"What's possible in other counties is impossible here, but some things impossible elsewhere are possible here."

"Behind the chiliasm of modern man, is the megalomania of self-infinitization."

From 2017. I've changed the ending a bit. Lemmy now gets the last word.

I keep thinking of this as a primer: easy to understand, almost obvious, like a lecture in images. I could run down the references and conflicts it it describes point by point. But I think no one gets the joke. And that's why Lemmy gets the last word.

Ubiquitous images of modernity: the grid and the individual imagination; universalism and one point perspective; ideologies of objectivity and subjectivity; fantasies of reason and resulting psychosis; rationalism and irrationalism, but also rationalism vs empiricism, pedants vs ironists, philosophers vs comedians and lawyers.

My lords, ladies and gentleman, we are here also to honour Mr. Fred Timson, leader of the Timson clan, that vast family of South London villains, petty thieves and receivers of stolen property. But, no violence in your record Fred right?

That’s right Mr. Rumpole. 

Mr. Timson conducts his life according to strict monetarist principles. 

So I do Mr Rumpole.

He does not believe in the closed shop. He believes that shops should be open at all hours of the night, preferably with a jemmy.   

Too right Mr Rumpole! 

But, without Fred Timson and his like, how many of us would be out of work? How many brother judges? How many of Her Majesty’s counsel learned in  law? How many Coppers? How many humble Old Bailey Hacks? Indeed, we may all be bundled out under the embankment in cardboard boxes…So my lords, ladies and gentleman, charge your glasses, Henry, fill'em up! I give you a toast to Fred Timson and the criminals of England!

The Museum of Capitalism. The quote is Daniel Bell.
I have to keep trying.

NYT: Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History.

David Hammons, Public Enemy, 1992 
see previous

Three nights walking in Central Park in late 2014. Still incomplete. The beat changes, speeding up a bit in the second section. I'll use something more complex for next sections. It's all ongoing. In a lot of the shots the color is still unresolved. I like shooting in log; it gives you a lot of options. It's the record of an eye in motion and time. It's a stringout that I'm trimming, slowly.

Wiseman,  "observational  cinema", "Slow cinema" and the "Sensory Ethnography Lab". etc.

Bored

Imagine NY Times Editorial Board meetings under an autographed portrait of Jefferson Davis 

His diary includes the text of a letter Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, shortly after the infamous Briton had colonized the land of the Shona people in Africa – whose land he claimed and renamed Rhodesia. “You are being invited to help make history,” Herzl wrote to Rhodes. “[I]t doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial… [Y]ou, Mr. Rhodes, are a visionary politician or a practical visionary… I want you to.. put the stamp of your authority on the Zionist plan and to make the following declaration to a few people who swear by you: I, Rhodes have examined this plan and found it correct and practicable. It is a plan full of culture, excellent for the group of people for whom it is directly designed, and quite good for England, for Greater Britain…."

When I was on twitter I got most of my news from foreign sources or people with direct social and personal connections out. Very few where were American beyond first or second generation.
He's talking about the NYT.

so many great Arab reporters in the region who speak the language and know the country and you guys publishing garbage about a dude keeping a 12-hour schedule like it’s some kind of achievement in the fuckin region when your own president watches tv all day. you guys are trash.

— Arash Karami (@thekarami) June 17, 2020

Left-wing secularists in Lebanon are in a bloc with Hezbollah. I can't think of another country other than Israel where the "left" wouldn't understand and agree.

Because he's in the news.  Jilani, Taibbi. etc

I've always said Chomsky will be remembered for his empiricism as an amateur journalist rather than the arch-rationalism that defines his dated theories of language, but his reportage is pretty basic stuff. He's the Jack Webb of anarcho-syndicalism.  Rationalism wins out in the end, and with it a kind of purblind stupidity. He's the archetypical pedant. There's no way in hell in which he's an "intellectual".

Chomsky to W.D. Rubenstein, quoted in Rubenstein, "Chomsky and the New-Nazis", Quadrant
Volume 25 Issue 10 (Oct 1981)

I see no anti-semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even denial of the holocaust. Nor would there be anti-semitic implications, per se, in the claim that the holocaust (whether one believes it took place or not) is being exploited, viciously so, by apologists for Israeli repression and violence. I see no hint of anti-semitic implications in Faurisson's work, and find your argument to the contrary ‘puzzling and unsatisfactory’ to put it in mildest terms.

