Notices by kevin (feelnotes@alaskan.social)

got into a political debate with my boomer maga father-in-law this evening so now I’m wondering how many gummies it will take to make all the noises sound like howard dean screaming

Jewish guy in Miami shoots two men because he thinks they are Palestinian—but really they’re Israeli Jews!

The two Israeli victims post about it on social media—but they assume the shooter was Arab!

I’m Jewish enough to know this is peak comedy, just incredible levels of grievance and delusion. Larry David could never.

@StillIRise1963

As a psychologist who conducts research on White people, I’ll say that Du Bois is a good place to start.

@StillIRise1963

This is my Understanding Whiteness starter pack

@mekkaokereke but let me tell you about the funny looks I get when I, a licensed psychologist and researcher, tell people that whiteness is a risk factor…

“Why is this happening?” For those trying to understand how this moment fits into the long arc of history, for those who seek an explanation of the widespread embrace of right wing populism, I recommend this short book (or long essay, really) by Nancy Fraser. It’s only 60 pages, and it’s available as an ebook from Verso for $5. https://www.versobooks.com/products/849-the-old-is-dying-and-the-new-cannot-be-born

A short thread:

In this book, Nancy Fraser expands on Gramsci’s writing about hegemony (the book’s title is borrowed from the well known Gramsci quote, too).

Trumpism, she argues, is the most visible symptom of a deeper hegemonic crisis. The public faith in society’s core assumptions is unraveling. The broad postwar/post-Civil Rights consensus about how society should apportion respect and distribute resources is coming apart. “Now is the time of monsters.”

Fraser observes that for the last half century there was a broad, mostly bipartisan consensus about these two ideological dimensions of *recognition* and *distribution*

The conventional wisdom was that all members of society deserve institutional respect, but that meritocratic/capitalist logic should ultimately determine the “fair” apportionment of resources. This is multiculturalism, but with free markets. Black capitalism. Lean-in feminism. In other words, progressive neoliberalism.

As the multisystem crises of late capitalism intensify, faith in these assumptions will continue to deteriorate. People embrace radical alternatives that would be unthinkable in the dying social order.

Fraser identifies two alternatives: European-style social democracy or White nationalist populism.

The Democratic Party, as recently as the Harris-Walz campaign, has resisted calls for more redistributive economic policies from people like Bernie Sanders.

While the GOP and Trump offer fascism.

The old world is dying. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

Whatever comes next will seem radical and extreme by any old measure of normalcy.

“The question,” MLK reminded us from a Birmingham jail cell, “is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”

Would you believe that the word “Israel” does not appear in this news story

“knocked off their career paths” is also a wild euphemism for “disabled”

“Nobody wants to work anymore.”

A former IDF soldier and historian of genocide describes his last trip to Israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov

Not to be optimistic on main, but I think it’s entirely possible Harris and the Dems pull off a 1964-style landslide.

@aral to be fair, “cost of living” is a useful shorthand for capitalism

“If we accept that the machine is never broken (except in the case of the McDonald’s ice cream machine), then we can recognize that driving change requires us to make the machine want something else.”

The Purpose of a System is What It Does
by @anildash

https://www.anildash.com//2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/

Here is also the suggestion that a truly liberatory politics can’t stop with a defense of gender identity — it has to contend with biological sex as the site of social reproduction and base of material wealth.

Andrea Long Chu from the top rope 🔥

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender-judith-butler.html

Still thinking about Andrea Long Chu, the lucidity and urgency of her writing, and her call to liberate sex and gender from each other.