One more round of Links and Comments for today, then promise will do some different kinds of posts for a while.
I missed this one yesterday, when it was relevant to posts then:
The Atlantic, 3 Nov: You Can’t Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary, subtitled, “Virginia is sending Democrats a warning: They’ve lost control of the narrative about education.”
That is, it doesn’t matter if CRT isn’t being taught in Virginia schools, if voters think that it is. It’s all about narrative. (This is a big theme of mine, actually, about how humans interpret everything as narrative, which is why science does not come easily, but which perhaps science fiction helps bridge the divide.)
On the other hand, via another article I read this morning and now can’t find the link to (but likely will tomorrow), it’s claimed that even if literal CRT isn’t being taught in Virginia schools, the *flavor* of it is, in the sense of bringing up ideas of racial inequality and privilege. And it freaks many white people out to think that their children are being taught how their grandparents were racists. (My father’s father was, in small town Cambridge where my parents grew up: he used the N-word casually whenever referring to “those people.” Still, it was not unusual at the time; was he out of line, or simply a man of his times?)
(This, er, whitewashing of the past is not necessarily inappropriate. Sometimes a society needs to overcome the past and not be beholden to its assumptions, to move on, to progress. But this applies to the populace at large. The smart ones should never be denied the lessons of history. “Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.”)
This is a basic problem of politics; it is driven by mob thinking and subject to deliberate misinformation to manipulate voters. You can’t solve real problems when half the population is obsessed with imaginary ones. But you have to use the population you have.
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I also missed this obvious observation, about the election the other day: Incumbent parties *always* lose governors (and Congressional members) in the mid-term elections. The fact that only one of two governors lost this time can be taken as a sign of progress, not failure. Via Rachel Maddow, via another link I can’t find just now.
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NYT, 4 Nov 21: The Powerful G.O.P. Strategy Democrats Must Counter if They Want to Win
Again about Republican race-baiting, which goes back decades.
…the past half-century of American political history shows that racially coded attacks are how Republicans have been winning elections for decades, from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad. Many of these campaigns were masterminded by the strategist Lee Atwater, who in 1981 offered a blunt explanation: Being overtly racist backfires, he noted, “so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” C.R.T. is straight out of the Atwater playbook.
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The Week, 1 Nov 21: ‘Let’s go Brandon’ and the anti-civility arms race
Republicans, classy as always.
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Daily Kos, a fairly left-wing site, about CNN, generally thought as a middle-of-the-road site.
Daily Kos, 4 Nov 21: CNN’s milk story isn’t awful because it’s about milk, it’s awful because it’s about CNN
Apparently CNN ran a story about a large family that buys 9 or 12 gallon jugs of milk a week, and then calculated how much more those cost now than a while ago, and implicitly blaming Biden. (Part of the problem is that the story is trivial; how many families buy that much milk? And is the price increase really such a deal-breaker?)
CNN is not Fox. But they are deeply wedded to convincing America that things are bad, Democrats are failing, and Joe Biden sucks … because without a manufactured crisis, they might have to report news.
I’ve noticed this too, on CNN, which I check several times a day as my primary news source that is updated regularly, that is about the way they characterize all the “crises” the Democrats are facing. And I figured, perhaps they’re bending slightly over backward to be somewhat critical about Biden after years of being (much more legitimately) critical about T****; they don’t want to seem soft on Biden. And yet, isn’t it the case that most journalism highlights news in the most alarming way possible? Still, this milk story does seem out of line. President don’t affect milk prices any more than they affect gas prices. Not in 9 months.
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Passing thought: notice how Republican candidates are always yelling at the top of their voices.
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AlterNet, 26 Oct 21: ‘When do we get to use the guns?’: A right-winger’s question shows how the GOP is spiraling out of control
All those gun-owners with their obsessions about the Second Amendment are itching to start a Civil War, apparently. The case of Kyle Rittenhouse comes to mind, about a young man who went out of his way, with his big gun, to get into trouble.
