Yes, yes I know they are both deeply compromised people. But I just can’t be cynical about this. They are acting like statesmen in this moment and that’s much more than I can say about another ex-president.
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2022
Boaty McBoatface clearly was more amusing. When a year go the container ship Ever Given went sideways and blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, there was more than red on the faces of its owners. Their balance sheet and others’ across the planet were bleeding. For each day Ever Given plugged the canal, “an estimated $9.6 billion-worth of cargo between Asia and Europe” was delayed. The Suez Canal Authority assessed nearly a billion dollars in damage. Egypt lost “between $12 and $15 million in revenues for each day the waterway was closed.”
Well. April Fools Day came two weeks early this year. A sister ship to the Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp., Ever Given, is aground in the Chesapeake Bay.
Slate tells the tale:
Since Sunday night, a 1,095-foot-long cargo ship has been stuck in the mud off the Maryland coast of the Chesapeake Bay.
For reasons that remain unknown, the ship—which is fate-temptingly named the Ever Forward—missed a turn while traveling from Baltimore to Norfolk, Virginia, and veered out of a 50-foot-deep channel that runs down the middle of the bay to accommodate such large cargo ships. Ship tracking data shows that the Ever Forward overshot the edge of the channel into waters much too shallow for it to traverse.
Whoops. Except where this ship is stuck, writes Christina Cauterucci, is “no big whoop.” It’s not blocking other vessels. The bigger whoops is that the Ever Forward is “stucker” than the Ever Given ever was.
Perhaps Vladimir Putin can spare a tactical nuke.
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The New York Times editorial Friday on so-called cancel culture drew a flood of criticism. “America Has a Free Speech Problem” opens like this:
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
The Net exploded with a collective WTF!? Adam Davidson launched a short thread:
I’ve wondered, my own self, why this NYT editorial promoting the false “cancel culture” panic has upset me so much. I think part of it is this: I have fucking LOVED the NYT. Worked there. When it’s great, nothing comes close. But it has fundamentally misread this moment.
As the right has become more explicitly an anti-Democratic ethnonationalist movement, the NYT (unlike, say, WaPo) has seen its fundamental duty to be a paper for “both sides.” It sees its fundamental flaw in 2016 as not grokking the Trump fan.
Its coverage of the Trump WH was too often a version of “that naked Emperor show has a beautiful suit. ” In short, the NYT went deep into its instincts: both-sidism; respect for authority; a view that Trump-is-normal; that their job is not to call strikes as strikes.
I saw this as, mostly, a Dean Baquet problem. And I was hopeful (though wary) that his replacement will right the ship. But this editorial–approved, I have to assume, by AG Suzlberger, the publisher–suggests the problem is deep in the org.
I personally really like AG. He’s a lovely guy and smart. But I think he is running a paper adrift and in crisis. And this editorial was like them screaming out: Yeah, mother fuckers, we’re quadrupling down on our both-sidist views.
It breaks my heart. There is so much great work there. Right now, heroic NYT journalists are on the frontlines in Ukraine. But cover America like you cover Ukraine! It’s OK. It’s good to report the truth.
The Times did not simply highlight the term now picked up by Vladimir Putin to justify his invasion. Davidson added, “They claimed that we have a constitutional right to freedom from shame.”
That is how the editorial reads. Almost is if subconsciously the Times is begging for readers to stop critiquing how it covers the news even when it distorts it. It is a bizarre argument. Formulations are many, but speech that does not offend anyone requires no protection. When those who take offense express their outrage, that’s protected speech too, so long as it is expressed nonviolently. If you can’t take the heat, etc.
But the never-shunned Donald Trump and his supporters, unconstrained by shame or the 9th Commandment, abused their 1st Amendment right to spread lies that inspired an attempted coup a year ago. Mr. Shameless and his anti-Democratic ethnonationalist foot soldiers almost cancelled the country that invented the Bill of Rights. The Times treats condemnation of that as a threat to free speech. SMH.
“When speech is stifled or when dissenters are shut out of public discourse, a society also loses its ability to resolve conflict, and it faces the risk of political violence,” the Times complains.