Chomsky responding a to question about the quote above. "Circa 1989-1991"

The “statement” to which you refer is a distortion of something that I wrote in a personal letter 11 years ago, when I was asked whether the fact that a person denies the existence of gas chambers does not prove that he is an anti-Semite. I wrote back what every sane person knows: no, of course it does not. A person might believe that Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews in some other way without being an anti-Semite. Since the point is trivial and disputed by no one, I do not know why we are discussing it.

In that context, I made a further point: even denial of the Holocaust would not prove that a person is an anti-Semite. I presume that that point too is not subject to contention. Thus if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite. That suffices to establish the point at issue.

The point is considerably more general. Denial of monstrous atrocities, whatever their scale, does not in itself suffice to prove that those who deny them are racists vis-a-vis the victims. I am sure you agree with this point, which everyone constantly accepts. Thus, in the journal of the American Jewish Congress, a representative of ASI writes that stories about Hitler’s anti-gypsy genocide are an “exploded fiction.” In fact, as one can learn from the scholarly literature (also Wiesenthal, Vidal-Naquet, etc.), Hitler’s treatment of the gypsies was on a par with his slaughter of Jews. But we do not conclude from these facts alone that the AJC and ASI are anti-gypsy racists.

...You ask whether one wouldn’t at least suspect the motives of someone who denies genocide (the Holocaust, in particular). Of course. Thus, I do suspect the motives of Wiesel, Bernard Lewis, the anthropological profession, the American Jewish Congress and ASI, Faurisson, Western intellectuals who systematically and almost universally downplay the atrocities of their own states, and people who deny genocide and atrocities generally. But I do not automatically conclude that they are racists; nor do you.

Faurisson was a Holocaust denier. He wasn't quibbling about methods.

To value the lives of one group over others is bigotry, so we can conclude that the AJC and ASI are in fact anti-Gypsy racists, as we can conclude that Zionists who conquered Palestine were racists.

"I do suspect the motives of Wiesel, Bernard Lewis, the anthropological profession, the American Jewish Congress and ASI, Faurisson, Western intellectuals..."

You're either willing to psychologize or you aren't. To ascribe motives is to ascribe beliefs.

Some people may be so committed to their own innocence that they refuse to acknowledge the historical record. What does that say about them?

repeats: Deborah Lipstadt and other self-hating Jews.

Moved to the top after the decision in Bostock v. Clayton County

Shouldn't a fast-radicalizing left be alienating a lot of middle-of-the-road Americans? Creating a lot of opportunities for Republicans? So why is the GOP losing ground even as the Democrats move left? Could it be, maybe, ever-so-slightly, the fault of the GOP's leader?

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 14, 2020

John Cena and the WWE are not the "fast radicalizing left".  Neither are the vast majority of protestors. Via Timothy Burke, @Bubbaprog, the man who made this.

The video's from 2016

No shit

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism.

Cedric Johnson is associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Zionism site:https://nonsite.org

Binary logic

Partial repeat

"By this logic, of course, the Times is unjustly denying the public the ability to debate the virtues of cannibalism, or of the United States becoming a Communist state, or whether people killed in mass shootings are really crisis actors" https://t.co/KclKI6fDSA

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) June 13, 2020

There is no consistent standard by which the removal of public statues is justified. According to current standards, you could conceivably make a case that all statues should be removed of persons throughout history who did not sufficiently "center" black trans lives

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 15, 2020

Wesley Yang: "Can you play poker at the highest level without mastering the math? I have no poker skill and very minimal practice, but I do have total emotional detachment and an excellent poker face."

"I have total emotional detachment" says the man who identified with a mass murderer

In this country, anyone who claims to be interested in politics as an idea is a moralist.

You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness.

In re: "Diversity blather"

Silberman’s post, which went out widely to scores of Court staff and judges, sat unanswered over the next day, until the first volley was sent back not by a fellow judge but by a clerk: courtroom employees who work directly with judges to research and write their opinions.

“Hi Judge Silberman,” began the career-risking reply-all email, “I am one of only five black law clerks in this entire circuit. However, the views I express below are solely my own,” they went on. “Since no one in the court’s leadership has responded to your message, I thought I would give it a try.”

