Neither does right wing chutzpah: The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature. Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed. On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.” One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon.
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The recent Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the FDA’s approval of mifepristone presents itself—in...
If you have any question as to whether DeSantis is fit to be president of the United States, his decision to hire this man should answer it. He either did it because he actually believes that the COVID vaccines are dangerous, which makes him a moron or he did it out of a cynical desire to appeal to anti-vax voters. Either way, it was a disgraceful decision and should disqualify him from ever having higher office of any kind: Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document. Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.
Peter Dutton’s number two, Sussan Ley, has called on the Albanese Government to allow a third option for the upcoming Voice referendum so voter’s can vote yess. ”Why should the Australian public be forced to choose between yes and no... Read More ›
— Blessed Be the Name of the Market? On the intellectual origins of market society and how the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith became an icon of American capitalism. A recorded conversation between Glory M. Liu, Jacob Soll, and Brad DeLong. The discussion builds on Liu’s new book Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became […]
In what is an important reflection on the political stakes for wider Marxist Feminist theory, Cinzia Arruzza has counselled against the fashionable conflation of racial and patriarchy oppressions within capitalism. Asserting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class is simply not enough in attempting to unpack such oppressions as features of capitalism. Equally an emphasis on relationality can become bland without the capacity to decide on where a relation begins or ends. Significant logical and historical questions can then arise. Is gender oppression a structurally necessary feature of capitalism? Is discrimination based on race in-built into the reproduction of racial capitalism? These are knotty issues that come to prominence and utility when assessing Nancy Fraser’s new book Cannibal Capitalism, the latest text completed in the Past & Present Reading Group.
The post Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Speaking of fascism, TNR made a handy list of “the 10 most fascist things Fox’s top host said on air”: 1. He has promoted the “great replacement theory.” Carlson has repeatedly pushed the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” He has argued that Democrats want to replace white people so they can control the country. 2. He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad. 3. He said the desire to procreate has been “subverted” by birth control and abortion. 4. He complained about “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.” Carlson has insisted that masculinity is supposedly on the decline in the United States. While both the theory and his suggested solution—tan your testicles—are ridiculous, they stem from a right-wing belief that attacks on masculinity upset the social order. 5. He said white supremacy is not a real problem. 6.
This essential substance has a history—and future—that’s far from clear.
The post The Strange Life of Glass appeared first on Nautilus.
Leaked documents reveal the GOP megadonor held dual citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis as he lavished the Supreme Court justice with gifts.
The post Clarence Thomas Billionaire Benefactor Harlan Crow Bought Citizenship in Island Tax Haven appeared first on The Intercept.
The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted. Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Continue reading »
The kind of strategic study Australia needs, to preside over this kind of defence staff college scribble, is one which gives a sense of our civil society’s capacities, needs, aspirations — and our neighbourhood. The Flippingbook is an entirely inappropriate, narrow minded, chauvinistic, militaristic thing that belongs in a country practising for fascism, the submergence Continue reading »
The Albanese government wouldn’t be able buy nuclear attack submarines from the US without agreeing to let them keep performing all their core roles in our region. One key role is to follow Chinese nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines to be in a position to sink them if a US president wants to launch a nuclear Continue reading »
Failure to adequately tax mining super profits has greatly damaged the Australian economy. Living standards have stagnated in the last decade or so, while inequality has increased. This article argues that the two are related and that the concentration of profit growth in the mining sector is an obvious reason why the increase in inequality Continue reading »
Anthony Albanese has in essence reversed the Howard Government’s 2001 changes to rules around NZ citizens living in Australia and their access to Australian citizenship. For such a major change, it is surprising it will be brought in quickly from 1 July 2023. Usually, major immigration policy changes take at least 9-12 months to design Continue reading »
The new NSW Government is riding its luck with quiet little piecemeal reviews of Sydney transport crises. Transport challenge A recent post pointed to formidable transport challenges facing Labor if it took office after the NSW election. It said the best, perhaps only, chance was a tough public inquiry into transport, as recommended by John Continue reading »
In a positive development, the University of Adelaide has rejected the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, because to adopt it would have been potentially counter to “the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech”, according to the University Council. This topic has been addressed twice in Pearls and Irritations over the Continue reading »
An invitation to visit Beijing was issued late last year to Stephen Chow, Sau-yan, the Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong. His recently completed visit is the first by a Catholic Bishop of Hong Kong to the Mainland since the recovery of Hong Kong by China in July, 1997. It may help provide a strengthened framework Continue reading »
I get emails and letters from right wingers fairly frequently and they’re mostly insulting rants against me personally. (I get some of those from the left too. This one I thought was interesting because he doesn’t call me any names and seems to be so earnest. You can see the extent of the brainwashing: I don’t think I need to tell you that virtually everything he says is not true. Nobody is supportive of abortion”up to the minute of birth and after birth.” That’s just not on the agenda and nobody is doing that. Children are not deciding to “attempt to change their sex.” That’s not legal. Their parents are making these decisions on their behalf in consultation with experts and doctors. The seriousness of crimes in our cities is vastly overstated and the three cities he mentions aren’t even in the top ten. There is much more gun violence in red states than blue states. And I suppose it’s irritating that people get shouted down on college campuses but I wouldn’t call it fascist. (At least not in comparison to storming the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power…) He seems like a decent person.
Whatever Jack Teixeira’s motives, he's accused of sharing documents that have underpinned major stories in the same outlets that helped hunt him down.
The post With Pentagon Leak, the Press Had Their Source and Ate Him Too appeared first on The Intercept.
Hey, just so you know, Andrew’s coming tonight. Before he gets here, we should probably go over a few things about him.
Andrew is a bit of an enigma. He’s not someone you can “take at face value.” He never really got over the 2000 presidential election, if you know what I mean. Now’s a good time to google that.
Honestly, to understand Andrew, you have to meet his dad. But to understand his dad, you have to meet Andrew’s uncle. Not his dad’s brother—his mom’s brother. Andrew’s dad hates that guy. That hatred informs his worldview.
To understand Andrew, you have to have known him at Brown. If you didn’t get into Brown, it might suffice to have gone to a school in a bordering state. But not in Connecticut. And definitely not MIT. Andrew is anti-everyone in STEM. I recently switched career paths from my gig at SpaceX when he seemed provoked by my employment there—I’ve always wanted to try and hack it as a busker anyway.