Links for Friday, August 11
How do you set right what's gone so wrong?
This is a travel week for yours truly, and thus no main mid-week piece. To compensate I’m making the Friday Links post free to all.
Its theme: Setting things right when they’ve gone so very wrong. Enjoy.
Links
• Why Democrats Should Primary Biden (Politico)
Biden has challengers, of course, but Marianne Williamson and Robert Kennedy Jr. aren’t the right ring partners to prepare him for what will be his last electoral contest. With a tepid approval rating that puts him near to Donald Trump at his worst, Biden needs a primary opponent who can prepare him for the 2024 general election, somebody who can make him prove that he can still run the traps and beat whichever Republican he faces. If Biden can’t vanquish a worthy Democrat in primary season, he has no business entering the general.
Who might that challenger be?
Interesting toe-in-the-water suggestion from a mainstream non-Trumpist publication.
File under “Just thinking out loud, boss.”
• Let the Platforms Burn (Cory Doctorow)
A preview of a members-only post by Cory Doctorow on Medium. I present it not because of his entry argument:
California needs to burn. For millennia, First Nations people oversaw controlled burns in the forests they lived, played and worked in. These burns cleared out underbrush, saw off sick trees, and created canopy openings that admitted sunlight to help quicken new growth. The importance of fire to healthy renewal is testified to by the regional trees that can only reproduce through fire, including the state’s iconic giant redwood.
but for his intriguing close:
Social media [also] needs to burn.
File under “Twitter, reduced to an X on the screen.”
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now (Freddie DeBoer | NY Mag)
Take, for example, the chronic mistreatment of workers in our railway system that contributed to the derailment and subsequent air crisis in East Palestine, Ohio. Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of her overall political orientation, speaking up like a militant supporter of workers in the press then immediately betraying them with her vote.
A bit of controversy for your reading pleasure. I want to spend time on this hard-to-discuss topic because first, it’s near and dear, and second, it’s the heart of one of the two great divides on the left — or the center-right, since what you see differs depending on the rock you stand on.
Most will not agree with Freddie DeBoer in criticizing AOC. For most, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a heroine of both the Resistance and the #Resistance. She swept into the Capitol with a protest at Nancy Pelosi’s office (does anyone remember what the issue was? or how it ended?), and has led the charge for such leftist proposals as the Green New Deal and “Tax the Rich.”
She took up the Bernie Mantle, as it were. She’s holy ground, a secular hero and saint, the first of the next generation who will “set things right.” She’s the person, for example, who offered this radical 2019 proposal:
AOC’s Plan to Decommodify Housing
With a new bill that complements the Sanders campaign’s policy, the representative wants to protect renters, not landlords.
… Her legislation—called the “A Place to Prosper Act”, and one of a six-bill package to address economic inequality titled “A Just Society”—aims to keep tenants in place by establishing a national cap on annual rent increases, restricting evictions without just cause, and guaranteeing a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction.
Yet for some, she’s something less. In DeBoer’s words, “a regular Democrat,” someone to the left of party leaders, but who’s learned in her few years in office that taking her cue from the leaders of her team means keeping her place on it.
DeBoer lays out his own position in the piece above. But consider listening to this podcast from Krystal Kyle and Friends. In it, Kyle Kulinsky, a co-founder of Justice Democrats, the group that brought AOC onto the scene, discusses with DeBoer their differences on AOC’s path and role.
The discussion ranges from Justice Democrats’ origins to the iconic Nader moment in Florida. Where do you stand in this touchstone debate?
File under “Caught between a rock and a Party leader.”
• Fox News Guest Says Wildfire Smoke Is Safe to Breathe (Truthout)
Appearing on “The Ingraham Angle,” Steve Milloy, senior policy fellow of the Koch- and coal-funded Energy and Environment Legal Institute, said contrary to nearly all evidence that there’s “no health risk” to breathing wildfire smoke. His remarks were chock full of lies, as he laid forth an utterly baseless conspiracy theory that the Environmental Policy Agency (EPA) straight out invented the harms of particulate matter, or PM2.5, which is a particularly insidious form of air pollution caused by wildfires. …
“This is wildfire smoke, this is natural, this is not because of climate change, this is not because of fossil fuel – internal combustion engines.” (emphasis added)
This is best understood as an instance of one the arguments in this post on climate delayism. Note his affiliation; this is operative work. Get ready for more, some from the much more subtle self-styled left.
File under “No one with power wants to fix this problem.”
• What ‘Defund the Police’ Could Actually Mean (Jonathan Korman | Twitter)
I’ll close on more controversy, this time about the much-maligned ‘defund the police’ movement. In this post-George Floyd era, when much of that incident’s anger has dissipated (until it rises, phoenix-like, with another death), the self-styled left has shied away from the phrase, the call, the concept. They’re either shamed by their more practical colleagues, who regret the phrase, or lost for ways to defend it.
But the core of the anger that sparked it is real and persistent. This is a strong and impassioned piece of writing.
Raze every police station. Salt the earth where they stood. Start over.
Be sure to read the whole thread. It’s loaded with examples of deadly cop malfeasance.
My litany says “fire every cop” not because I believe All Cops Are Bastards — I know that there are earnest people trying to do right within toxic systems — but the systems are irredeemably toxic.
Indeed they are. For more on police in America, consider this:
File under “Police replaced the Pinkertons. Think about that.”
And now, your musical treat:
I'm not Abel
I'm just Kane
Open up the Heavens
Make it rain
The rain from heaven cleanses. It also brings the flood. A two-edged request.
We just got some rain. It was good.
Didn't read deBoer's piece because why bother, it has been so obvious for years AOC is just a normal Democrat. She can talk to her base and they lap it up, but then she eagerly votes with the rest of them over and over again. Israel, for example, the railway workers (as mentioned), ever higher defense budgets and more war. And her base doesn't care. They are well off progressives (and even a few call themselves socialists, though the word fits them like they're wearing a hat that makes them look ridiculous), and all they need are symbolic victories, like wearing a dress that says "tax the rich" to a fancy ball where rich people go. It doesn't do anything, but it's a symbolic victory, the most important kind to them. Her base eats it up and pretends she's fighting for what's right. The only thing, and it's too bad these poor progressives haven't figured out, you can't eat symbolism, so it turns out they're the only ones who care what she says anymore. Do they even realize? I'm guessing not.
So in the end, just like any other Democrat, she riles up her base and gets them fired up to support Biden, and none of them even wonder about how it looks that AOC and themselves have lashed themselves to a decrepit boat that has sunk 40% below the waves of popularity, and the gales forces of disapproval have washed over 55% of the bow. And because they look so foolish rocking to and fro on the deck, such as being simultaneously pro-war and anti-war, or both condemn US foreign policy and wonder about all the things we could do with it (this notion I stole from the current issue of Jacobin, the article "Beyond Chomsky and Walzer"), I don't think they know how to swim.