John Q

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

In comments on a previous post, Thomas Beale takes exception to a statement by Ibram X Kendl (about whom I know nothing) that “The opposite of racist isn’t “not racist”. It is “anti-racist”.”

It occurred to me that, the opposite of “anti-racist” isn’t “racist” but “anti-anti-racist”

That raised some interesting thoughts for me. The construction “anti” doesn’t function like a negative sign in standard mathematics. It was first (AFAIK) used in “anti-anti-communist” to refer (mostly pejoratively) to those who thought that anti-communists like McCarthy and Nixon posed a greater threat to the US than did (domestic) communists.

Is there a tenable position that is non-racist without being anti-anti-racist. It’s not a logical impossibility – for example, I am neither pro-Nickelback, nor anti-Nickelback, nor anti-anti-Nickelback – but it’s hard to see how it could be sustained in the current state of US or Australian politics. Certainly, the critics of CRT come across much more as anti-anti-racist than as non-racist.

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

Over the fold a piece I wrote on the Critical Race Theory panic. I took my time and I think everything has been said by now, but readers might like to discuss it anyway. There’s an earlier version here

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While we are talking about tangentially religious topics, it might be fun to look at the question of Boris Johnson’s nuptials. It’s been stated in seemingly authoritative terms that it was OK for the twice-divorced Johnson to be married in a Catholic ceremony, because his previous marriages were outside the church.

My knowledge of this question comes from the TV version of Brideshead Revisited[1], where a minor character, engaged to a Catholic, jumps through all sorts of hoops to convert to Catholicism, then discovers that he is disqualified by a previous divorce, arising from a non-Catholic marriage.

Things have loosened up quite a bit since Evelyn Waugh was around, so I thought these rules might have changed. But it seems clear that this is not the case. The central point is that the Catholic Church accepts non-Catholics marriages as valid, in the absence of the conditions that would justify an annulment. Indeed, if it was the actual teaching of the Church that all married non-Catholics were living in sin, we would probably have heard about it before now.

Where does this leave Boris, and the Church? I Am Not A Canon Lawyer, but my guess is that, even if the marriage was contrary to church law, it would still be valid and binding. But it certainly seems that the great and powerful get special treatment from the Church, as they always have done.

Not always favorable treatment, however. It looks as if Joe Biden may be singled out from millions of other pro-choice Catholics for exclusion from Catholic communion. That would set an interesting precedent.

fn1. I read the book first, but I remember this episode from the TV series

As with the centre-left in other countries, there’s lots of concern in the Australian Labor part about the perceived loss of its traditional working class base. I’ve written a piece in Crikey,reproduced over the fold, arguing that this is mostly misconceived. Lots of Oz-specific stuff, but I think most readers should be able to follow the thread. Interested in comparisons with similar debates in other countries.

In a case of l’esprit de l’escalier, I just worked out the perfect parenthetical addition to this piece that was published in Inside Story, responding to a string of pro-natalist pieces in the New York Times and elsewhere. The central point is that the economic model in which strong young workers support elderly retirees is outdated and will only become more so.

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Unsurprisingly, the forced grounding of an airliner flying over Belarus, and the arrest of a critical journalist on board has provoked a burst of whataboutery from Russia and a reciprocal round of ‘false equivalence’ from the West.

The parallel case is that of the forced landing of the Bolivian presidential plane, with President Evo Morales on board, on the basis of the false suspicion that it was also carrying Edward Snowden. The grounding, at the behest of the Obama Administration, was carried out by European governments (France, Spain, Portugal and Italy) which refused to allow the plane transit through their air space. Faced with the risk of running out of fuel, the plane landed in Austria, and was eventually allowed to proceed. This conduct was of a piece with Obama’s general willingness to take extreme measures against whistleeblowers.

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

… is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far. (Previously posted in 2011).
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When I read fiction, it’s mostly either the 19th century classics or speculative fiction – what was and what might be, as opposed to what is. I live in the present, and spend most of my waking hours analysing the economy and society of today, along with the recent past and near future. In doing that, I am, for the most part, in agreement with Mr Gradgrind – what I want is facts, nothing but facts.

But in relation to the future (and, in many ways, the past) we don’t have facts, only possibilities. And, unlike the present, we don’t have lived experience to help us understand those possibilities. Speculative fiction, at its best, extends our thinking to encompass possibilities we wouldn’t otherwise consider, and to imagine ways of life no one has actually experienced. [click to continue…]

(Overdue again!) Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

Note: Unfortunately there appears to be no way to turn moderation off selectively, so the discussion here will be a bit slow. Still looking into options.

I’m racing to get a draft manuscript of The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic, not helped by the fact that Biden keeps doing pretty much what I think he should do. More of the fold. Comments greatly appreciated, as always.
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Writing in the New York Times, Elizabeth Bruenig makes the case against an alliance of convenience between liberals and “woke” corporations against the threat posed to democracy by Trumpism . After acknowledging how desperate the situation has become, she presents the argument, to which I’ll respond bit by bit

Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill.

This is the nature of alliances of convenience. When the Western Allies joined Stalin to fight against Hitler they had no (or at least few) illusions about him, and didn’t rely on him to keep his word any longer than necessary, or to refrain from undermining them in other quarters

It isn’t possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.

This simply isn’t correct as the Biden Administration is showing. Despite co-operating with capital on social matters,. Biden has proposed substantial increases in corporate tax rates and global action against corporate tax avoidance. In this context, it is the position of capital that has been weakened by the toxicity of its usual allies, the Republicans.

Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical — Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didn’t unionize — it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy. Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor.

Again, this is what happens in an alliance of this kind. Fights over unionization go on, in parallel with an alliance over the right to vote. Once again, it’s the corporations who face the bigger problem here, with opportunistic Republicans pretending to back the rights of the workers.

I have no idea what to do about this other than know it for what it is. If it were ever the case that knowledge was power, it certainly isn’t so anymore: Knowledge is more widely dispersed than ever; power remains notably concentrated. But knowledge confers a certain dignity. It’s worse to be powerless and unaware than to be powerless and perfectly clear on where you stand.

This is a counsel of despair, without any real basis. Bruenig gives no reason to suppose that the fight for democracy can’t be won, even if it requires alliances between groups with interests that are otherwise opposed. But if the Republicans can be held at bay long enough to allow the passage of strong voting rights law, they will have to reform themselves or face permanent minority status. Getting to that point (for example, by winning bigger majorities in both Houses of Congress in 2022, then scrapping the filibuster) will be difficult, but not impossible

An important limitation of Bruenig’s analysis is that she treats “capital” as a unitary force. There is a sharp division between global corporations, with a long-run interest in the preservation of the rule of law under a democratic government, and the crony capitalists, epitomized by Trump himself, for whom the object is to extract as much as possible from the US economy, as quickly as they can.

Someone with more expertise than me could interpret all this in terms of the “fractions of capital” idea put forward by Poulantzas and others in C20. A search on those terms produced this piece in The Guardian, which covers some of those points.