When in the Trump era have conservative white men in rural diners or Trump fans parading about in flag-draped boats and pickups and semis been shut out of public discourse, had their speech stifled? Least of all by the New York Times?
The political violence came anyway. Perpetrated by the shameless.
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Stepan’s mom started posting photos and videos of him on Instagram and TikTok in 2020, and since then, he’s absolutely taken the internet by storm. He now has over a million followers on both platforms, and people come to his pages knowing without a doubt that he’s going to make them smile and bring a little joy to their lives.
Stepan is goofy and curious and loves posing for adorable and silly photos. Recently, though, Stepan’s life and routine had to change because he and his family live in Ukraine.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine, everyone was worried for Stepan and his family’s safety. They left comments on his posts and someone even started a Twitter account for him, to post updates and try to spread awareness. Stepan and his family weren’t posting much, and everyone just hoped that they were OK.
Finally, Stepan’s family was able to post an update and let everyone know that they were able to make it out of Ukraine safely — with Stepan in tow.
“We spent two nights in the basement and without electricity for a week,” Stepan’s family wrote on Instagram. “We had to go to the nearby basement to charge the phone. Then we managed to leave the city. Kharkiv volunteers helped by taking us to the railway station. We got on the train Kharkiv to Lviv (in 20 hours, we got to Lviv). Then we followed to the border with Poland. At the border, we stood in a line in a pedestrian crossing. There were a lot of people (4 to 5 thousand). After 9 hours, we crossed the border.”
“When we reached Poland, we were offered help from the World Influencers and Bloggers Association from Monaco,” the family wrote. “They helped us get to France to wait for the very day when we could return home. We’re [alright] now. We worry very much about our relatives in Ukraine and will do the very best we can to help our country.”
Stepan has brought so much joy to so many people, and everyone is so relieved to hear that he and his family are safe.
He really is cute:
Amidst the horror, these people try to save the animals:
Yes, of course, all efforts must be made to help the people first and foremost. But there is enough money to help the animals too. They are innocent creatures just like those little kids and they deserve some help too.
It seems J.D. Vance’s “No BS Tour” is skipping a stop in Minnesota. The Ohio Senate hopeful, currently polling in third place, was slated to speak at the Minnesota GOP’s annual Lincoln-Reagan dinner fundraising event. Then, without explanation, he was pulled.
Scheduled on April Fool’s Day with no apparent sense of irony, the invite went out in late February and almost immediately, Minnesota Republicans pushed back against Vance’s selection. Brian McClung, former spokesman for Gov. Tim Pawlenty tweeted:
Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican party, observed that “numerous Republican operatives” were “fuming” about the selection of Vance as the keynote speaker, highlighting Vance’s ill-informed and callous (not to mention electorally stupid) comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a primary reason for their ire. Though maybe the objection is really about Vance being Vance.
For those who may have forgotten: Vance went on Steve Bannon’s War Room and said “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” during a clumsy attempt to show that his real priority is the U.S.-Mexico border and stopping shipments of fentanyl.
He then kind of, sort of, walked back his statements a few days later.
But then he cashed in one of infinite invitations to go on Tucker Carlson’s show to un-walk back the walk-back. The banner on his campaign webpage features the following fundraising appeal: “Secure our Southern Border and NOT Ukraine’s Border! Stand with Tucker Carlson and JD Vance.”
In other words: J.D. Vance is gonna J.D. Vance. It’s what he does.
But he has other problems, too. Vance is also under fire for investing in the platform Rumble with his political sugar daddy, Peter Thiel. Rumble, if you’re not familiar, is YouTube for those who have been “canceled” by Big Tech.
Mostly that means your garden-variety far-right, white-nationalist types. But Rumble is also the new home to RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda channel.
Poor guy can’t catch a break.
Apparently, Vance didn’t know that there is a very large Ukrainian American community in Ohio either which was a very stupid mistake. He clearly didn’t read the electorate properly .