[M]y maternal ancestors were enslaved in Mississippi. While the laws of this nation viewed my ancestors as property, I view them as hostages. In a hostage situation, when someone does something that leads to the freeing of the hostages, I am not sure if the hostages would be concerned as to whether the person that saved them, actually intended to save them. In this instance, as people considered to be property, my ancestors would not have been involved in the philosophical and political debates about Lincoln’s true intentions, or his view on racial equality. For them, and myself, race is not an abstract topic to be debated, so in my view anything that was built to represent white racial superiority, or named after someone who fought to maintain white supremacy (or the Southern economy of slavery), see Photo of Liberty Monument attached, should be removed from high trafficked areas of prominence and placed in museums where they can be part of lessons that put them in context. ...

Experience is substantive. The need for diversity is not about fairness; it's about epistemology.
Adolph Reed, McWhorter, Leiter, Jilani, Henry Farrell –a long list.

Jilani: If our ancestors survived colonialism we can survive a racist editor. "Shhh..."

It's so easy to destroy Jilani, but no one does it.  People don't speak directly. His universalist anti-identity-politics schtick falls flat, from Bari Weiss to Batya Ungar-Sargon on "moral panic". Moral panic is all they're good for. The facts are there but no one shoves them in his face.

He deleted the tweet.

If you screen grab a video on Netflix you get a black screen, but subtitles come through.

Because we should be able to rely on NYT editorial writers, sitting in a room under a portrait of Theodor Herzl, to tell us what's "right".

Journalism's Top Ethics Expert Isn't Concerned With Right and Wrong
As journalists wage a civil war, America's leading media ethicist doesn't seem to quite understand what anyone is fighting about.

Last Wednesday, The New York Times published an op-ed in which Republican senator Tom Cotton called for a military crackdown on citizens protesting against police killings of Black people. It was an incendiary argument packed with lies the newspaper's own reporters had already debunked. The decision to publish it led to revolt inside the Times' newsroom, and, four days later, the resignation of Opinion editor James Bennet, until then reportedly in the running to take over the paper.

Outside the Times, journalists would in days to come deride the paper's decision to publish the op-ed. Osita Nwanevu of The New Republic traced the debacle to the Times' insistence on promoting illberal ideas in the name of liberal ideals, predicting that the paper will "continue to publish the opinions of a right that openly disdains the principles underpinning a free press and a free society." Vox's David Roberts wrote that the op-ed shouldn't have been published "because it reflects a worldview incompatible with the baseline small-l liberal values that make the Times's work, and journalism generally, possible." Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, herself a former Times public editor, criticized the publication of the op-ed and took the occasion to argue that whatever the merits of assiduous neutrality in theory, there is no such thing in practice. "Every piece of reporting—written or spoken, told in text or in images—is the product of choices," she wrote. "We choose what to focus on, what to amplify, what to investigate and examine."

The day after the op-ed was published, Kelly McBride, America's foremost expert on media ethics, shared with me a very different opinion, more in line with that of the people inside and outside the Times decrying the episode as a triumph of "safetyism." McBride wouldn't have published it had she been in charge of the section, she said, because it was "crappy" and “intellectually dishonest.” As she saw it, though, publishing controversial and unpopular arguments, like one that the government should use military force to deny protesters the ability to exercise First Amendment rights, is important in order to ensure a robust "marketplace of ideas."

By this logic, of course, the Times is unjustly denying the public the ability to debate the virtues of cannibalism, or of the United States becoming a Communist state, or whether people killed in mass shootings are really crisis actors, or any number of other unpopular ideas whose adherents aren't given some of the limited space available in its Opinion section. Further, the issue wasn't whether Times readers should be informed of Cotton's positions, which were already well-known; a news article in which they were described critically and contextualized would have caused no controversy. The issue, as critics had it, was that the paper turned their platform over to him so that he could make an inherently illegitimate argument, unchallenged.

"As she saw it, though, publishing controversial and unpopular arguments, like one that the government should use military force to deny protesters the ability to exercise First Amendment rights,..." Ignoring the looting as opposed to reporting the looting and arguing that the cops made things worse, or that the cops themselves ignored it.

