Month: July 2020

See updates and errata through April 19, 2022, at end of post.

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Since the novel coronavirus began to spread and when most people were told to stay home whether they still had jobs or not, it’s been hard to miss that so-called “essential” workers, facing shortages of personal protective equipment,^[1] were in fact expendable workers.
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1. ^[1]Emily Stewart, “Essential workers still lack basic safety protections on the job,” Vox, May 7, 2020, https://www.vox.com/coronavirus-covid19/2020/5/7/21250387/essential-worker-ppe-amazon-walmart-employees-protection-hazard-pay↩

I tend to view the United States as Amerikkka, an inherently unequal society, indeed as a constitutional oligarchy.^[1] I see Donald Trump not has having introduced something new to the country, but as having brought authoritarian populist mob rule to effective control of the U.S. government^[2] and as having encouraged paleoconservatives, especially white supremacists, to display their colors. Read more →

1. ^[1]David Benfell, “A constitutional oligarchy: Deconstructing Federalist No. 10,” Not Housebroken, June 7, 2020, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/04/22/a-constitutional-oligarchy-deconstructing-federalist-no-10/↩
2. ^[2]Though now controlled by the putative opposition party, the House of Representatives can do little without Senate concurrence and seemingly relies on its ineffectiveness for empty gesturing that merely appears to challenge a neoliberal consensus.↩

I would not want to endorse a view that in the U.K., Boris Johnson has been too heedless of the economy and too heedful of the pandemic. Much of what I see suggests the contrary. But I include Bob Moran’s cartoon from the Telegraph (figure 1) because it is one of those rare instances where we acknowledge that both problems are severe and deserving of attention. Read more →

I have been of two minds regarding the pulling down of Confederate monuments in recent protests. First, I think obviously, we should not let the destruction of symbol substitute for substantive action to eliminate all forms of racism and bigotry. But second, we should not underestimate the power of symbol.
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