Thursday, June 30, 2022

Dred Scott returns, motherfuckers

 It is almost eerie how the abortion decision follows the old paradigm of the slave versus "free" states. There is a story in the NYT with this paragraph:

"A top anti-abortion lobbying group, the National Right to Life Committee, recently proposed model legislation for states that would make it a crime to pass along information “by telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication” that is used to terminate a pregnancy."


That follows, to the letter, the Southern slaveholder doctrine about abolitionist literature. There was an article in Lithub a few years ago about the way Southern states censored the abolitionists:
"South Carolina was one of four southern states that outlawed the abolitionist writings in their jurisdictions. Slaveholders tended to justify such reactions by appealing to patriotic service at the expense of law. Some accused the postal system of supporting abolitionist endeavors."
I suppose it is one of those dialectical hiccups that the slaveowner cause - in this case, making women the wards of the state - is led by a black justice, Clarence Thomas.
When one right is flushed down the toilet, others will follow. Make no mistake about that: unless the Supreme Court's executioner judges are impeached or disobeyed, freedom in the U.S. will soon decline to the level of all those "shithole" countries that Americans think they are superior to.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Back to Normal Fails

 

Back in 2018, the NYTand all right thinking campaign consultants were giggling and acting shockedabout the undignified doings of this character named Trump, who was president.Instead of doing what presidents are supposed to do – remaining solemnly in the Oval Office, trying to look like a stuffed goose who was all about war for freedom, he was acting like a huckster, going out to rally his troops up and down the country.

The campaign industry people were right in the short run: the legislative races on the national level went against Trump. But in the long run, what an excellent strategy! This was not only using tweaking the demonstration form, merging it with the campaign rally, but it was hooking up the party to a national populist movement.

Now, of course, we have a D majority in the Senate and House and a D president. And they sit there helplessly as the R SCOTUS takes away everything the Dems produced in the last fifty years. They sit there helpless and the campaign industry geniuses think, hey, great time to cash in, sending out millions of spam ads, and the usual talking heads say, vote like your life depended on it. All pretending like the car is gonna move when it don’t have no gas, Sally.

Biden is sorta hopeless. I don’t think he has the energy or temperament to be a barker. What we need, desperately, is a barker. We have several women, as a matter of fact, who could do it. But instead of coordinating with these women – instead of going out there and in Trumpian manner vilifying the six outlaws, the six demagogues on the court, sitting on the citizenry – instead of making this a real fireworks election – we are getting pallid emails to VOTE! As if this was a just discovered thing. As if VOTING as in restoring the Civil Rights act of 1965 had not been voted down unceremoniously in Congress, without much after effect by the Dem executive branch. On to UKRAINE!

Trump, being a buncombe artist, discovered how to merge the kind of street politics that go into demonstrations and the political machine that is party politics. The Dems are so entirely blind to this obvious phenomenon in the age of Reality TV that they have planned – as far as I can see – nothing to make this a national campaign. Nothing about inflation, nothing about Roe Rights, nothing about the striking down of concealed weapons carry, nothing about how to limit, nay, dissolve the unconstitutional and undemocratic power of, the Court. Nothing, as the Fool said in King Lear, will get you nothing.  

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...