interesting stuff/nonfiction
(1) As my eyes get older, reading tiny type gets harder. Beeline standardizes, often enlarges, and cleans up many webpages, making them much easier for me to read. I’ve found myself using it more and more often. Not great for pages with multiple elements-it picks the one it thinks is most important-but great for everything from LJ to Naked Capitalism.
I have a post up on Tumblr about some statistical research on FF.net and MuggleNet that might be of some interest to some of you!
Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces: Police forces are now more militarized than the military, recruiting people who want to bash heads and generally treating citizens as the enemy. Judges don’t see their job as constraining the cops, and nobody else does either. As long as politicians generally aren’t the targets, rhetoric about war and evil succeeds and the dehumanization of protestors, marijuana users, and people unfortunate enough to be on the wrong end of a bad tip or transcription error in a warrant’s address continues apace. Honestly, Balko mentions race more than I’d expect for a Cato Institute type, and he is at least consistent in condemning terror tactics against anyone. For a good encapsulation of the book, check out this excerpt at Salon. Warning for animal harm (as Balko points out, people seem to take terrorizing innocent civilians in stride, but they get upset when they hear how many dogs cops are killing). Is there a way back? Balko’s answer is not very hopeful.
Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream?: If you want a really depressing tour through the growing economic inequality and political stagnation of America over the last four decades, here it is! The transfer of risk to ordinary Americans, and the transfer of reward away from them, has occurred in all kinds of ways, from the destruction of pensions to be replaced by worse-performing 401(k) plans to the destruction of well-paid, longterm jobs. Smith holds out some hope that we can take the country back from the plutocrats in charge-but why we’d start now is not entirely clear.
Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left: Really depressing book about “redhunting” of government employees in the 40s through the 60s and how it was used particularly and disproportionately against women (along with homosexuals and African-Americans). While being independent-minded could sometimes convince investigators that a man wasn’t Communist-influenced, it had the opposite effect for a woman, and women were also tarred by their relatives’ politics in ways that men weren’t-though for New Deal men who tended to marry ambitious women who shared their education and values, their wives’ questionable pasts could harm them too (and this included anything even with a faint whiff of socialism, because the conservatives who conducted these hunts saw no differences between socialism, Communism, and the consumer protection/labor rights movements). Storrs argues that these attacks cut off political possibilities on the left, scaring even the officials who survived into turning right. He also argues that the terror distorted the historiography; many of the victims hid their loyalty investigations, so their changed behavior seemed like self-directed evolution and we lost sight of the continuities between democratic socialist principles and some New Deal programs.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
I have a post up on Tumblr about some statistical research on FF.net and MuggleNet that might be of some interest to some of you!
Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces: Police forces are now more militarized than the military, recruiting people who want to bash heads and generally treating citizens as the enemy. Judges don’t see their job as constraining the cops, and nobody else does either. As long as politicians generally aren’t the targets, rhetoric about war and evil succeeds and the dehumanization of protestors, marijuana users, and people unfortunate enough to be on the wrong end of a bad tip or transcription error in a warrant’s address continues apace. Honestly, Balko mentions race more than I’d expect for a Cato Institute type, and he is at least consistent in condemning terror tactics against anyone. For a good encapsulation of the book, check out this excerpt at Salon. Warning for animal harm (as Balko points out, people seem to take terrorizing innocent civilians in stride, but they get upset when they hear how many dogs cops are killing). Is there a way back? Balko’s answer is not very hopeful.
Hedrick Smith, Who Stole the American Dream?: If you want a really depressing tour through the growing economic inequality and political stagnation of America over the last four decades, here it is! The transfer of risk to ordinary Americans, and the transfer of reward away from them, has occurred in all kinds of ways, from the destruction of pensions to be replaced by worse-performing 401(k) plans to the destruction of well-paid, longterm jobs. Smith holds out some hope that we can take the country back from the plutocrats in charge-but why we’d start now is not entirely clear.
Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left: Really depressing book about “redhunting” of government employees in the 40s through the 60s and how it was used particularly and disproportionately against women (along with homosexuals and African-Americans). While being independent-minded could sometimes convince investigators that a man wasn’t Communist-influenced, it had the opposite effect for a woman, and women were also tarred by their relatives’ politics in ways that men weren’t-though for New Deal men who tended to marry ambitious women who shared their education and values, their wives’ questionable pasts could harm them too (and this included anything even with a faint whiff of socialism, because the conservatives who conducted these hunts saw no differences between socialism, Communism, and the consumer protection/labor rights movements). Storrs argues that these attacks cut off political possibilities on the left, scaring even the officials who survived into turning right. He also argues that the terror distorted the historiography; many of the victims hid their loyalty investigations, so their changed behavior seemed like self-directed evolution and we lost sight of the continuities between democratic socialist principles and some New Deal programs.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.