Putting people in solitary confinement for extended periods is recognized to be a form of torture. So what does it say about us that in the state of Illinois, school districts have been using this form of punishment as disciplinary measures for decades, even with very young children, though giving them benign-sounding euphemisms. ProPublica investigated these practices and issued a damning report.
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Neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol is wrong about pretty much everything and this tweet from him should give the rest of us a good idea of whom NOT to support in the Democratic primary.
I very much prefer Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg or Klobuchar to Warren. But the idea that one term of Warren would pose anything like the threat of a second term for Trump to the basic norms and institutions of our liberal democracy, including to free markets, is laughable.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 25, 2019
So that rules out Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomber, and Klobuchar. The fact that he gives a lukewarm endorsement of Elizabeth Warren should make her pause to try and understand where she is going wrong.
I think it is safe to say that, by omission, Kristol hates Bernie Sanders and that should be taken as a very good sign for Bernie.
Tom Tomorrow has some thoughts on this.
These two Pearls Before Swine cartoon strips caught my attention because they were slightly more extreme representations of me.
I too do not find large parties very congenial and sometimes end up wishing I could find a good book instead.
While I am not as bad as Rat, it is the case that I can find social interactions, even with people I really like, exhausting. The difference is that after a couple of hours, I tend to fade out somewhat and seek to leave, rather than becoming hostile.
The internet is under siege, its initial promise of providing free global access to everyone on a level playing field under attack from governments, big businesses, and secretive, anti-democratic forces. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the key creators of the World Wide Web, has been involved in a consortium that has come up with proposed measures to save the internet in a document titled Contract for the Web.
He discusses the plan in an interview.
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I saw this film yesterday that is based on real events and found it to be very gripping. It stars Adam Driver as Daniel Jones, a member of Senator Diane Feinstein’s staff, who was assigned by her to investigate reports of torture by the CIA. Despite the fact that the CIA refused to cooperate with him, over five years he and a small team painstakingly built up a dossier of all the illegal and immoral actions and war crimes that were committed under the justification of ‘keeping us safe’. They produced a comprehensive torture report that the CIA and the White House of Bush and Obama tried to avoid releasing.
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James Baillie, a professor of philosophy, looks at why people struggle so much to accept the fact of death even though they know it is inevitable. He starts by looking at a passage from The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) by Leo Tolstoy.
The syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic – ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal’ – had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but by no means to himself. That man Caius represented man in the abstract, and so the reasoning was perfectly sound; but he was not Caius, not an abstract man; he had always been a creature quite, quite distinct from all the others.
Baillie says this cognitive split described by Tolstoy arises because we see the world from both an ‘outside view’ and an ‘inside view’.
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It has been noted in many places that the Democratic debate held last Wednesday was the first to feature all female moderators. Unfortunately, Sarah Lazare writes, rather than being a victory for feminism, this did not lead to ay improvements in the nature of the questioning.
The idea that women’s representation in itself — regardless of who those women are — is a boon to women everywhere is hardly new to US political discourse. But what makes the fawning over the November 20 debate particularly tone-deaf is that the moderators’ questions were both inane and right-wing. Their inquiries were almost entirely premised on defending the benevolence of US empire, marginalizing political positions deemed too far left, and asking “gotcha” questions from the right on issues from health care to immigration. Trapped within these ideological constraints, the debate actually struck a blow against feminism — and was a blessing to the forces of chauvinism and austerity.
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Metaphors can be great things. But at some point, you have to stop dragging it out and return to the reality, something that this coach of a rugby team after they lost a match seems unable to do.
This rugby interview is one of the best sports interviews I’ve seen, as it keeps getting delightfully weirder as it goes on. pic.twitter.com/6ua2P5FxET
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 21, 2019
American actor Rob Delaney has experienced both the private American health care system and the British government-run National Health Service (NHS) and says that there is no comparison. He describes the NHSas “the pinnacle of human achievement”. He says that it would be crazy to vote for Boris Johnson and the Conservatives because after they get Brexit they would break up and sell the NHS to the private sector as the price of getting a trade deal with the US to make up for the losses of no longer being part of the EU.
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Leonardo Flores writes that all manner of reactionary forces were behind the coup that overthrew Bolivian president Evo Morales and they are now targeting the rights of the indigenous people of whom Morales was one as well as members of his party MAS (Movement Towards Socialism).
[Morales’] resignation has yet to take effect, as it must be approved by the legislature. This did not stop opposition party member Jeanine Añez, the senate’s second vice president, from declaring herself interim president, further proving that what’s happened is a coup.
MAS legislators, who have a majority in both chambers, have been unable to attend parliamentary sessions as security forces have not guaranteed their safety.
…Currently, indigenous and labor movements are on the streets in several Bolivian cities, demanding that President Morales be reinstated.
…Meanwhile, police forces are ripping the Wiphala flag, a symbol that represents the indigenous peoples of the Andes, from their uniforms and from government buildings.
…Coup leader Luis Camacho entered the government palace with a Bolivian flag and a bible; upon leaving, one of his supporters, a Christian pastor, declared that “Pachamama will never return to the palace… Bolivia belongs to Christ.” (Pachamama is an Andean goddess representing Mother Earth.)
The coup and its aftermath are not just a rejection of President Morales, but of Bolivia’s indigenous majority and the social gains of the last 13 years.