Archive for politics
I hope you hear them coming
I’ve never had writer’s block, but I find it difficult *to write well* on a topic that makes me angry. Attacks on transgendered people make me angry to a staggering degree.
I am grateful for the work of Parker Molloy on this and other topics.
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Brynn Tannehill, the “harbinger of doom” I noted last year, also writes about this topic in a way that keeps me up at night.
Workers Vanguard
My favourite Trotskyists are back with a new issue of The Spartacist. I was afraid that the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), which publishes that periodical as well as the newspaper Workers Vanguard, had ceased operations. No doubt its leadership is getting old; indeed, this issue of The Spartacist has three obituaries of former leading members.
I value these publications for their erudite, brilliantly written propaganda (their word), which has come in handy for me any number of times. I met a couple of their editors back at Stanford University in the mid-nineties, and featured an issue from their Women and Revolution series in my “Writing and the Bill of Rights” classes there.
I hope a younger generation of true Marxist-Leninists takes up the banner. I will miss this voice terribly otherwise.
Linda Tirado reflects
This is an excellent interview by WCCO Channel 4 in Minneapolis with author / reporter / photographer Linda Tirado, who was blinded in one eye after being shot by a police offer during a 2020 demonstration in that city. Tirado is both purposeful and poignant here – and instructive; she always wants to teach … and *to show people how*. You will be surprised by some of what she says. (Click on the image to see the video.)
“Harbinger of Doom”
This is how author and defense analyst Brynn Tannehill describes herself. She’s really smart, and she’s not kidding. I admire someone whose prose style remains peppy no matter the despair it conveys. Here she is on guns and the end of America. And on the genocide in front of us. Have a nice day!
“righteous certainty”
I’m a big fan of Atrios and his blog, Eschaton. Here’s a worthwhile thought on which to end a year that ought to have been instructive:
There’s a kind of righteous certainty among people who succeeded because they knew how to check all the right boxes when they were 15, a belief that if they (and you) do check all the the right boxes then everything will go as planned. High fives! (Snuffy Walden score!) [link added]
Not a lot of self-doubt, not a lot of self-recrimination. Among other things, it’s a worldview which is very unsympathetic to the failure of others, failures that could not have resulted from anything other than a failure to check the boxes.
basil.CA 