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WiGOP’s pandemic response:
Legislature: [does nothing]
Toadies: [shrilly] The Democratic governor is overstepping his bounds trying to contain the pandemic!
Court: You can’t do that, Governor.Repeat.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down Statewide Mask Mandate | WPR
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Crime reporters, by the nature of their job, are more like weather reporters. They relate the events that have occurred, as told to them by the police, without scrutinizing the systems.
The Press and the Police | Hedgehog Review
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These are the words of the only baseball player to have his number retired by every major league team: “The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.”
Why MLB should consider moving the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta | LA Times
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What if the humanities were marketed within the academy by the names of their best and most important ideas, and not by the names of their calcifying disciplinary formations?
Interesting, yet dubious.
The Humanities Have a Marketing Problem | Chronicle of Higher Education ($)
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Public sainthood is a repudiation of humanity, and if you spend your life fighting for humanity—and knowing how ugly the fight can get, and how you can get blood on our hands—you would be annoyed at being treated like a saint, too.
Dissidents Aren’t Saints | Foreign Policy
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[Recognising exile agency] means accepting that they will sometimes speak in a political idiom that doesn’t resonate with us, and that the methods they sometimes employ are politically inconvenient or even incomprehensible.
Exiles on Main Street | Aeon
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[A] striking feature of our current political landscape is that we disagree not just over values (which is healthy in a democracy), and not just over facts (which is inevitable), but over our very standards for determining what the facts are.
The Value of Truth | Boston Review
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“Once we hit that saturation point where the first tier has all gotten their vaccines, the narrative will shift to blame. It’ll be ‘Why haven’t you taken care of this yet?’”
How Inequity Gets Built Into America’s Vaccination System | ProPublica
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“[Tubman] is a woman who spent her life destroying slavery[.] It’s a reminder about the relationship between history, capitalism and capital in this country. If we put her on the [$20] bill uncritically, that’s a grave disservice to her legacy.”
Fitting the Bill | L&S News
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[Frederick Douglass] never said never. Agonizing as it must have been, with so many faith-shaking signs around him, he stood by his words to the end.
Frederick Douglass and the American Project | Hedgehog Review
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And will our media overlords engage in any self-reflection about the monsters they manufactured?
These moguls built the authoritarian grifter just evicted from the White House with a prime time hustle.
The Lincoln Project and Andrew Cuomo Are Media-Created Monsters | Jacobin
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While other states also saw a decline in union membership over the last decade, Wisconsin’s 5.5 percent drop was especially steep compared to its Midwest neighbors.
A 38.73% overall membership decline.
A Decade After Act 10, It’s A Different World For Wisconsin Unions | WPR
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If no one expects to be told the truth, lies no longer have much operative power – but neither does the truth. The two are indistinguishable and nothing can be counted on.
Imagine a workplace where you could actually tell the truth | Psyche
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The tragedy is not that Internet posters have played an elaborate and costly game of gotcha on Wall Street. It’s that the everyday business of Wall Street does that to the rest of us.
The Lessons of GameStop | Hedgehog Review
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We know the government lied about Vietnam. But should the reporter who published the Pentagon Papers have lied to his source?
ProPublica’s editor-in-chief contemplates Neil Sheehan’s deception of Daniel Ellsberg.
Seeing the Pentagon Papers in a New Light | ProPublica
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The restaurant industry’s embrace of history-as-endless-menu coincided with a moment … in which a growing majority of Americans were coming around to the realization that future generations would in all likelihood be worse off than today’s.
Salt Fat Acid Defeat | n+1
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Irresponsible practices of belief-formation are the deepest sin of a digital society since the stakes of credulity are simply too high.
To be a responsible citizen today, it is not enough to be reasonable | Psyche
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My daughter has never heard me speak the name of the current resident of the White House. Tomorrow, he will be evicted by the Constitution. May he — along with his cronies, his enablers, his goons, his lackeys, his mouthpieces, and his vandals — be forever anathema.
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The “Arrow” argument is how I see this.
The future is seen as ‘nobody’s time’, an unclaimed territory that is equally devoid of inhabitants. Like the distant realms of empire, it is ours for the taking.
Future generations deserve good ancestors. Will you be one? | Psyche
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Infinite Zoom
Such large-scale social change should prompt us to ask larger questions: What kind of world do we want to live in when we emerge from these chaotic times? How much of that world will have been actively built with our input, and how much of it will have been constructed for us by engineers in ways that only in hindsight we will understand to have been foundational? What patterns of behavior and habits of mind do these solutions privilege over other ways of doing things? What are the likely unintended consequences?
Technosolutionism Isn’t the Fix | Hedgehog Review
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When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.
The American Abyss | New York Times
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Quotes for a Day of Sedition, Insurrection, & Treason
Hannah Arendt:
[A] people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
And:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
Frederick Douglass:
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
Theodore Roosevelt:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
Aesop:
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aung San Suu Kyi:
[D]espotic governments do not recognize the precious human component of the state, seeing its citizens only as a faceless, mindless - and helpless - mass to be manipulated at will. It is as though people were incidental to a nation rather than its very life-blood. Patriotism, which should be the vital love and care of a people for their land, is debased into a smokescreen of hysteria to hide the injustices of authoritarian rulers who define the interests of the state in terms of their own limited interests.
W.E.B. Du Bois:
Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
Henry A. Wallace:
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public.
Eric Hoffer:
A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
Hugo Black:
No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.
Bertolt Brecht:
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.
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Paradoxically, to properly recognize the diverse realities that constitute the human experience, we must lean more heavily into our oneness, not tiptoe timidly around it.
Toward a New Universalism | The Hedgehog Review
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No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.
Facebook is a Doomsday Machine | The Atlantic
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I’m pleased to see that Minnesota-based climate journalist & scientist Eric Holthaus, my favorite writer from the soon-to-be-shuttered slow news site The Correspondent, has started his own Substack newsletter, The Phoenix.
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