He’s not doing well in his race, despite all the money in the world. And it’s not because he’s too MAGA crazy. Josh Mandel who is running against him grovels before Dear Leader even more obsequiously and he’s way ahead. I think he’s just creepy. I didn’t think any level of creepiness was too much for GOP voters but apparently even they have their limits.
This WSJ story about the Russian Orthodox church’s alliance with Putin’s expansionism explains a lot. At some point we really need to grapple with the fact that our wars of the last 50 years have tended to be the result of religious rationalizations rather than ideology. There’s always more to it, whether money or power, but after centuries of wars being waged for other reasons, religion has made a big comeback as the righteous motivation for terrorism and war in the 21st century:
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently described the war in Ukraine as nothing less than an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. Its outcome, he said, will determine “where humanity will end up, on which side of God the Savior.”
Some Ukrainians—those whom President Vladimir Putin claims Russia is liberating with its invasion—have rejected “the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power,” the patriarch explained. Those values are exemplified by gay pride parades, he said, which serve as admissions tests “to enter the club of those countries,” by implication the European Union and more broadly the West.
The Russian Orthodox Church has taken an active role in forging the ideology that undergirds Mr. Putin’s geopolitical ambitions. It is a worldview that holds the Kremlin to be the defender of Russia’s Christian civilization, and therefore justified in seeking to dominate the countries of the former Soviet Union and Russian empire. According to the Rev. Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian-born theologian and former adviser to Patriarch Kirill, these ideas emerged in the aftermath of communism’s collapse, when the Russian state sought to fill an ideological void at the same time that the long-persecuted Russian Orthodox Church asserted itself in a newly open public square.
Mr. Putin invoked ‘Russkiy mir’ in 2014 to justify the annexation of Crimea, which he said reflected the ‘aspiration of the Russian world, of historical Russia, to re-establish unity.’
That confluence of interests inspired what Sergei Chapnin, a former official of the Moscow Patriarchate, calls the “post-Soviet civil religion”: the concept of Russkiy mir (“Russian world”). The term dates back to the 11th century, referring to the East Slavic lands that included much of today’s Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. According to a 2015 article by Marlene Laruelle, a political scientist at George Washington University, the modern usage of Russkiy mir was introduced in 1999 by writers at a Kremlin-associated think tank to mean the whole Russian-speaking world, including Russians living abroad. Mr. Putin, who became president the next year, invoked the term in 2014 to justify the annexation of Crimea, which he said reflected the “aspiration of the Russian world, of historical Russia, to re-establish unity.”
For Mr. Putin, Russkiy mir refers to Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence, which includes the territories of the former Soviet Union and the Russian empire before it. “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 21, three days before Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church embraced the term and lent it a religious character, within which Ukraine also played a special role. The Russian Orthodox Church traces its origins to the 10th-century mass conversion in Kyiv known as the Baptism of Rus’.
In Ukraine, however, the religious conception of Russkiy mir, like the political one, has encountered resistance. Many of the country’s Orthodox believers belong to a Russian-led Orthodox Church, but the country is also home to a sizable Catholic community as well as a Ukrainian Orthodox Church that has sought autonomy from Moscow. In 2019, the global Eastern Orthodox Church’s spiritual leader, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, granted that autonomy.
The decision led to a serious schism within the Eastern Orthodox world. Different national churches have taken sides with Moscow or Constantinople. Patriarch Kirill has suspended communion with Patriarch Bartholomew and lamented that the latter is now helping to “mentally remake Ukrainians and Russians living in Ukraine into enemies of Russia.” Mr. Putin accused Patriarch Bartholomew of doing the bidding of Washington.
Inside Russia, Russkiy mir has found deep religious resonance, especially in the military. According to Dmitry Adamsky, an expert on the Russian military and professor at Reichman University in Israel, Orthodox clergy build troop morale and encourage patriotism. Each of the three parts of Russia’s nuclear force structure—land, sea and air—has received a patron saint. The church has also enthusiastically promoted Russia’s role in Syria’s civil war as a crusade to protect Christian minorities, Mr. Adamsky said.
The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed forces near Moscow, consecrated in 2020, furnishes a spectacular display of the fusion of the military and the religious. The cathedral commemorates Russian military action, above all in World War II—its floors are paved with metal from melted-down German weapons and tanks—but also in more recent conflicts in Georgia, Crimea and Syria.
