Wertheimer

fair.org is a great resource and a necessary corrective to the mainstream media. They've been particularly good at documenting the lies and propaganda in the New York Times and Washington Post during the last few years:

Despite History of Fabrication, Press Uncritically Covers IDF-Provided Documents on Hamas

For NYT’s ‘Free Speech’ Maven, Racism Needs Protection, Gaza Protests Don’t

NYT Engages in Front-Page IDF ‘Womenwashing’

And so on. They're pretty essential. And they're not that different from what we might try to do in this comm.

From their freelance guidelines page (linked above):

A typical FAIR story focuses on US media coverage of a story currently in the news or an issue that receives perennial coverage, e.g., Afghanistan. We also occasionally cover news about the media—for example, layoffs of journalists, labor disputes or media mergers—and stories of activism that challenges media bias, censorship or policy.

...

Freelancers receive $300 per article, paid within two weeks of publication. To help our message find the widest possible audience, we request that writers grant FAIR the right to approve republication of their articles; any proceeds from such reprints would belong to the writers. We also ask that you grant us the right to publish your piece in the Nexis media database. FAIR publishes under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Creative Commons license, which allows for published work to be copied, distributed, displayed and performed for noncommercial purposes if full attribution is given and no alterations are made to the work.

Submissions from BIPOC, women and LGBTQ writers are particularly encouraged.

Because of FAIR's history (they've been publishing since 1986) and reputation for accuracy, their articles are often the first thing I send to libs who realize that something is wrong with the coverage they're reading from other outlets. At the beginning of the Ukraine war I must have sent this one to everyone I know. Some people memory-holed it immediately, naturally, but this stuff often works on people who will read it in good faith.

Maybe this comm can be a space for practicing or collaborating on writing takedowns and correctives like this?

"We are no longer counting food that someone gives you as income when we figure your SSI payment."

This came into effect on September 30, but they just informed SSI recipients (using the future tense) this morning.

You mean they can just change these awful rules without needing an act of Congress to do so? Incredible. We suffered for years for no reason! But don't worry, our call is important to them:

Second, this final rule promotes equity. SSI recipients, by definition, have low income and resources. Because low-income people disproportionately encounter barriers across a range of social, health, and economic outcomes, our goal is to improve their circumstances, thus improving equity.

Incredible. You're the ones who legally require that we have low income and resources!

(Edited title)

Electing Judges in Mexico? It’s a Bad Idea.

But, consistent with his systematic attacks on checks and balances, his project to elect judges could lead to the death of democracy in Mexico.

. . .

Ms. Singh is a professor at Stanford Law School and the executive director of the school’s Rule of Law Impact Lab. Ms. Garcia is an expert adviser to the lab.

https://law.stanford.edu/rule-of-law-impact-lab/#slsnav-our-focus :

Democracy is in decline around the world. Governments elected to power with populist agendas are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics. There are striking similarities in the methods deployed to subvert democracy. These methods typically include compromising electoral integrity, undermining judicial independence, and quashing free expression and dissent. The Stanford Law School Rule of Law Impact Lab studies and uses legal tools to counter core threats to democracy and to promote democratic renewal worldwide.

Incredible

Dies of phytohemagglutinin poisoning in every movie

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410

This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.

UPDATE: They're back!

I hate Adam Gopnik.

Championed most effectively by Angela Y. Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), the cause may seem no more realistic than the defund-the-police movement that sang so loudly four years ago, at a cost to progressive candidates.

This is a lie: "There’s only one problem with this: there is no empirical basis for this claim in any of the above comments or reports. No studies, no evidence, not even [anecdotes are] ever provided."

Indeed, in a political moment like this one, worrying about the niceties of progressive reform at all may appear as self-distracting as a beachgoer worrying about sandcastle architecture as the sea pulls back on the brink of a tsunami.

Oh, fuck you.

It is also Du Boisian, it must be said, in the way that it gravitates toward class and economic explanations for phenomena not always well suited to them. Davis and others insist that the real villain of mass incarceration in the U.S. must be late capitalism or neoliberalism. In truth, we could empty our prisons tomorrow, and Apple and Google and Amazon and the rest atop the high heap of American enterprise would scarcely notice.

Writer for magazine whose logo is a fop with a monocle really hates class reductionism for some reason

Products from prison labor may slip into the supply lines, but corporations, as a rule, would prefer that they didn’t, since this results in more bad publicity than profit. Inmate labor tends to be done in the service of prisons themselves or government clients like state D.M.V.s. (There’s also the private-prison business, but it’s a shrinking one and houses a small fraction of the incarcerated population.)

The free market would never allow slave labor! And, hey, did you know that private prisons are irrelevant because they don't have the market valuation that Apple does?

There are, in any event, a great many free-market countries in the world, and very few are marked by overstuffed prisons. Mass incarceration remains a distinctively American problem. On the other hand, plenty of anti-capitalist societies have turned to mass incarceration—we speak of the “American Gulag” in honor of another, and nobody looks to Pyongyang for models of penal enlightenment.

There are more incarcerated people per capita in the United States than there were in any non-WWII portion of the gulag's existence. And those incarcerated have a lower life expectancy. (Right? I need help verifying this; I think it's a combination of two studies rather than a single unified study.) EDIT: See this post by @[email protected]

Pre-capitalist societies lacked mass imprisonment, but then—what with all the beheadings, beatings, and banishments—the people they considered criminals weren’t around long enough to be imprisoned.

As usual, the experiences and practices in indigenous cultures are ignored, because the arc of history is a semicircle that only includes Europe.

Sered’s points are sometimes vitiated by the weight of her pieties; her prose suggests someone constantly looking over her shoulder, like a driver going well below the speed limit but still glancing back nervously in fear of a traffic stop, or, anyway, reproach from a captious political ally. What sin might this next sentence commit?

Any problems with the prose of this book must be because of cancel culture!

. . .

Reminder that Adam Gopnik wrote a book about how sad he is that his daughter has better politics than he does. : "A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, is a manual for the dad side, a work of rousing reassurance for open-minded men who are nonetheless sick of losing political debates to teenagers whose meals they buy."

On July 18, Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19. Despite having symptoms, he’d spent the morning shaking hands with voters and workers before bothering to test during yet another massive surge of the virus; we won’t be getting breathless health updates about the peasants he exposed, nor will those infected be receiving any of the free medical treatment the President received from the comfort of his isolation bed, in his vacation home. The New York Times reported that he looked ill and unsteady as he walked to Air Force One (maskless) and was helped into his limousine, then carted back to his beach house in Rehoboth.

On July 19, Biden tweeted that he was “stuck at home with COVID”; most Americans, of course, have to return to work while ill these days, even when experiencing symptoms. His administration has thoroughly minimized the illness, with his former COVID response coordinator calling masking “fringe", and his CDC encouraging people to end isolation when they’ve been without a fever for one day, a standard that has absolutely no scientific relationship to infectiousness. (Amidst the wall-to-wall minimizing and ever-changing guidance, most employers interpret this most recent update to mean “no isolation”).

. . .

It was a poetically appropriate end for Biden, who, as hundreds of thousands died on his watch, alternated between ignoring COVID, joking about it, mocking masks, and appearing ignorant of the strict COVID protocols that his staff used to protect him for years while his administration unwound protections for everybody else.

In fact, in order to meet with or be in the room with Joe Biden at all, you had to submit to PCR testing for COVID-19 right up until this past March; it only took four months of life in the "new normal” he’d thrust the rest of us into years ago for Biden to get a taste of his own medicine.

Front page of sfchronicle.com right now.