We" at the beginning is an important qualifier that limits her context. We means "we representatives issuing this resolution" not "we as a society."
Which is why her final paragraph is about the surrounding rhetorical context that has been created by Trump and his FCC.
I don't see anything that is out of context or lacking in relevance to the resolution.
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Imagine if Klobuchar, in her resolution, had said that Hortman was a devoted protector of women's reproductive freedom...
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BC - I disagree with many ideas on the left, and despise some. That doesn’t keep me from condemning, say, the murder of Melissa Hortman and her husband. FULL STOP. The senate resolution honored her life and passed unanimously. The resolution honoring the life of Charlie Kirk, however, was opposed by 58 Democrats and 60 more either voted present or did not vote. Most said due to his ideas. Melissa Hortman had ideas too, ones that many on the right disagreed with or found repugnant, but the Republicans chose to honor her life and not temper their desire to send a unified message condemning her murder. I wish the Democrats would have done the same for Kirk.
Here is the text of the Senate resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-resolution/301/text
Here is the text of the House resolution: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/719/text
The former is a fair sight more neutrally worded and measured in tone than the latter. The author of the House resolution had to know that their characterization was going to be more nettlesome and create partisan friction where none need exist.
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One more response to Ezra Klein's response to the response that was given to his Charlie Kirk eulogy.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/
But I am stuck on one bit in particular, which Klein offered during his Shapiro interview in response to an outpouring of criticism for the whitewashing portrayal of Kirk in his op-ed. He contends that living with one another on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure” cannot work and would not be worthwhile if it did: a nation where such things flourished would not be “a free country.”
What could Klein possibly mean by this? We are indeed going to have to live with each other, barring apocalyptic violence—but we already have been for quite some time, and doing so has not required revisionist history of the sort we are now witnessing about one Charles James Kirk in particular. The political ascendancy of right-wing fractions of the U.S. adult population is new. But their existence, of course, is not: they were not born in the summer of 2020, recent efforts to blame their intransigence and bigotry on whatever missteps may or may not have occurred during the George Floyd protests notwithstanding.
Worth a read and a bit of rumination.
On “Rule Six, there is NO … Rule Six!…”
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment...the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
On “An experimental first post”
WRT BC's linking of environmental justice to the rights of the unborn, the opposite legal flourish would be to invoke Castle Doctrine as a defense for an abortion in a state with restrictive abortion laws, but liberal firearms laws.
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