Russia’s official National Security Strategy, approved by Mr. Putin last year, devotes several pages to “the defense of traditional Russian spiritual-moral values, culture and historical memory.” According to a study for NATO Defense College by Julian Cooper, a British scholar, the values in question are a mostly generic list including life, dignity, patriotism and strong families, but they are framed in contrast to those of the West, which encroach on Russia’s “cultural sovereignty.”
In a speech last fall, Mr. Putin deplored what he identified as prevalent cultural trends in Western Europe and the U.S., including transgenderism and “cancel culture.” “We have a different viewpoint,” Mr. Putin said. “We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”
The Kremlin and the patriarchate have framed Ukraine’s western ties and aspirations for membership in the EU and NATO not only as a geopolitical concern but as a threat to the spiritual integrity of Russkiy mir, according to Regina Elsner, a theologian and researcher at Berlin’s Center for East European and International Studies. A video posted last month on the website of the World Russian People’s Council, a Moscow think tank headed by Patriarch Kirill, makes the connection explicit: “If the actions of our president to recognize [separatist regions in the Donbas] relate to the political, military sovereignty of Russia—that is, we are trying to stop the advancement of NATO, missiles on our borders—then the moral problems associated with the protection of traditional values are aligned, and they are no less important than political and military aspects.”
Spiritual integrity … right.
Our culture war has been right in there too, there’s no getting around it. From the endless paeans to “Judeo-Christian values” to the recent legal assaults on secularism, we’re definitely rowing in the same boat.
Remember this disgusting quote right after 9/11?
“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
Today, it’s all about “religious freedom” (for bigots.) But really, is it that different?
I know you’ll be shocked to learn that the largest Ivermectin trial done so far was a disappointment:
Researchers testing repurposed drugs against Covid-19 found that ivermectin didn’t reduce hospital admissions, in the largest trial yet of the effect of the antiparasitic on the disease driving the pandemic.
Ivermectin has received a lot of attention as a potential treatment for Covid-19 including from celebrities such as podcast host Joe Rogan. Most evidence has shown it to be ineffective against Covid-19 or has relied on data of poor quality, infectious-disease researchers said. Public-health authorities and researchers have for months said the drug hasn’t shown any benefit in treating the disease. Taking large doses of the drug is dangerous, the Food and Drug Administration has said.
The latest trial, of nearly 1,400 Covid-19 patients at risk of severe disease, is the largest to show that those who received ivermectin as a treatment didn’t fare better than those who received a placebo.
“There was no indication that ivermectin is clinically useful,” said Edward Mills, one of the study’s lead researchers and a professor of health sciences at Canada’s McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Dr. Mills on Friday plans to present the findings, which have been accepted for publication in a major peer-reviewed medical journal, at a public forum sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
I suspect that many of the wingnuts who got COVID took Ivermectin and when they got better they attributed it to that instead of the fact that they simply recovered on their own. The ones that died, well … dead men tell no tales.
It’s one thing to try these snake oil cures like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin if there’s nothing else out there and someone is very ill as long as it isn’t going to make them worse. But there’s been no excuse for this nonsense for the last year and a half as the vaccines and treatments came on line. It killed a whole lot of people.
This piece by Dorian Lynskey discusses a phenomenon that’s depressing but not surprising:
Last week, Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote a column about Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and referred, in passing and without elaboration, to “Right-wing pundit Glenn Greenwald”. The results were predictable. Greenwald’s defenders protested that he had previously supported the likes of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, doggedly opposed the last Bush administration, and used to write for the Guardian and the Intercept, which he co-founded.
His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.
I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.
Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”
Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.
Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.
[…]
The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.
During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.
Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)
Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.
The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.
The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.
At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.
Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.
The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.
Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.
In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?
We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.
Agreed. It’s just not a useful way to think about politics anymore.
It’s not hard to have principles about these matters of life and death or to use a phrase that was bastardized during the grim Bush years: moral clarity. And I don ‘t think there’s ever been such a perfect example of how that works than now. If you were against the invasion of Iraq then the parallel with what Putin has done now couldn’t be more clear. This is not a tough call.
