We're All Democratic Socialists Now

 

"Socialism in Milwaukee": Drawing from The Milwaukee Independent, probably ca. 1910-12, when the city had its first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel.

I began coming to this idea on election night itself, and the morning after, contemplating the most cautious candidacy, that of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey—cautious for understandable reasons, I might add, with the most plausible Republican opponent, who'd come scary close to beating Governor Phil Murphy four years earlier, in a state that elects an awful lot of Republican governors for one of its general blueness, but I'd been worrying it had made her so cautious it wasn't good for her, making her really tense and uneasy. The victory speech showed her much better, much less buttoned-up and tight-lipped; energetic and relaxed at the same time. It struck me that it was the first time I'd seen her having a good time during the campaign, and I was honestly happy for her.

But something surprising escaped my notice until the morning airing of radio excerpts, from her acknowledgments of all the volunteers and all she had learned from them:

I was moved during my block walk in Trenton with Shanique because she spoke so passionately about the promise of her city and her neighbors despite the challenges. I love the group of young men from Monroe who have been hard at work on this campaign. They want a seat at the table and they're ready to fight for their future. The little girls who come up to me to say that they're going to be a governor or they're going to be a president. It reminds me of my own belief that anything was possible. Akeem's team, who worked their butts off, knocked over 60,000 doors. Akeem told me these are not the kids who will succeed in Trump's vision of this country. But they will in mine. Union jobs at a time when our economy is set up to make it harder and harder for working people. You know what? They don't just fight for their brothers and sisters in labor. They fight for all of us.

Sherrill, under the guidance of working people she's come to know, has come to a particular kind of view on how things are working: that the industrial economy is "set up" to deprive working people of a fair share of the profits, and that the organized labor movement is an essential part of righting the situation, and that the object is a social movement from which the whole society can benefit, "for all of us."

That's more than a little bit Marxist, whether she understands it that way or not. At a very fundamental level:

• that industrial capitalism, the fostering of industrial growth through capital investment, inherently exploits workers, robbing them of the value they produce;
• that the "point" of the analysis, as Marx says, "is to change" the situation for the better; and
• that whatever is done to change it starts with worker organization.

And not at all incompatible with the more orthodox outline of inevitable class conflict in  Zohran Mamdani's victory speech:

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Mamdani's socialism has inspired some violent reaction from some people (mostly Gen-Xers, I imagine) who directly identify, like the fictional Alex P. Keaton, with the bloodsucking bourgioisie; after Mamdani had said:

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

(which ought by rights to be about as controversial as Ronald Reagan announcing that it was morning in America, in fact it's practically the same thing),  I saw some unhinged corporate guy from NBC News reacting to the opening of Mamdani's speech with its stirring invocation of the spirit of Eugene V. Debs with real horror etched in his face, as if he'd seen somebody proposing to perform human sacrifices to Moloch.

But I haven't seen much awareness of Debs's role in American history as one of the most popular third-party politicians we've ever had (clearing 6% of the vote in 1912, the year Bull Moose Theodore Roosevelt got better than 27%), a proponent of expanded labor unions, public ownership of utilities, women's suffrage, and an end to child labor, among other things, characterized by Senator Bernard Sanders as "probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had". Not the importer of some abomination from Russia or China, but as absolutely American a figure as William Jennings Bryan, or Upton Sinclair, or Henry Wallace, whose cause may well have lost out, but who ought to retain our patriotic respect.

One of the weirdest things about the campaign was the continued professed shock at Mamdani's calling himself a "democratic socialist" and acknowledging his membership in the DSA, as if Bernard Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn't been doing the same thing ever since we met them, along with dozens more American politicians young and old from Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib to my own Rep. Jerry Nadler, from 35 in state and local offices in 2017 to over 250 today. Being a "democratic socialist" is not weird! 

But the word itself remains problematic, burdened perhaps by the horrible vicissitudes of its own history, like Sade's heroine Justine (whose subtitle was, remember, "The Misfortunes of Virtue"), from Utopian experimental communities, all inevitable failures, through science fiction thought experiments, through human disasters like the end of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris to the "scientific socialism" implemented in the USSR, in which it was supposed to represent an evolutionary phase on the physically ineluctable path from reality to communism, which obviously never came close to happening, to the self-parody of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". 

