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Mental illness; spectacular and everyday violence
It is weird to me that people bring up mental illness re: the Las Vegas shooting. Steve Paddock had no history of being diagnosed with anything, and from what we know, he had no history of displaying obvious symptoms of anything that would tend to suggest a mental illness. He was slightly reclusive and socially offish, but so are tons of people. ( Read more... ) -
The Pyrrhic Fakeout of Berkeley's "Free Speech Week"
The student group that acted as a sponsor for the Milo Yiannopoulos organized "Free Speech Week" at Berkeley has pulled out, and it sounds like the whole thing has been reduced to Milo, Mike Cernovich, and Pamela Geller leading a march of fascists and alt-right activists across campus under heavy police protection ( Read more... ) -
Trump week 1: on fears of a coup
The problem with these medium.com shock pieces is that they're demobilizing. It's hard to tell how much of Trump's first week is strategy and how much of it is incompetence. But we know that one thing that has slowed previous Republican over-reaches (Contract with America, government shutdowns, etc.) is protest and outrage, and this week has seen a ( Read more... ) -
Empathy and the desire for vindication? On poor and working-class Trump support
Patrick Blanchfield, in a review of Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in their own Land:
What her subjects want, Hochschild repeatedly says, and what they apparently see in Trump, is an opportunity for “vindication.” But “vindication” means something more than just “recognition” or “being seen.” Etymologically, “vindication” derives from a word for ( Read more... ) -
Missing the crush of the crowd
I'm sad not to be in the Bay Area for the Super Bowl. Not because I would attend it, but because I enjoy uncomfortably large crowds organized around massive, limited-duration public events. Problems: 1) I'm an introvert, so I shouldn't like big crowds; but really big ones feel deliciously impersonal. If you are there with one or two people, then ( Read more... ) -
Nativism: the comparatively recent heart of white populist backlash
Thinking about a history which I understand poorly, though it is a history of the period of my life: anti-immigrant politics as a key element of the politics of white backlash in the US. I've seen a couple of people posting this video of Reagan and Bush from 1980, and it set off a chain of fascination. There seems to be a reading of this that it ( Read more... ) -
The Wrong Lessons about the Tea Party on the Left
It's striking to me how consistently leftists learn the wrong lessons about the Tea Party: that they took over swaths of the Republican Party by patient attention to boring things like caucuses and organization (so the Left should do the same with the Democratic Party). Of course the conventional wisdom keeps changing; two weeks ago the Tea Party ( Read more... ) -
Temporary abstinence from the Facebook liturgical calendar, and some personal reflections
I'm a longtime believer in interventions in the (secular) liturgical calendar* of holidays and anniversaries, and I've blogged about this quite a bit in the past, but I think I am standing aside from the social media version for a while, at least a few months. No posts about MLK today; no posts about the history of St. Valentine's Day or any ( Read more... ) -
Movie notes - The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is sure to be well analyzed by lots of people who have read the books, which I haven't, so these are really just some quick notes from a radical politics & critical theory junky to read the movie in that world of reference. My way into the universe of The Hunger Games is through vulgar political comparison and ( Read more... )