It's fair to claim that Cotton's claim about antifa had been "debunked", but the looting was real enough. A friend and his wife were trapped in their home with people trying to smash in their door.  And I've spent the last week reading defenses of looting and violence written by people who decry Cotton's op-ed.

"The issue, as critics had it, was that the paper turned their platform over to him so that he could make an inherently illegitimate argument, unchallenged." And who's to judge what's inherently illegitimate? McBride called Cotton's op-ed "crappy" and “intellectually dishonest.” I like that.

Pulitzer Prize for "Commentary" has gone to...
...Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer and, this year, Nikole Hannah-Jones.

And now Taibbi has joined in, defending the journalism of "truth". In this country, anyone who claims to be interested in politics as an idea is a moralist.

The phrase "the marketplace of ideas" founds adversarialism in the market, as if greed didn't need an adversary.

Remember Osita Nwanevu and "The Enemies of Truth"
He's a good reporter but you don't you need a graduate degree from the University of Chicago to be a hack. It just gets in the way. He's got a great career ahead of him as a self-important mediocrity.

The public seems to be ignoring anarchists, looters and concern trolls. Wasow is now covering his ass, and academics find new just-so stories to replace the old ones.  "In my book, tentatively titled..."

Over two weeks after the protests against the killing of George Floyd began, America remains firmly in the year 2020. 1968, with its sustained chaos and broad white backlash, is still a distant memory and, one hopes, a less potent allusion for our times. But many are still determined to believe the demonstrations we’ve seen will take a toll on the Democratic Party and the American left. Disdain for the protests on the right was carried into this week by National Review’s Kyle Smith on Monday. “After more than two months of frustration and boredom stemming from the lockdowns, the riots looked like a combination of outburst, festival, and religious observance,” he wrote. “The new religion is anti-racism; displaying one’s devotion requires mass gatherings, displays of self-mortification.”

This will likely be the image of the protests the president and his backers continue pushing through the election; the possibility of a campaign focused on these uprisings has scared some liberals from the outset. “The bulk of [Trump’s] comments have focused on ending protesters’ violence rather than addressing the cause behind the demonstrations, with invocations of the upcoming presidential election,” Vox’s German Lopez wrote last week. “If that works to get Trump reelected, the protests almost certainly won’t accomplish the policy changes that many movement leaders want. We don’t know if history will repeat itself, but there are signs that it could.”

But there are already signs that it isn’t. Polls since the protests against the killing of George Floyd began have consistently shown broad public support for the movement.

One of the latest, published Tuesday by The Washington Post, shows 74 percent of Americans support the protests, including a 53 percent majority of Republicans. That poll also produced a figure much more striking than the headline result. While the Post found that Americans were about evenly divided on the question of whether the protests have been mostly peaceful or mostly violent, a 53 percent majority of those who believed the protests were mostly violent supported them anyway. The Post also reported that 69 percent of Americans believe Floyd’s killing reflected “broader problems in treatment of Black Americans by police.”

That finding, the Post’s Scott Clement and Dan Balz wrote, “marks a significant shift when compared with the reactions in 2014 to police killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.”

All this is consistent with another survey published Wednesday in The New York Times, which showed that support for Black Lives Matter has jumped dramatically since the protests began. “Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm,” the Times’ Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy wrote. “By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of Americans support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.”

What a list.

Jean-Marie Straub, 2020. Text: Georges Bernanos, from La France Contre Les Robots, 1947.
"pour Jean-Luc"

Famous leftist filmmaker uses the words of a Catholic monarchist. The man is walking by lake Geneva. In the US, Straub's films, almost all made with his late wife Danielle Huillet, are represented by an art gallery, a luxury boutique, where Alain Badiou comes to speak. Chantal Akerman was also represented by a gallerist.

Monarchism and communism have a lot in common.
I shouldn't have to add any of that but Americans are stupid.

I shouldn't have to follow reactionaries, contrarians and pedants to find people who understand what anti-political idealism looks like. I shouldn't have to read cynics to find anti-utopians. In this country, anyone who claims to be interested in politics as an idea is a moralist. Left, right and center, varieties of the same commitment. Calls for "abolition" of jails and police, from Alex Vitale to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, are fantasies and lies. It's been called a  motte and bailey strategy. Cui bono? We need a serious left, stripped of utopianism and vanguardism; stripped of faith.

