owlmoose | Sep. 28th, 2017

Wow, how did I go almost a month without doing one of these? Clearly I'm not going to catch everything, but here's some highlights/more recent stuff.

If you read only one thing on this page, make it Ta-Nehisi Coates's excellent "The First White President", a stark appraisal of how Trump's presidency is a direct response to Obama's. This is from almost a month ago, so I hope you've already seen it, but if not, you must.

One of the hot stories lately has been the escalation of the NFL anti-racism protests (and that is what they are, at their root, not any of this nonsense that people have tried to dig up about patriotism and respect for the troops). One of my favorite responses comes from Bob Costas, of all people, who says some excellent things about sports and the conflation of patriotism with support for the military.

A New York Times editorial reminds us that protest is almost never popular at the time it happens. NFL fans may be booing now, even as more players and even the owners start getting involved, but history may take a very different view.

I found this Newsweek article about Trump's history with the NFL to be pretty telling. It's not particularly a secret that Trump has made several attempts to purchase an NFL franchise, but he's been blocked by other owners as well as outbid. What I hadn't realized was that he ran the USFL (a short-lived would-be competitor) into the ground in his desperate attempts to be accepted. The story is pure Trump from beginning to end, and might explain why he's so quick to go after the owners now. If nothing else, make sure you read the letter from another USFL owner to Trump.

Vox has an interesting and depressing article about psychic numbing and the difficulty of getting people to care about large-scale tragedies.

The big topic in my newsfeeds a couple of weeks ago was Hillary Clinton's new memoir and the (depressingly predictable) backlash to it. This take from Quartz uses the coincidence of Bernie Sanders introducing his "Medicare for All" bill at around the same time to compare and contrast the way the media talks about Sanders versus how it talks about Clinton. Spoiler alert: sexism is involved.

Some of the book got leaked in advance, primarily sections where Clinton talks about Sanders and his effect on the race. (Mostly leaked by CNN, and isn't it interesting that these passages, sure to be controversial and re-spark infighting among the left, are the ones they chose? Instead of, say, one of the apparently many passages where she blasted the mainstream media for their terrible and imbalanced coverage? I wonder why THAT might be.) This analysis of the leaked text points out that her critique of Sanders was both balanced and fact based, but who cares about that when you can promote a "lady was mean to a man!" narrative?

Really excellent BuzzFeed article on private-public spaces built by tech companies and why they're no substitute for a genuinely public commons. It's nice that Apple wants to think of their stores as "town squares", but will that last when someone wants to have a picnic there, or a political protest? Somehow I don't think that's going to fly.

Another thing I missed was the announcement that DACA will be sunsetting, but that The Occupant is open to signing a DREAM Act-like bill if it passes Congress. (And for once that's not just words; Five Thirty Eight estimates that DACA could likely pass Congress with no trouble, although that doesn't mean it will ever come up for a vote.) Since anti-immigrant sentiment is one of the main issues that got him in the White House, this seems like a contradiction, but I thought Chris Hayes had a good take on why even his most hard-core anti-immigrant supporters might be okay with it: opposition to Obama was never about the policies themselves, but about the fact that a black man was implementing them. White people have taken the power back; as long as that's the case, what happens next doesn't really matter. Racism, my friends. It's the engine that drives so many things.

KJ