Sometimes people who get frustrated by deep injustices in democratic societies seem to give up on their governments doing the right thing and start to consider the possibility of violent revolution as the only way to get any meaningful change. Andrew Marantz writes about an empirical study by Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, to try and address empirically the question of which kind of effort, mass civil rights struggle or revolution, is more likely to produce the results sought.
[Read more…]

It has long been clear that the Republican party in Congress, aided by some in the Democratic party, has a straightforward strategy: Block everything that does not provide benefits to the ruling class. By creating gridlock and impasses at every turn, they have sought to give the impression that government is useless. This is part of their greater strategy of creating a sense of voter apathy among the less affluent so that they will wash their hands of government and thus be less likely to vote.

In the August 16, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand writes that given the chance, government can do many things that are of great benefit to many people and he points to a two-year window that demonstrates this.
[Read more…]

The massive statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee that existed in the former confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia has come to an ignominious end, removed from its pedestal on a prominent part of the city, cut up into pieces, and hauled away and placed in a storage unit.

A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond for generations was taken down, cut into pieces and hauled away Wednesday, as the former capital of the Confederacy erased the last of the Civil War figures that once defined its most prominent thoroughfare.

Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.
[Read more…]

I have been thinking about the incident in which a passenger viciously attacked a flight attendant who had told her to buckle up and put her tray away since the plane had not yet docked at the gate. This was just one of a large number of such attacks that flight attendants have been subjected to in the last year.

I posed the question as to why people exploded in rage like this but did not really answer it. I initially put this phenomenon down to the pent-up frustrations that people have these days because of the confinements caused by the pandemic. But on reflection, I think it runs deeper than that and is a manifestation of class attitudes that is a relic of feudalism
[Read more…]