In 2021, I wrote a post on the need to rectify the name of socialism, in the following terms:

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean. At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism",

• the "capitalist" imaginary being the world in which all economic activity is performed by individuals—capitalists living off the buying and selling and rent of various things they own, property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, and workers who have nothing to sell but their labor—carrying on like an enormous anthill or machine for value creation, with no outside interference from (for example) a state,
• the "socialist" imaginary being the world in which the state, taken over by members of a vanguard workers' party, has seized all the property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, from the capitalists and administers it all really well, so that all the workers, instead of being left to penury and starvation, get paid a fair wage and have lots of time off to cultivate themselves morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and
• the "communist" imaginary being the world from which ownership has simply disappeared, leaving everybody to work just for the love of working and share the fruits of their labor with their friends and neighbors, forever and ever.

Note that this idea is no less unrealistic than the ideas of Milton Friedman (in which completely ejecting the state from economic management will turn the inequities of the anthill into its own kind of utopia where justice reigns automatically, dispensed by the marketplace magic, through the blind faith of the population), and a typical economist's idea, shaving off all the messy details of actual human life in favor of the cleanliness and beauty of a model. And the reality of socialist practice within the narrow definition has often meant a system that isn't administered well at all and makes things considerably worse (though as I always say don't forget those great industry-nationalizing nations France and Singapore), as bad as the outcome of an attempt at a pure market economy (Somalia or fictional Mahagonny).

Which is why I'm calling them "imaginaries", in a critical-sociology noun that I'm just trying to learn how to use. Because they have little to do with reality, which makes their usefulness questionable.

A broader and more useful concept is an older one, older than capitalism really, dating at least to the late 14th century and the activities of Father John Ball, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the presence of King Richard II at St. Albans, Kent, in 1381, for preaching, to the combatants in Wat Tyler's rebellion, that the division of the English into classes was contrary to the will of God:

When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and... servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord

Not, you see, that property should not exist, as in the communist model, but that it shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of one set of people and excluded from the other set, that it should be more equitably distributed across the society, socialized; not that everybody should be a serf but that everybody should be a lord, on a very modest scale—if not by the violent expedients Ball advocated,

"uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future"

then by some more comfortable method like politics (which, contrary to Clausewitz, is war continued by other means, not the other way around). That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done. That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done.

And that, in my view, is the socialism that Zohran Mamdani and Mikie Sherill may be said to share with the reasonably (not extravagantly) progressive-minded members of their party, DSA and not: that the practices of  capitalism do bad things to working people, and collective action can, and should, ameliorate them to a really meaningful degree.

The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

Rectification of Names: "Democracy"

 

Speaker's platform on the hill known as Pnyx in western Athens, photo via Wikpedia.

I think I may be guilty of having an original idea without noticing it, which is one of the pitfalls of being an amateur. Specifically, I've started using the word "democracy" in a somewhat different way from the way it's usually used, and it may have gotten a little more different than I intended. But it could also be an interesting case for the Rectification of Names, as I think Confucius intended that concept, if I could argue that my way of using the word is more useful than the various traditional ways—

Zi Lu said: “The monarch of the state of Wei wants you to govern the country, what is the first thing you plan on doing?” Confucius said: “First, it is necessary to rectify the names” (Zhu Xi, 1998, p. 498). 

According to Confucius, in order for society to be stable, everyone needs to do with the right name. Zhu Xi (1998) states that: If names are not correct, one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, and if one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, affairs cannot be managed successfully. If affairs cannot be managed successfully, rites and music will not be conducted. If rites and music are not conducted, punishments will not be suitable. And if punishments are not suitable, the common people will not know what to do. So, when the gentleman uses names, it is necessary to be able to speak so that people understand. If one can say it, one can definitely do it. A gentleman should not be careless with words” (Zhu Xi, 1998, pp. 498-499)

Yesterday, it was with reference to the invariable American conservative response when you complain that something they like (like the Electoral College) is undemocratic: "We're not a democracy, we're a constitutional republic."  

I guess what is clearly stupid about this argument is fairly well known, certainly to Dr. Google (who led me here): it's a specific reference to the passage in Federalist 14, by Madison, in which he explains that North America is too big for a democracy:

Hi, It's Stupid: The Last Post on Modern Monetary Theory

 

Statue from 2009 by the late William Fawke, in the Garden of Heroes and Villains, Warwickshire, via Ellen Herold's Pinterest.