The need to put the US at the center of all world events, much less as the evilest-of-the-evil is just simplistic, reflexive positioning. The line between good and evil exists in every nation, every people, every human being.
If you feel a little bit disoriented right now, it’s understandable. We have been through several major emergencies these last few years and it doesn’t seem to be letting up. In fact, the last two decades have been tough, what with 9/11, the Iraq war and the financial crisis. But more recently our crises have been coming one right after the other, starting with the traumatic election of Donald Trump in 2016 and culminating in a deadly global pandemic, an attempted coup and now a major war in Europe that could explode into a nuclear conflagration with one small misstep.
The war in Ukraine is the most acutely dangerous problem at the moment and I think we are all shaken by what we’re seeing on TV, and trying not to think about how much worse this could get. Right now all we can do is pray that this ends as soon as possible and be grateful that Donald Trump and his minions aren’t in office at this moment.
That brings us to the other two still-unfolding crises which have become entwined in a bizarre and unprecedented way. The anti-democratic movement in the GOP has been percolating for years but it accelerated during Trump’s term and then launched into warp speed after the 2020 election, culminating in the coup attempt and insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. It is the natural consequence of the ongoing radicalization of the GOP and the mainstreaming of revanchist right-wing extremism.
That extremism has infiltrated our culture in ways that have tragically impacted the other major crisis we are dealing with: the COVID-19 pandemic. Going into its third year, we are enjoying a welcome lull in the crisis. Spring is here, the weather is warming up, public health requirements have lifted and people are feeling a bit more free:
That is a remarkable change from just last month when the omicron variant was still raging. Enjoy it — because it’s not going to last.
Congress cut billions in COVID funding this week and it couldn’t happen at a worse time. The new variant known as omicron BA-2, aka “stealth omicron,” is on the march. Europe and Asia are already seeing spikes in cases and it’s rapidly becoming the dominant strain in the U.S. as well. As Dr. Rochelle Walensky notes in the tweet cited above, the U.S. mostly has a low or medium virus level but we are seeing it turn up in wastewater all over the country, so it’s only a matter of time before we see the next surge. That pattern has been the same from the beginning.
China has locked down 52 million people to try to hold back the tide of this new variant, which some say is 50% more infectious than the previous omicron variant we just got done with. And because China had a substandard vaccine and kept earlier iterations of the virus out through lockdowns and other “zero-COVID” policies, there is little immunity in their population. The same thing is happening in Hong Kong.
In Europe, their case rate is skyrocketing as well:
With our lower rate of vaccination in the U.S., when the new sub-variant really hits here we will likely cross the threshold of 1 million deaths, which is mind-boggling.
Here is the Atlantic’s Ed Yong on our decision to “move on”:
When I first wrote about the panic-neglect cycle five years ago, I assumed that it would operate on a timescale of years, and that neglect would set in only after the crisis was over. The coronavirus pandemic has destroyed both assumptions. Before every surge has ended, pundits have incorrectly predicted that the current wave would be the last, or claimed that lifesaving measures were never actually necessary. Time and again, neglect has set in within mere months, often before the panic part has been over.
Congress refused to approve billions in needed funds just as a new wave is about to come crashing down. Unfortunately, it appears that we will just have to ride out all the variants to come. We must hope that the waning efficacy of the vaccines will not result in an explosion of new cases, and that new and future variants will be mild for most people. That still leaves the medically vulnerable and those who cannot get vaccinated out in the cold, as well as the scary possibility of long COVID for anyone who even gets a mild case. I guess those are the breaks.
There’s a strain of this thinking in Europe as well, with widening protests against masks and vaccine mandates. But here in America we have spawned a full-fledged resistance movement to public health that has resulted in a much lower vaccination rate and violent hostility to innocuous measures like masks and social distancing in restaurants. Public health officials are enduring nonstop harassment. And most of this is driven by right-wing politics.
