The Trump-Johnson deal-making dilemma

How can the leaders of two nations who are both inveterate and known liars and backstabbers negotiate a workable deal? It is hard to make a deal if you think the other party will renege on it at the first opportunity, even to the extent of not honoring any commitment that they themselves publicly make in the negotiations.

We may soon find out.

New British prime minister Boris Johnson has been described as dissembling, dishonest, dark, and duplicitous, qualities that he shares with Donald Trump. So while there may well be a genuine ‘special relationship’ between the two of them as individuals, I am curious about how they will arrive at deals since neither party can be trusted an inch to negotiate in good faith.
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Here we go again, on an endless loop of mass murder

We have two separate back-to-back mass shootings to contend with. One in El Paso, Texas where 20 people were killed and more than two dozen injured and the shooter has been captured. The other in Dayton, Ohio where nine people plus the shooter were killed and another 26 injured. The killers both used rapid-fire assault weapons that enabled them to reach this high toll in just minutes.
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The indignities that pregnant women face

There are many stories of people being mortified when they ask someone, even someone they know, whom they think is pregnant how far along they are only to discover that the person is not pregnant at all. But women say that they have been astonished at how the visible signs of their pregnancy seem to give total strangers the impression that they have license to make personal remarks and give advice. Someone named Jax tweeted her response when some officious stranger gave her unsolicited and unwelcome advice.

Her tweet prompted a lot of responses from other women recounting their own experiences and how strange it was to suddenly find people thinking that their bodies were now communal property.

It is not just pregnancy. I have a friend whose chemotherapy resulted in hair loss, a common side effect. She described how a strange woman at a store asked her if she had had breast cancer and a mastectomy and my friend did not rebuff her but answered yes. She was astonished when the woman then asked her which breast had been removed! That was too much even for my always courteous friend.

It s weird how some people cannot recognize personal boundaries.

Long term flooding

When one thinks of floods, one thinks of a disaster that lasts for a short time. Heavy rains or hurricanes or snowmelt causes a rise in the levels of rivers that overwhelm their banks and levees or the sewer and other drainage systems. But although the damage caused can be great and long lasting, the water usually subsides fairly quickly.

But this year, there have been parts of the US where people have not seen the ground for six months because the floods have stuck around.

Compounding the problem was a high Mississippi River, which remained near or above flood stage for the longest span since 1927. The perfect storm of historic rainfall and a high river resulted in a backwater flood that has lingered beyond anything the region has ever seen.

Only within with the past couple weeks has the water receded, and for the first time in nearly half a year, farmers are finally beginning to see their land re-emerge.

Imagine seeing something like this for six months.

Farmland in the lower Mississippi delta remains submerged in floodwater. Photograph by Rory Doyle/The Guardian

It is surprising that this phenomenon is not getting wider coverage. I had heard about widespread flooding but assumed that it was in different regions at different times. I had not been aware that some places seem to be under permanent floods.

Who are the ‘working classes’?

In my post yesterday, I quoted Michael Moore saying that nowadays 70% of the working class consists largely of women, people of color, and people between the ages of 18-35. He seemed to equate ‘working class’ with lower income workers. In a comment drken said, ” I always thought “working class” meant middle and lower-middle class people. They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re not impoverished.”

It is clear that there is no unanimity regarding the terminology to use since there are three factors that are being considered and they cut across each other: income level, nature of work, and attitude. When it comes to income classes, one can quantify the levels in terms of quintiles. Starting with lower income class, one goes up to lower middle, then middle, then upper middle, to finally upper income class. But the other two categories are not that easy to discriminate between.
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Michael Moore shreds the image of who makes up the working class now

Politicians love to talk about how they support the working class, the people who are seen as the backbone of any nation, the ones who keep things going. But if one has a mental image of the working class, it might be that of a middle-aged, white man working in a factory or on a farm who is in the middle-income bracket, definitely not wealthy but not poor either. It is this demographic that is much sought after by politicians, and it is their supposed steady defection from the Democratic party to the Republicans, a process accelerated by Donald Trump, that is blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016.
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Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault

Via Aeon I came across this fascinating excerpt of a conversation held in 1971 between these two highly influential thinkers about social and political power structures and what we might seek to achieve through them.

From the Aeon description of the exchange:

In 1971, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault met at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands for their first and only debate. Produced by the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation as a part of their International Philosophers Project, the programme featured discussions with eminent thinkers on the topic of ‘human nature and ideal society’. In recent years, their debate – the fourth and final of the series – has been somewhat overshadowed by events surrounding it. Namely, it’s rumoured that the programme’s host, the Dutch philosopher Fons Elders, paid Foucault for his appearance in hashish, and repeatedly encouraged him to put on a bright red wig to spice up the proceedings.

However, the debate itself – seen here excerpted and translated by the YouTube channel Philosophy Overdose – has appeal beyond the pleasures of watching the provocative Foucault spar with the professorial Chomsky. With the Vietnam War near its height, Chomsky and Foucault agree that contemporary power structures need to be attacked and dismantled. However, while Chomsky advocates for a system of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ rooted in justice, sympathy and human creativity, Foucault argues that these concepts are products of the same bourgeois system that needs replacing. Probing age-old philosophical questions as well as the politics of the moment, the interview offers a revealing glimpse of the divergent styles, attitudes and outlooks of two enduringly influential thinkers.

The weird Marianne Williamson boomlet

When I was scanning the news headlines after the first night of the Democratic debate, I was surprised to see several mention Marianne Williamson as having done something noteworthy, apparently by saying that Donald Trump could not be defeated by wonky policy proposals because he can harness dark psychic forces or something. She had a similar moment after the first round of debates last month. Of course, since she eschews policy wonkiness in general and is apparently some kind of spiritual guru, this psychic forces terrain is something that she would relish campaigning on.
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The second Democratic debate

Once again, I did not have time to watch the second night of the Democratic primary debate. To be quite honest, there was really nobody on the stage last night that I was particularly interested in, except for Julian Castro whom I’d like to learn more about. The top three in the polls of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker tend to leave me cold. I see them all as party establishment candidates, with Biden and Harris having very problematic records as well, while it is not clear exactly what Booker stands for. Booker strikes me as a charismatic, highly skilled and ambitious politician but one who will be too willing to accommodate powerful interests.
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