Hi, it's Stupid to say Modern Monetary Theory is all wrong, but I just can't help myself.

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, the great Irish philosopher midway between Locke and Hume, argued brilliantly that things don't exist—I mean things, material objects, the out-there stuff we see and touch, in that you can have a perfectly coherent picture of the universe without them: all you need are minds, full of perceptions, and that's enough. Things corresponding to the perceptions don't have to be there. "Berkeley's system," says the Stanford Encyclopedia mildly,

while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.

Which made Dr. Samuel Johnson, the irascible lexicographer whose portrait serves as my avi, pretty mad. Because obviously the theory was revolting to his stolid English soul, but he didn't even know how to participate in the discussion. One day as he was leaving a church with his future biographer, James Boswell, they started chatting about it, Boswell observing that "though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." As they spoke, they passed a big stone along the path and Johnson turned to give it a powerful kick, no doubt hurting his foot: "Thus I refute it!" 

Meaning, more or less, GTFOOH, are you telling me this doesn't exist? Deze nutz!

This is my problem with so-called Modern Monetary Theory. 

Nil Nisi Bonum Department

 

Gerald Ford's chief of staff Don Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy Dick Cheney, 1975. Photo by Harvey Georges/AP, via The New York Times.

In defense of that vile reprobate Donald Rumsfeld, now on his final journey to whichever circle of Hell it is that houses those who believe their own parochial interests outweigh the suffering of millions, it is not at all true that he spoke incomprehensible gobbledygook in the way Sarah Jones suggests in her otherwise excellent farewell note in New York:

Iraq will be Rumsfeld’s legacy, with all of the lies, all of the torture, all of the killing. While many hands bear responsibility for such loss, two belonged to Rumsfeld, who had Saddam Hussein in his sights for years before 9/11 gave him the excuse he’d wanted to attack Iraq. Rumsfeld lived out the rest of his days with his impunity. His victims weren’t so lucky.

Rectification of Names: Socialism

 

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean.

At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism", 

Inaugural

 

Candle stand, 1830s, from the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing ("Shakers") of Mount Lebanon, New York, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I take the same general feeling from the inauguration festivities, watching TV all day, as so many of us, of immense relief and consolation, of reassurance that we have a working government again, with kind and caring and reasonably truthful people at its head, which doesn't mean they're going to fix everything but that we're back in a place from which it's possible to navigate. We all found ourselves in unexpected tears at one point or another, and for me one of the oddest points was that first normal press briefing in four years from Jen Psaki, State Department spox under Obama and now Biden's press secretary.

There's a concept from the British ordinary language philosopher Paul Grice of the four "conversational maxims" that make discourse possible: you must assume that your interlocutor will try to be informative, truthful, pertinent, and clear. These are things that you don't get from arguing with Gish-galloping conservative trolls, and we didn't get them from the communications of Trump or his official representatives, of course, and the freshness of Psaki, just being well-prepared, level-headed, on point, freely admitting to not knowing what she didn't know, and having no reason to lie about anything, seemed miraculous and somehow out of the nowhere, and it really did fill my eyes with tears. I think it's a kind of PTSD: like Londoners in the Blitz, we've been living disoriented and fearful from the constant bombardment of gaslighting language, and as welcome as the silence is it's filled with our own emotions, the ones we haven't been able to listen to for such a long time.

Perfect

 

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty, via Center for American Progress, December 1980.

A year or so ago Rectification Central was exercised about the meaning of the word "perfect" as in 

“It was a warm, friendly conversation,” he said, referring to his conversation with Zelensky. “There was no quid pro quo. There was nothing. It was a perfect conversation.”

In what sense was it "perfect"? Without fault or flaw? Is a quid pro quo an "imperfection" that you should avoid, if conversational perfection is your aim? If you're an artist of conversation, would perfection be the standard you aim at? Perfection in some particular aspect, or overall? Who says something like that, about a phone call, and what do they have in mind?

Anyway this morning somebody on NPR—I think it was my girl Nina Totenberg—gave me the clue to what Trump actually meant, by comparing it with the incitement speech Trump gave to the Capitol rioters before their rampage on 6 January, as he described it 

So if you read my speech --
and many people have done it,
and I've seen it both in the papers
and in the media, on television --
it's been analyzed, and people thought
that what I said was totally appropriate.
And if you look at what other people have said --
politicians at a high level -- about the riots
during the summer, the horrible riots in
Portland and Seattle, in various other --
other places, that was a real problem --
what they said. But they've analyzed
my speech and words and my final
paragraph, final sentence and everybody,
to the T, thought it was totally appropriate.