CAMEROTA: But to be clear, you're not talking about reform. The word, dismantle, is intentionally different than reform. This is more than reform. This is dismantling. I mean, activists who support this are calling this a police-free future.

BENDER: Yes. And, you know, a lot of us were asked if we could imagine a future without police back in 2017, when we were running for office. And I answered yes to that question. To me, that future is a long way away and it would take an enormous amount of investment in things that we know work to keep people safe. I mean, for a lot of folks in our community, stable housing is a safety issue. Having access to healthcare is a safety issue. And so, having -- you know, I think one thing folks are asking is to stop investing so much money in this militarized police force and instead invest in the things that our community really needs. So, you know, I know the statement was bold and I stand by that bold statement, but the work ahead of us will be long, it will include every member of our community. It has to. And, you know, I think we have very immediate things, we have a state action against our police department, which gives us legal mechanisms in the very short-term. You know, there are lessons from all over the country, all over the world that we're looking to take immediate steps while we work toward building the systems that we would need to imagine that future.

CAMEROTA: Do you understand that the word, dismantle, or police-free also makes some people nervous, for instance? What if in the middle of night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?

BENDER: Yes, I mean, hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know -- and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege. Because for those of us for whom the system is working, I think we need to step back and imagine what it would feel like to already live in that reality where calling the police may mean more harm is done. And so in the very immediate, we have to lean in to whatever changes we can make in our existing police department. You know, I think we look to cities like Camden, New Jersey, that completely restructured their department, as we build up systems. And we've already done that. We are not starting from scratch. We have invested in community-based safety strategies. We have knowledge in our community across the city. We've done an analysis of all the reasons people call 911 and have looked up ways we can shift the response away from our armed police officers into a more appropriate response for mental health calls, for some domestic violence calls, for health-related issues. And so the groundwork is laid already in Minneapolis for us to build on that, to learn from folks around the world, but really also to listen to our community and put those community voices front and center, as we build up those systems even further.

CAMEROTA: On a political point, as a Democrat, are you worried that you have just handed President Trump a great talking point or slogan or battle cry for his re-election to be able to say, see, Democrats want to get rid of your police? First, they come to take away your guns, as he says. Now, they're taking away your police officers. Does that concern you?

BENDER: You know, that's why I said at the beginning that it starts with telling the truth. And I think we've been afraid of a lot of things, of those political dynamics of what would happen in our city, you know, to have our police force hearing these kinds of words. And that fear is what we have to really work through, because, again, that's the fear that so many in our community are facing. That's the fear that we see, you know, from George Floyd's family, or the family of Jamar Clark or Justine Damon, who were also killed by Minneapolis Police, who have told us, we never want to see this happen again. And so the efforts we have taken so far to stop this, to make sure no one is killed in this way have not worked. So our statement is to try something new.

They should display it like this. Modernism was a fuck-you to this crap, and plenty of contemporary art riffs on acts of destruction. This is the real deal.
I wanted to put David Hammons with Rodin, but we couldn't get the Rodin on short notice.

List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests. Wikipedia

Wakanda Forever

Higgins, the pro-looter writer/editor with a graduate degree and a LinkedIn page, rt's the arrest of "one of Seattle's most avante garde [sic] hairstylist and... named Seattle's Best Hairstylist for 2018", for the crime of recording the macing of a little girl and posting it on Instagram.

Right below he rt's Brendan O'Connor, American, writer for Gizmodo, Gawker, Awl, New Yorker, NYT.

spontaneous, organic movements are beautiful and contain infinite possibilities. one of those possibilities is that people like this (i.e. liberals) can use a radical vernacular and aesthetic to guide everyone else down a dead end.

He doesn't even know he's spouting boilerplate, but he read it in a book somewhere. The people he's complaining about are just as bad. The hairstylist (Haircuts $115, Full Balayage $240, Bleach and Tone $255) makes no great claims.

In 2014 The New Inquiry published "In Defense of Looting", by Vicky Osterweil "writer, editor, and agitator". Now it's a book

A radical argument for why rioting and looting are our most powerful tools of dismantling white supremacy.

Looting–a crowd of people publicly, openly, and directly seizing goods–is one of the more extreme actions that take can place in the midst of social unrest. Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement.

