“The Constitutional Crisis Is Now” [Robert Reich, The American Prospect]. “If [Trump] refuses to accept the results [the 2020] election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office.” This is lunacy. In 2016, liberal Democrats floated the idea that “faithless electors” in the Electoral College should not appoint Trump — based on information from the “intelligence community” that the public was not allowed to see. From that day to this, liberal Democrats haven’t accepted the results of 2016, which is what the “Clinton won the popular vote” amounts to. Is the inability to look in the mirror a 10%-er deformation professionnelle?
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How Swarming Insects Act Like Fluids | Quanta Magazine - 0 views
Realignment and Legitimacy - 1 views
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“The Democratic Party unraveling is not good for America” [Ed Rogers, WaPo]. “The Democratic Party is not functioning as an umbrella organization or even a coalition. Instead, activists from Tom Steyer to George Soros to Planned Parenthood are operating independently*, doing things a political party otherwise would. These independent actors are pushing pet causes. Traditional party building isn’t one of them. Campaign finance reform and communication technologies have empowered wealthy individuals and collateral groups while at the same time inhibiting parties and individual campaigns. I say this not to kick the Democratic Party while it is down but because I believe in the two-party system…. We need reforms that empower parties and candidates and diminish the influence of deep-pocketed plutocrats and narrowly focused interest groups.” Rogers is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, but he’s not wrong. NOTE * Maybe. When you start thinking, it’s hard to know where the boundaries of the Democrat Party really are. For example, are journalists who propagate Brock talking points in the party, or not? My instinct is to say that they are, but how is an institution with fluid boundaries like that to be named and categorized? Or how about an organization like Emily’s List, ostensibly independent, but directing donors only to Democrats? (And Donna Shalala, but not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Or Cynthia Nixon. Or Zephyr Teachout. Really, Emily’s List? Really?)
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UPDATE “One-time Ohio congressional district candidate arrested while streaming incident live on Facebook” [WHIOTV-7]. This is Sam Ronan, who ran for DNC chair and had good things to say about election rigging. The odd thing about this story, and everything I’ve seen on the Twitter, is that he was arrested at his house, and nobody is saying why the cops were there in the first place. Readers?
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"Realignment and Legitimacy "The Constitutional Crisis Is Now" [Robert Reich, The American Prospect]. "If [Trump] refuses to accept the results [the 2020] election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office." This is lunacy. In 2016, liberal Democrats floated the idea that "faithless electors" in the Electoral College should not appoint Trump - based on information from the "intelligence community" that the public was not allowed to see. From that day to this, liberal Democrats haven't accepted the results of 2016, which is what the "Clinton won the popular vote" amounts to. Is the inability to look in the mirror a 10%-er deformation professionnelle? "The Democratic Party unraveling is not good for America" [Ed Rogers, WaPo]. "The Democratic Party is not functioning as an umbrella organization or even a coalition. Instead, activists from Tom Steyer to George Soros to Planned Parenthood are operating independently*, doing things a political party otherwise would. These independent actors are pushing pet causes. Traditional party building isn't one of them. Campaign finance reform and communication technologies have empowered wealthy individuals and collateral groups while at the same time inhibiting parties and individual campaigns. I say this not to kick the Democratic Party while it is down but because I believe in the two-party system…. We need reforms that empower parties and candidates and diminish the influence of deep-pocketed plutocrats and narrowly focused interest groups." Rogers is a veteran of the Reagan and Bush White Houses, but he's not wrong. NOTE * Maybe. When you start thinking, it's hard to know where the boundaries of the Democrat Party really are. For example, are journalists who propagate Brock talking points in the party, or not? My instinct is to say that they are, but how is an institution with fluid boundaries like that to be named and cate
Mathematicians Find Wrinkle in Famed Fluid Equations | Quanta Magazine - 0 views
How the Pittsburgh Massacre Fits Into America's Long History of Anti-Semitism - Pacific... - 0 views
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The thing that connects people like David Duke, Richard Spencer, and anyone else we put under the white-power umbrella is a sense of imperiled whiteness. That has emerged as a very visceral, palpable thing over the past 10 or 15 years. Some segment of white Americans feel their world is under siege, and something needs to be done. That's the connection between efforts to restrict voting and the use of violence to intimidate certain groups of people.This notion of imperiled whiteness is as American as apple pie. It's more visible at some points in history than others. There was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, the anti-immigrant movement of the 1920s, the return of the Klan in the 1950s and '60s. The notion of whiteness, and white power, being at risk prompts people to do some really ugly, dehumanizing things.
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What, if anything, can we do as a society to get a better handle on this?One solution would be teaching kids about race, history, and power in every grade, from elementary school to college. That way they could think critically about the subject, and when confronted with a particular theory about, say, what's driving immigration, they'd have tools to engage it, rather than accepting easier, more problematic explanations.
The Boundary Between Our Bodies and Our Tech - Pacific Standard - 0 views
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At the beginning of his recent book, The Internet of Us, Lynch uses a thought experiment to illustrate how thin this boundary is. Imagine a device that could implant the functions of a smartphone directly into your brain so that your thoughts could control these functions. It would be a remarkable extension of the brain's abilities, but also, in a sense, it wouldn't be all that different from our current lives, in which the varied and almost limitless connective powers of the smartphone are with us nearly 100 percent of the time, even if they aren't—yet—a physiological part of us.
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The debate over what it means for us to be so connected all the time is still in its infancy, and there are wildly differing perspectives on what it could mean for us as a species. One result of these collapsing borders, however, is less ambiguous, and it's becoming a common subject of activism and advocacy among the technologically minded. While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: It's a means for others to access us.
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"This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: You have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with," Weigel says. "We've allowed these private companies to take over a lot of functions that we have historically thought of as public functions or social goods, like letting Google be the world's library. Democracy and the very concept of social goods—that tradition is so eroded in the United States that people were ready to let these private companies assume control."
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