From the NYT: [nyt] January 2005
ATLANTA, Jan. 1 – Donald L. Hollowell, a prominent Atlanta civil rights lawyer who played a part in a number of leading Georgia desegregation cases and later became an official of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, died here on Monday. He was 87.
The cause was heart failure, his family said.
I wrote a piece back in November of last year, about “Inner Dynamics of Revolutions.” [stderr] And, as I watch the news today, I realize I was being much too oblique. So, let me try again; warning, I’m going to talk about current US politics.
Caine posted a bit about The Talk [affinity]. If you don’t want your day tainted by anger now is a good time to stop reading. This piece is going to start cheefully enough but end as dark as you can get.
This is from a 1947 film made by the War Department, to teach people how to detect and avoid fascism.
New Orleans’ statue of Jefferson Davis was finally taken down. And there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Davis is more popular with today’s racist fringe than he ever was when he was president of the racist fringe.
The idea that you can tell things about a person from their appearance underlies the entire point of dressing up, wearing make-up, and being concerned with our appearance. There are probably some things you might be able to assume from a person’s looks, but it’s still going to be pretty unreliable: you can’t tell someone’s a terrorist because they “look muslim” because “looking muslim” is a vague concept to begin with.
What about people who look like criminals?
The FBI and the US attorney’s office have also joined the investigation as authorities work to determine if it was a hate crime.
In my recent post “Nationalism Is A Lie” there was so much horror behind what I wrote, that I was either going to have to write a textbook-length incoherent screed,* or leave a lot on the table. So I thought that rather than diverticulating into asides, I’d post this piece separately.
Trigger warning: really horrible people doing really horrible things, with a walk-on by the Roman Catholic Church
From “Applied Eugenics” by Paul Popenoe, 1918 (MacMillan)
The United States birth-rate may, on its face, appear high enough; but its face does not show that this height is due largely to the fecundity of immigrant women. Statistics to prove this are given in Chapter XIII, but may be supplemented here by some figures from Pittsburgh.
I have added a new category to Stderr blog: “Genocide”
I’ve added two more books to the recommended books list. (Stderr recommended book policy)