However, in this deftly argued corrective, Vicky Osterweil argues that while looting is often maligned in today’s society, it is, and has always been, one of our most powerful tools of dismantling capitalism and white supremacy. 

Bold Type Books, formerly Nation Books, an imprint of Hachette, the third largest trade publishing conglomerate in the world.

Lee Fang apologizes for hurting people's feelings. Zaid Jilani joins Wesley Yang in writing articles against identity politics for a Jewish identitarian journal.

Reactionaries now more than conservatives call out liberal hypocrisy on the protests and Covid-19. Romney marched, and earned a puff piece in the Atlantic. Bush and Colin Powell now say they're voting for Biden. The right-wing response to government action was defensive, moving inward, closing ranks. The new protests are moving outward. You can show the distinction by comparing cops and protestors. The cops are the ones who refuse to wear masks.

Fauci is worried about increased infections. Others are less so.  Greg Gonsalves retweets Noah Smith retweeting Mark Lipsitch: two epidemiologists and an economist. Smith does the "cost-benefit analysis" and says it supports the protests.

Gonsalves also retweets "Andrea Roberts, PhD @FreeBlackTX"

I never again want anyone to say theorizing doesn’t lead to change. Black feminist theory and intersectionality informed the creation of black lives matter. We’d never be this close to change without powerful black queer women organizing & theorizing.

Theory is form of literature. What matters is the people who have to time to indulge it.
Black Lives Matter is the new black bourgeois pushing for full representation, abetted by the earnest whining of whites and careerist intellectuals, and by others who are more simply fed up. It's anger of a community weakening as a community, as its members gain authority outside it. It's assimilation. Neoliberalism is open or just below the surface, also a narcissism as spoiled and absurd as any white slacker revolutionary.

The protests are becoming a mass movement, a religious movement in a time of crisis. It's a reaction. It's anti-fascist but not radical. The puritanism will fade along with the marches, but some things will change for good. White guilt about blacks, moralizing self-pity, is matching post-war guilt about Jews, including rituals of self-abasement by people who are still in fact anti-semitic and racist. But statues are being torn down by protestors or removed by authorities in the US and Europe. They're down for good. I'm not much for literal iconoclasm but 19th century academic monuments are low on my list; they always had more value as politics than art. That brings me back to bigger arguments.

Leiter and Adolph Reed, unable to see the bigger picture, or if they claim to see the bigger one they miss the largest. Leiter's a Zionist. Reed's spent his life in an American left where Jewish nationalism was accepted, and only specific actions here and there came in for meaningless criticism. Both see their own insular self-justifying politics as ideal, without elisions or gaps.

Pedants are always right about details; that's in the definition of the word. Reactionaries left and right indulge in nihilism for what they see as a higher truth. Their intellectual supporters among the pundit class would never practice what they preach.

Just reposting this.

"Running this puts Arab @NYTimes staff in danger."

Yeah, no one thought of it.

Photograph of Theodore Herzl in the Editorial Board meeting room at the NY Times.
via Eli Valley. It'll be taken down at some point in the next 20 years.

'Weird Alex' [sic] Pareene "Staff Writer, The New Republic, Brooklyn"

They can't be reformed. Disband the MPD and every other big urban police department. Hire some detectives to investigate the serious crimes with actual victims, and social workers and civil servants for the other duties. Pay local bar bouncers and antifa to patrol neighborhoods.

Pereene's new article links Binyamin Appelbaum. "I write editorials about business and economics for The New York Times. My new book, The Economists' Hour, is now on sale! http://bit.ly/EconHour"

The police are supposed to protect protesters and prevent looting. When the opposite happens, it raises the suspicion that the police are sending a message.

Appelbaum is retweeting Rachel Olding "Breaking news at @TheDailyBeast. Former editor/journo in the US for @smh & @theage"

Hard to describe how rampant the looting was tonight in Midtown Manhattan and how lawless it was. Complete anarchy. Literally hundreds of stores up and down Broadway, Fifth Ave, Sixth Ave. Kids ruling the streets like it was a party.

His article links the AP, and beat reporters for The Chicago Sun-Times; he links NBC News, and on and on.

His last paragraph.

