A research project found that writers at the New Yorker magazine are even less diverse than they were 50 years ago. The editor of the digital edition defended the magazine by saying that his section is becoming more diverse. Problem is, when journalists talk about diversity, they never talk about class. A newsroom that really looks like America includes people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, not just people who check off certain boxes.
Democrats are fighting internally between their progressive and centrist wings over infrastructure bills, one for actual buildings, the other one for actual human beings. Interestingly, two right wing senators control what comes out of the US Senate even though they are only a tiny minority. Over in the House of Representatives, on the other hand, the small minority progressive squad is dismissed as the small minority that they are. What both assumptions have in common is that right wing politics are always considered normative.
Both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate held hearings last week in which they examined the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and the many mistakes made during the war against Afghanistan. The key witnesses were the same generals who presided over the 20-year mess. Meanwhile, over on cable news television, the usual retinue of retired generals, several of whom presided over a war we had no business fighting, held court. We might get less militaristic foreign policy results if we asked people who are not in the war business (like academics, journalists and antiwar activists) about whether or not we should start a war.
Voters have the tendency to forgive the worst wrongdoings committed by politicians from their own party while getting angry about the very same thing when it’s done by a member of their own party.
When jobs are scarce, workers are told to make big changes in their lives to adjust to reality. Now that workers are scarce, however, whiny employers are offered sympathy rather than given advice to change their obsolete business models.
The United States constantly does bad things that its political leaders claim go against the nation’s fundamental values. If you do something all the time, isn’t THAT your value?
After ISIS killed 13 US soldiers at the airport in Kabul, Joe Biden accidentally assassinated a US aid worker and his seven young children using a drone. Killing the wrong people isn’t an occasional but rather a systematic, routine feature of drone warfare.
There is no left in the United States. Certainly not in Congress. Even “progressive” Democrats like AOC argue that the rich should pay higher taxes, a stance perfectly aligned with mainstream DNC leadership. No one argues about where those taxes should be going.
There’s a cultural war raging between people who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who already have. Caught in the middle are people who got the vaccine but don’t have contempt for those who haven’t.
The United States only managed to evacuate 7,000 out of the 120,000 Afghans and their family members who were eligible for U.S. visas because they worked for occupation forces. But we did manage to bring out hundreds of cats and dogs.
