A friend’s daughter is 25. She was going to get married in May to a guy her age. Of course, they had to postpone the wedding because of COVID.
And today I heard that the fiance has cancer. Advanced stage. This is a really young guy. A very sweet, bright fellow.
Unbelievably sad.
Bari Weiss’s letter of resignation from the NYTimes is a crucial read. I tried to cull a particularly important quote from it but that’s not possible. The whole letter is really powerful.
It’s funny how there was never this kind of melodrama about grocery store workers, even though grocery workers are clearly in more danger than teachers.
It’s also quite stunning how dumb teachers are. Moving online makes their jobs very easy to outsource. If they can’t babysit, then they aren’t really needed. And they don’t seem to get it.
Many people think that the point of all the mayhem, the school closures, the dismantling of the economy, the denial of policing services to the population, etc is to get Biden elected.
But it’s the other way round. The goal of getting Biden elected is to carry on with the neoliberal revolution that will take all this welfare away from us and complete the wealth transfer from the middle class to the small neoliberal elite.
The membership in that small elite is highly coveted. This is why so many people are parroting the meaningless slogans about structural whatevers, fragile whitenesses, and unpackings of inequities. They think this jargon is a passcode that will open the doors to the protected elite status for them. It won’t but they’ll still keep trying and eating each other like spiders stuck in a glass jar.
Yet another reminder of how Americans are not completely weird around race and ethnicity:
Daniel Morrison of Slap the Sign, Notre Dame’s Fansided site, has launched a campaign for the university to consider changing its nickname. At a time when the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians are taking serious looks at their identities, it only makes sense that this should fall under the spotlight, too. But is it warranted?
In short, Morrison argues that, in spite of many people embracing the Fighting Irish moniker, it’s rooted in negative stereotypes of Catholics and immigrants. He also gives historical context: Irish people once were looked at in the U.S. with the same prejudice that other minority groups are today. Thus, stereotypes were born. As one can see from the aforementioned professional franchises, there’s a long history of those in this country, and now, people are trying to undo what their forefathers did.
No, nothing weird here. It’s all completely normal. Now let’s make sure that this completely normal approach is exported around the world.