(The theme in the middle section there is the official bothsides line with which the Republicans have approached the achievement, according to which the looting that took place on the edges of the Black Lives Matter marches in Minneapolis and New York in the first days after the murder of George Floyd and the occasional trash fires around the federal courthouse in Portland. were exactly the same as the murderous assault on the Capitol building—"you got to go to the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM," said Louie Gohmert on 1 January—though if you don't recall Governor Kate Brown advising anti-fascist agitators to march down to the courthouse, telling them "if you don't fight like hell you don't have a country any more," I think your memory is accurate.)

Whoever it was said it was "a perfect speech", the way the Zelenskyy call was "a perfect conversation", and I realized he meant he thought it was unindictable—that he'd delivered his illicit message with such perfect subtlety that the cops would never be able to finger him for it, with the majesty of Don Vito and his perfect quid pro quo message

Area Republican: "Donald Trump never even mentioned violence!"

Don Vito Corleone: "I just made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 13, 2021

That he'd committed the perfect crime. He hoped.

Hi, It's Stupid: Weekend Sedition

Hi, it's Stupid to say you should stop calling it "sedition".

Because what other word would you use to describe what does appear to be an attempt, on the part of a lot of Republicans, to subvert the Constitutional order, overturn our two-and-a-third-century tradition of building electoral democracy, and install some kind of emergency dictatorship, half-assed and certain to fail, but ominous in the lesson it seems to be drawing for that very big minority of discontented white people who are unhappy about the way the presidential vote turned out in November, the ones who "feel disenfranchised", that they don't have to put up with electoral democracy—that they can demand minority rule if they feel like it and, if they get enough shady lawyers and thugbois on the case, maybe one day succeed? How is that not sedition?

Dr. Google's first suggestion, credited to Oxford Language.

Well, in the first place because it's not, in those simple terms. It's not "against the authority of a state or monarch". It's on behalf of it, in favor of the desires of the pseudo-monarch who is in power and his party, currently in control of half the legislature, against a regime or administration that doesn't exist yet, to stop it from being born, and only secondarily against the constitutional authority that guarantees this regular succession.

What does "imminent" mean?

Update below

To the tune of:



(Isaac Cole Powell in the incoming Broadway revival of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.)

“There is no doubt that there were a series
of imminent attacks that were being plotted
by Soleimani. We don’t know precisely when
and we don’t know precisely where but this
was real”--Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

That's so darn imminent,
might already have been sent!
How would you know?
But whenever when it is,
then it is
ready to go!

Over here, over there,
that thing could be anywhere—
past the next bluff!
Or if it's some other hill
there it will
be close enough!

You can't predict it!
You cannot say precisely!
This imminence is nicely
unclear—

Is it real? Sure it is!
If it's not that's just show biz,
I am no fool.
When I called it imminent
I just meant
it would be cool.

It's really scary
and very military,
who knows?
I have just one reply:
we have got to kill that guy!
Maybe tonight.
Maybe tonight.
Maybe tonight.

Update

Pompeo clarifying his working logic here:

POMPEO: “Saying we didn’t know where and when the attacks would happen but also saying they were imminent and would‘ve targeted our embassy are consistent thoughts.”

These guys are so caught in their web of lies it’s actually fascinating to watch. pic.twitter.com/QWISa2gNml

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) January 10, 2020

Trump was apparently pretty clear in private about what his motivations for the strike on Soleimani were:

The way the strike was handled has drawn scrutiny from Democrats and some Republicans. Critics say the decision was hasty, considering the risk of all-out war. They also question whether the intelligence that prompted the action was as clear-cut and alarming as the White House has said, and see the move as doing little to further U.S. interests in the region.

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said. (PoliticusUSA picking up on a buried lede from Wall Street Journal)

He killed a man because he thought it might help corrupt his jurors.

People Against Populism

The "populist" Maximilien Robespierre, in a contemporary cartoon, via The New Statesman, July 2017.

What accounts for the following"?

Crowds are chanting “Death to Khamenei” in Iran while the regime kills them en masse and shuts down the internet. Throngs are marching to preserve democratic rights in Hong Kong, Warsaw, Budapest, Istanbul and Moscow. The masses are angry in Pakistan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia and toppling leaders in Lebanon and Bolivia.