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) released a study this week that looked at the disparities in outcomes among U.S. states and it’s not pretty. The authors note that these disparities have been growing for the past three decades, with more conservative states refusing to provide health care or enact measures like “workplace and product safety, the environment, tobacco control, food labeling, gun ownership, and needle exchange programs.” This has has had predictable results: a lot more suffering and premature death. The centrist think tank Third Way reported this week that “in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden,” and that eight of the 10 states with the highest current murder rates have “voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
They call that freedom. I think nihilism is closer to the truth.
Nothing illustrates this phenomenon like the response to COVID-19. The JAMA study reported this:
States that rushed to curtail lockdowns in the spring of 2020 experienced more protracted surges in infections and disruptions to their economies. In 2021, excess deaths were disproportionately concentrated in states where resistance to COVID-19 vaccination was prevalent. For example, excess death rates in Florida and Georgia (more than 200 deaths per 100 000) were much higher than in states with largely vaccinated populations such as New York (112 per 100 000), New Jersey (73 deaths per 100 000), and Massachusetts (50 per 100 000). States that resisted public health protections experienced higher numbers of excess deaths during the Delta variant surge in the fall of 2021 (Figure). Between August and December 2021, Florida experienced more than triple the number of excess deaths (29 252) as New York (8786), despite both states having similar population counts (21.7 million and 19.3 million, respectively).
The numbers don’t lie. In 2021, excess deaths were concentrated in states where people were hostile to mitigation efforts, and whose governors preened and strutted around, bragging about their COVID response as if there was a contest over how many of their own citizens they could ritually sacrifice to the MAGA gods. They took a whole lot of innocent people down with them. And it’s not over yet.
“While mainstream economists, think tanks, and journalists obsess over every tenth of a percentage point of inflation and unemployment,” writes Eli Cook at The American Prospect, “profit analyses remain something you find only in shareholder reports, IRS filings, or Bloomberg consoles.”
As with warning employees not to compare pay packages, the ownership class is very touchy about discussing its profits. That tradition in this country goes back over a century and a half, Cook explains:
We live in a capitalist economy driven by the profit motive. Yet, ironically, the study of profits remains a shockingly neglected subset of the economic discipline. No Nobel Prize in Economics has ever been given to the study of profits. Economists classify their publications into countless categories (the Journal of Economic Literature’s J3 code stands for “wages, compensation and labor costs”), yet there is no category for profits. The American Economic Review last published an article with the word profits in the title in 2014. It was about the Japanese textile industry at the turn of the 20th century. As for metrics, while Carroll Wright’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is still going strong, there is no Bureau of Capital Statistics.
Ignoring profits is not just an intellectual problem, but a political and social one. Never has it been more glaring. As anyone not living in a cave has heard, consumer prices have risen in the past year. (We know this thanks to the consumer price index, or CPI, invented by Wright.) Yet far less known to most Americans is that around the same time as this consumer price increase, there was a staggering jump in corporate profits.
Matt Stoller readers knew that. But the topic seems taboo among mainstream economists.
Current inflation is not caused by corporations gouging customers, no. Never. Conventional, capital-driven wisdom is that “the government’s expansionist fiscal and monetary policies, which made workers too powerful, raised wages too high, and led to higher consumer prices, as demand outran supply.” The answer, profiteers assure us, is too cool, the economy “by weakening workers’ purchasing power by cutting spending, raising interest rates, or lowering wages.”
Motivated reasoning? Meet motivated economic reporting.
If economics were a more diverse discipline, Americans would be hearing a very different story, one in which the starting baseline for modeling the economy is not the assumption of perfectly competitive markets but rather corporate concentration and asymmetrical market power. According to this approach, large corporations are often not “price takers” but “price makers,” and increasing profits by raising prices is not a theoretical impossibility but an empirical fact familiar to most anyone who has ever run a large business.
You think white people are threatened by demographics shifting political power away from them? Watch how the ownership class reacts to workers increasing theirs.
I worked the summer after high school in a cotton warehouse rebailing waste from test bundles. During a break, one of my co-workers joked on the dock about starting a union. After break time, he was called into the office and told he’d best stop talking that shit.
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