Democratic (and occasionally libertarian) politicians, liberal think tanks, and policy shops have produced lots of proposals designed to prevent what happened to George Floyd from happening again: implicit bias training, de-escalation training, body cameras, use of force restrictions. None of these figures have a plan to stop police from allowing a white mob to violate a curfew with impunity while brutally repressing protesters representing the “other side.” What is the reform plan for that, exactly? What is the reform plan for police choosing to believe deranged conspiracy theories about demonstrators?

It is almost reassuring to believe that the police want peace but are, through ineptness or poor training, bad at achieving it. They have told us, over and over again, that they are a political force with specific goals. Are we ready to listen yet?

Philadelphia Inquirer: "Frank Rizzo statue removed from outside the Municipal Services Building in the middle of the night"

Forbes: "Confederate Monuments Come Down: Alexandria Statue Removed, As ‘Black Lives Matter’ Written On Others"

Lee Fang's favorite quasi-black man: "I'm not racist, but..."

To be clear, I too am against racism, but the truth is that the French have had ample opportunities over the years to care about racism and it hasn’t always been a top priority. Right now is bad timing.

Ignore false radicalism. Pay attention to the action on the ground. The chattering class is a class.

The pro-looter activist from Common Dreams and LinkedIn is a Star Wars fan, a supporter of some billion dollar corporations but not others. And I remember when Star Wars and everything else about the Lucas fantasy world was criticized as authoritarian, and Star Wars itself as proto-fascist kitsch.

On twitter Ryan Cooper posted a screenshot to mock Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. Cooper has 53 thousand followers; Walsh's follower count has gone up 100 thousand in the past month. I told Cooper he should engage Walsh directly, so his followers could see the response.

Cooper replied: "Have you ever argued with a conservative? They won't learn anything no matter what I say or where I say it. Whatever I say is wrong by definition."

I told him it's not about Walsh but giving information to his readers that they wouldn't get otherwise. I told him I remember when very serious American left-liberals read Tyler Cowen and were afraid of Palestinians. I remember when they loved Bill Clinton.

Today he tweets this

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit

Left-wing secularists in Lebanon are in a bloc with Hezbollah. As a 22 year old Bulgarian club-kid said to me in 2006. "This is a stupid country."

repeats

Corey Robin: "I think people have lots of different interests, and I think an elitist project like conservatism actually offers non-elites certain opportunities for power (though power that is always allied/hitched to subjection), which is one of the reasons non-elites support it."

(etc.)

Ryan tweets images of cops on the rampage. Lee Fang—see below, here and here—tweets violence by looters. Neither are conservatives, right?

CNN: Killer Mike urges Atlanta protesters 'not to burn your own house down' in emotional plea.

Killer Mike made an emotional plea for calm Friday night as a protest in Atlanta against police brutality turned violent.

The demonstration started peacefully, but some protestors broke storefront windows, torched cars and vandalized CNN headquarters. Atlanta was one of several US cities that witnessed protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.

"I am the son of an Atlanta police officer," said the rapper and activist, who was joined at a press conference by Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Police Chief Erika Shields and fellow Atlanta rap star T.I. "My cousin is an Atlanta city police officer. And my other cousin an East Point police officer." 

"And I got a lot of love and respect for police officers, down to the original eight police officers in Atlanta," he said, an apparent reference to the city's first black officers, hired in 1948, who he said were forced to dress in a separate building because white officers rejected them. 

Killer Mike and T.I. pointed to Atlanta's civil rights history as the home of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who have struggled for equality over the decades. 

"I watched a white police officer assassinate a black man," Killer Mike said while crying, referring to Floyd's death. "And I know that tore your heart out."

The officer, since fired, is seen in a video with his knee on Floyd's neck. He has been charged with murder and manslaughter.

"I am duty-bound to be here to simply say that it is your duty not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy," Killer Mike said. "It is your duty to fortify your own house so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organization."

"It is time to beat up prosecutors you don't like at the voting booth," he added, as he wore a T-shirt that read "Kill Your Masters," a lyric from one of his rap group's songs. "It is time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs." 

"I'm mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn down yesterday because I am tired of seeing black men die," he said. "We want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burned to the ground.

Two cheers for buppies and the black petty bourgeois.  I'm sure Killer Mike likes Star Wars. It's ok. I'll deal.

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One month later: From Star Wars to Star Trek