David Brooks has an important idea, naturally ("The Revolt Against Populism"):

Then there's the trope of maddening indirection

Drawing via Corner Poetry.

The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday weighed in on the friction between a group of four freshman Democratic congresswomen and Speaker Nancy Pelosi: He suggested that the congresswomen — none of whom are white — should “go back and help fix” the countries they came from. His message was immediately seized upon by Democrats, who called it a racist trope.

Trope? Reader, Democrats did not call it a trope of any kind. Speaker Pelosi said it was "xenophobic"

I reject @realDonaldTrump’s xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation. Rather than attack Members of Congress, he should work with us for humane immigration policy that reflects American values. Stop the raids - #FamiliesBelongTogether!

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019

and Ben Ray Luján said it was "racist":

“That is a racist tweet,” Mr. Luján said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Telling people to go back where they came from — these are American citizens elected by voters in the United States of America to serve in one of the distinguished bodies in the U.S. House of Representatives. I think that’s wrong.”

And Ted Lieu has called him "a racist ass". What I say is

"trope". In addition to the rhetorical figures of metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, etc., there's this new trope called "saying exactly what you mean". Hope it catches on. https://t.co/Q8UEuErpLJ

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 14, 2019

Rectification: Roundups

While we've been talking about the correct use of the term "concentration camp" to describe the Customs and Border Patrol encampments at the Mexican border to hold thousands of people in illegal detention in unsafe and unsanitary conditions for weeks and months at a time (including children, who are required by law to be released within 72 hours), blogfriend Bethesda 1971 has been musing at Daily Kos on another word, "roundup", to refer to planned ICE activities across the country:

President Donald Trump said Monday that U.S. immigration officials will start raids after July 4 as part of a nationwide roundup of undocumented immigrants.  Bloomberg, July 1, 2019.

Trump says immigration roundup will start next week. Reuters, June 18, 2019.

Trump administration plans unprecedented roundup of 2,000 family members in deportation raids. ABC, June 22, 2019.

This has a Shoah pedigree too, as in one famous roundup in Vichy France, from July 1942:

Over 11,000 Jews were arrested on the same day, and confined to the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, in Paris. The detainees were kept in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water, food and sanitary facilities. Within a week the number of Jews held in the Vel’ d’Hiv had reached 13,000, among them more than 4,000 children. Children between the ages of two and 16 were arrested together with their parents. Among those detained were Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. .  .  .  .In the week following the arrests, the Jews were taken from the Winter Stadium to the concentration camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret region south of Paris, and to Drancy, near Paris. At the end of July and the beginning of August, the Jews who were being detained in these camps were separated from their children and deported.

Of course they weren't being deported to misery and lethal danger in the Central American Northern Triangle but to certain death in Auschwitz and other death camps, but the similarities are otherwise pretty striking. And yet we use the word "roundup" without a second thought. Anyway you should read the whole piece, linked above.

For the Record: A Little Joke

Via somebody's Pinterest.

Gunga Dinesh leapt to the defense of Emperor Trump for calling himself a nationalist:

You can't say he's using the word the way Ho Chi Minh used it. Ho demanded colonial powers let the Vietnamese govern themselves. Trump invites Russian, Israeli, and Saudi regimes to tell him what to do.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 23, 2018

It's a question, I guess, of "nationalist" as opposed to what? Ho was a nationalist for Vietnam as opposed to imperialist water-carrier for the French or the Americans, or the Chinese for that matter (who had fought to control Vietnam for a thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the Song, before they finally conceded defeat). Gunga Dinesh is an imperialist water-carrier for the British, that's why I like to call him that, when he talks about the Raj or East Africa. Dinesh isn't a nationalist with respect to India, though he may be a nationalist with respect to his adopted USA.

Ho, and Castro, also sometimes called themselves "nationalists" in opposition to "communists", when they were explaining their positions to a certain type of friendly Westerner at certain points in their careers. "No, no, he's just a nationalist. Go away, Mr. Quiet American." In this, I'm sorry to say, they were lying, though not without some justification.

