Numerous Items From Recent Weeks

• How the worldwide migration crisis is about civil wars and climate change, but also about the internet and smartphones;
• How the Luddites were not what we think, and why it might be appropriate to be one now;
• About the new book The Tyranny of the Minority and how Republicans have become an anti-democratic institution;
• How the Christian panic over “sex trafficking” is misplaced and hypocritical;
• Heather Cox Richardson about gerrymandering, and how it has led to our current dysfunctional Congress;
• How disinformation works even in China against Taiwan;
• Another item about how residents of San Francisco reject the characterization of their city by the right-wing media;
• An essay by Matthew Walther about book banning and the how to value literature.

NY Times, Ross Douthat, 23 Sep 2023: The Permanent Migration Crisis

Does Douthat really understand why it’s permanent? Well, he identifies what I think are the two obvious factors, but also a couple I hadn’t considered.

What’s changed and what will keep changing for decades are the numbers involved. Civil wars and climate change will play their part, but the most important shifts are, first, the way the internet and smartphones have made it easier to make your way around the world and, second, the population imbalance between a rich, rapidly aging West and a poorer, younger global south, a deeply unstable equilibrium drawing economic migrants north.

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The Luddites weren’t what we commonly think they were — peasants angry over machinery replacing their jobs.. Cory Doctorow has written about this too.

Washington Post, Brian Merchant, 28 Sep 2023: Opinion | I’ve always loved tech. Now, I’m a Luddite. You should be one, too.

The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.

It is that spirit that I’ve come to appreciate in the age of tech monopolies and generative artificial intelligence. The kind of visionaries we need now are those who see precisely how certain technologies are causing harm and who resist them when necessary.

It’s about who’s reaping the benefits of new technology.

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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 24 Sep 2023: Is America uniquely vulnerable to tyranny?, subtitled “What a brilliant new book gets right — and wrong — about America’s democracy.”

In this excerpt I’ve added an Amazon link on the book’s title. After citing Scylla and Charybdis, the writer says

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.

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Salon, Nathaniel Manderson, 24 Sep 2023: Evangelicals and “sex trafficking” hysteria: Another exercise in Christian hypocrisy, subtitled “I’m grateful my fellow evangelicals have finally noticed social justice. But their current obsession is bulls**t”

The current obsession with sex trafficking, especially the trafficking of children, is largely about political posturing. It may also contain a degree of psychological projection, given the recurrence of troubling stories like the one about Benjamin Garlick, a traveling evangelist who was recently indicted in Tennessee (along with his wife) on charges of raping and abusing a child. In any event, it’s no way based on actually saving people from the sex trade.
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There is nothing less Christian coming out of the current Republican Party than its anti-immigration policies. The Bible is absolutely clear on this question, as are the teachings of Jesus: Christians are called to welcome foreigners, travelers and strangers, with no regard for their legal status. There is no theology available anywhere in Christian thinking or teaching that allows believers to reject the immigrant for any reason — except, apparently, if the threat of sex trafficking is used as a pretext.

It is a perfect theological and political loophole, and Republican evangelicals have seized upon it and exploited it to the maximum. The success earlier this year of the evangelical propaganda movie “Sound of Freedom” is the perfect example. Fueled by evangelical money and the supposed star power of Hollywood lunatic Jim Caviezel, this unexpected hit supposedly showed the world the horrors of child sex trafficking, while hinting at elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory (which overlaps with the evangelical community to some degree). But for what purpose? To save people caught in this deplorable trade in human beings, or to win elections and build support for restrictive immigration policies?

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An example of how the tyranny of the minority works.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American: September 25, 2023

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing legislative districts to favor a political party.

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[The Republican strategy] worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the legislatures in the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

The results of that effort are playing out today.

…Tennessee shows what gerrymandering does at the state level. There, Republicans tend to get about 60% of the votes but control 76% of the seats in the House and 82% of the seats in the Senate. This supermajority means that the Republicans can legislate as they wish.

More examples. Also this result (this was two weeks ago):

Because their seats are safe, Republicans do not have to send particularly skilled politicians to Congress; they can send those whose roles are to raise money and push Republican ideology. That likely explains at least a part of why House Republicans are no closer to agreeing on a deal to fund the government than they have been for the past several months, even as the deadline is racing toward us, and why they are instead going to hold an impeachment hearing concerning President Joe Biden on Thursday.

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Disinformation campaigns work in America; they work around the world.

The Economist, 26 Sep 2023: China is flooding Taiwan with disinformation, subtitled “With elections looming, China wants Taiwanese voters to think America is their greatest threat”

It’s a subscriber site, so this link shows only the first couple of paragraphs. Still makes the point.

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Follow-up to the SFGate item in my Sept 21st post. A further example of how the conservative, Fox News-mindset, lies, in order to frighten their followers into voting Republican. The article has a lot of gorgeous pics in addition to this one.

NY Times, Heather Knight, 25 Sep 2023: ‘Are You OK?’ San Francisco Residents Say They Most Certainly Are., subtitled “San Francisco’s national reputation has plunged since the pandemic began, and many residents say they are frustrated by how their beloved city is being viewed.”

“It’s like going to New York and spending your entire time in Times Square, and your takeaway is, every New Yorker is dressed like Cookie Monster,” Mr. Mathur said. He tells his neighbors that San Francisco as a whole remains stunning and its amenities world-class.

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NY Times, Matthew Walther guest essay, 1 Oct 2023: The Enemies of Literature Are Winning

The writer is skeptical of the notion of “Banned Books Week” and the common definition of what “banned” means. How no library can include all books; how some books are discarded by libraries all the time. Yet he concludes,

When challenging a book — that is, assessing it and perhaps arriving at a low estimation of its value — becomes synonymous with endangering children, what is being articulated is a preferred mode of engagement with texts that is essentially totalitarian. The only books whose authors have not intended them to be challenged are works of propaganda, which, no doubt unwittingly, is how the boosters of many contemporary would-be banned books seem to regard them.

This attitude toward reading — in which the only well-meaning response to a text is uncritical approbation and anything else is tantamount to censorship — is not only disingenuous but ultimately, I think, also hostile to literature itself. If no book invites our disapprobation, what is the value of our esteem? Having renounced our ability to issue moral verdicts, we may find ourselves incapable of reaching aesthetic ones as well and of exercising the critical faculties that both require.

An argument much too subtle for the book banners to understand.