Practical rectification

Emin Milli was one of the Azerbaijani bloggers who mocked the government in 2009 for spending $180,000 to import 15 donkeys from Turkey—not that Azerbaijan  was suffering from any shortage of donkeys, but these were just—I don't know, more Presidential? The story is told in English by Ali Novruzov here. Milli and his fellow blogger Adnan Hajizade made a glorious film of a really ritzy, Vivaldi-playing donkey giving a press conference to let everyone know how much it's enjoying Azerbaijan hospitality.

For this bloodthirsty demagoguery they were given two and a half and two years in jail respectively, and were released a bit early in November 2010.

Milli is still writing, including this for PEN Atlas:

how is it possible to make the whole nation believe that words do not really matter, that they are empty and meaningless? How is it possible? Well, it is possible when people who present themselves or are presented to a society as masters of words, written or spoken, shapers of forms and meanings of the words, start to use the words as barriers behind which they hide their cowardice, venality and hypocrisy.

To corrupt the whole of society the regime decided to corrupt words first, to deprive them of their true meaning. Corrupt authoritarianism needs words to lose their meaning. But the victory of corruption here is only temporary. It is temporary because we always have rebels who believe that words are not dead and who bring the words back to life by standing behind them and often suffering the consequences....

One of those courageous people is Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova. She started to investigate and write about businesses owned by the family of the president in Azerbaijan and around the world. Of course, she had to be punished for writing the truth and exposing the regime. It was decided that her private life would be exposed in order to tarnish her reputation and to provoke “natural” attacks on her. The regime planted a hidden camera in her bedroom. Her relatives received the incriminating photos of her with her boyfriend. When she refused to be silenced, a video of her and her boyfriend was put online. The official newspaper of the ruling party started to accuse her of lax morals hinting at the video with its intimate content available online.

 The end of the story may not be what you expected:

The most conservative religious circles issued a statement in her support praising her courage in exposing the lies and corruption of the ruling elite. Everyone was appalled and even those who usually remain silent and live in fear, spoke up against such an immoral attack against a powerless woman. The government suddenly formally condemned “this crime” despite the prosecutor’s office ignoring Khadija’s officially lodged complaint for several days. The video was not shown on any television in Azerbaijan during prime time, something that had happened before with other journalists and unfortunately had silenced them.

You can follow up on Khadija Ismayilova's case here.

Photo by Rövşən lbrahimov.

Federalism and "Federalism"

Cadenette wig. From Probert Encyclopedia.

This is a Rectification issue that makes me really crazy; today's trigger is a perfectly goodhearted and well-written and useful Kos diary by DemFromCt on the Great Contraception Crisis story that happens to quote a Republicanish opinion piece by one Alan Weil in the New England Journal of Medicine to the effect that

Under the principles of federalism that have guided the development and implementation of policy in this country since it was founded, there are three potential benefits associated with permitting states to make these decisions with respect to the EHBs...

And then DemFromCt goes on to use "federalism" in this sense through the rest of the piece. Which is by no means an unusual occurrence.

But it isn't right. The word "federalism" as it was used by the Founding Fathers who [jump]

Freedom of independence!

Album cover by Micah Buzan.

I just want to keep savoring that bit of word salad for a while as created in a collaborative effort by Rick Santorum, reporter Michael D. Shear, and a shamefully inattentive Times copy editor:

“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.” [In fact, as noted in the previous post, the Times report is incorrect: Santorum said "freedom of religion", not "freedom of liberty".]

In the first place, if "it" is the government proposal for having health insurance plans cover contraception, exactly how is it not about contraception but is about freedom of speech?

Is it a new definition of speech, like the way in Buckley v. Valeo money is speech, [jump]

Ron Paul is no sodomechthriac

Update below the fold

Poor Ron Paul has been taking a lot of heat because of the former campaign staffer who claims that the candidate is not homophobic, even though he is afraid to shake hands with gay men, or to use their bathrooms.

Of course he clearly is a homophobe by any etymologically rational definition of the term--composed out of homo- (ὁμο) (short for the modern Greco-Roman bastard term homosexual) and phobos (φόβος) (Ancient Greek for "fear"). That is, he is scared to death of gay people. He may love them all personally, as his Savior commands, and respect their right to Do It any way they like, as a true libertarian must, but he fears that something really bad will happen to him if he touches one of them, or something that one of them has sat upon. Not the same thing at all. Similarly [see below the jump]...

 If you are chiefly worried about homophobia, you might find this song pretty offensive, with its rank stereotyping and reference to old spouses' tales. If it's sodomechthria that concerns you, you may like it anyway.