Good morning everyone! There is a lot to get to this morning (and so much that I was not able to get to)!
Bring in...the pundits!
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post writes up his four takeaways from Day 3 of the Democratic National Convention.
Wednesday night’s acceptance speech was an opportunity for Harris to redefine herself — after her 2020 primary campaign flamed out early and at a time in which she’s not just vital to Democrats’ 2020 hopes, but is set up to be their standard-bearer in future presidential elections.
And two lines stood out: “I know a predator when I see one,” and “There is no vaccine for racism.”
“I have fought for children and survivors of sexual assault,” Harris said. “I fought against transnational criminal organizations. I took on the biggest banks and helped take down one of the biggest for-profit colleges. I know a predator when I see one.”
That line, which is similar to one she used when campaigning for herself, came before Harris’s address explicitly turned to President Trump, but it was clearly intended to paint a picture. It was a subtly delivered but not terribly subtle allusion to the character of the man who occupies the Oval Office. In fact, Harris has previously followed up similar comments by directly invoking Trump, saying “and we have a predator in the White House right now.” Harris also uttered it while talking about her past as a prosecutor — seeking to turn something of a liability with progressives into a positive.
Harris later described racial injustice as a “virus,” likening it to the coronavirus outbreak.
Zack Blumberg of the Michigan Daily (the undergraduate student newspaper at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor) on why Kamala Harris is the progressive choice for VP
Harris is the premier example of a politician who is portrayed as moderate because of her incrementalist rhetoric and narratives about her past, a method of evaluation which disregards her actual political stances and instead plays into the perception that the Democratic presidential primary can be cleanly divided into two lanes: moderates and progressives... In reality, Harris’s reputation as a moderate Democrat is not backed up by actual evidence and portraying her as such does a great disservice to her Senate voting record, which is consistently exceedingly progressive.
***
Given the evidence that Harris is a consistently progressive legislator, a question naturally arises: Why, then, is she considered to be a moderate Democrat? There are two major reasons for this, both of which focus on points of limited relevance to her actual record as a legislator and policy-maker. First, there is her history as a public prosecutor. Harris served as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and then as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017. Her time as a prosecutor has received mixed reviews: Some believe she was “often on the wrong side of history,” while others describe her as “the most progressive DA in California.”
However, criticisms of Harris’s record as a public prosecutor are often overblown and reductionist. Public opinion on crime, justice and policing has shifted dramatically in the 16 years since Harris first became a prosecutor, and many of her critics ignore the difficulties and political realities of winning elections as a Black woman during a period in which voters (even Democratic ones) demanded their politicians be tough on crime. Put simply, had Harris not been willing to take a more conciliatory approach during her time as a public prosecutor, she would never have been afforded the opportunity to become a senator or vice-presidential nominee. Furthermore, this type of attack seems to be leveled exclusively at Harris...
Mr. Blumberg, a junior, spent most of 2019 as a columnist for the Daily writing explanatory Vox-style op-eds on foreign policy matters. I’m being forgiving of an egregious factual error in an otherwise fine column because Mr. Blumberg is living out a dream of a Michigan native who was a foreign policy geek as a teenager, himself.
Go Blue!
Russell Berman of The Atlantic sounds on a theme that was noted and reflected by other columnists: Former President Barack Obama is scared for this country at this moment.
Devoid of an audience and its usual rapturous applause, Obama sounded at times like a disappointed father, his sighs audible as he delivered a speech he never thought he’d give. Donald Trump was once a joke to Obama, a “carnival barker” who he famously mocked at the White House Correspondents Dinner as Trump sat and watched with a frozen smile. The humor in Trump has been gone for a while now, but still, Obama held back on his successor as he kept away from the near-daily controversies and scandals emanating from the White House.
That restraint ended initially when Obama campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018. And last month in Atlanta, he used his eulogy for the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia to assail—without naming him—Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service and other efforts at voter suppression. He took on the president much more directly tonight, and more aggressively than any ex-president has criticized his successor in recent political memory. “For close to four years now,” Obama said, “he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.”
Charles Blow of the New York Times with an overall review of the convention’s virtual format and...he likes it.
...it was hard to conceive of a virtual convention, dictated by social distancing as a deadly virus still rages. Indeed, as the Democratic National Convention opened Monday night, I feared that, despite all their efforts, the convention would fail to succeed.
I was wrong.
There was a particular charge and effectiveness of seeing people in situ, surrounded by their books, in their kitchens, on their lawn, in some place that is meaningful to them or the people they represent.
The lack of a live audience also stripped away a bit of the performative nature of speeches and presentations; no pausing for applause, no way to know for certain if a line was landing. You simply had to deliver your speech.
But yet another benefit was that because there was no roar of the crowd, everyone could be clearly heard; because there was no crowd, cameras stayed fixed on the speaker instead of panning to the audience.
Charles Pierce of Esquire profiles the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in South Carolina, Jaime Harrison
The seat Harrison is running for was occupied for forty-eight years by Strom Thurmond, who’d run for president in 1948 in revolt against the civil-rights plank in the Democratic National Convention platform. But it wasn’t just dark legacies that got Harrison into this race. He’d also had just about enough in 2018, while watching the red-faced, hysterical Yosemite Sam performance of Thurmond’s successor, Lindsey Graham, in defense of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“It was those hearings that really pushed me over, to be quite honest,” Harrison said. “Not so much because I thought Graham shouldn’t vote for Justice Kavanaugh. Listen, you can’t be naive in this business. Lindsey Graham’s a Republican, and the Republican president nominated somebody to be on the Supreme Court. Where I really had a problem was the treatment of Dr. Ford in that hearing.”
Philip Bump of the Washington Post on the danger of The Damn Fool giving a thumbs up to the QAnon people.
...The spread of QAnon is seen by federal law enforcement as a threat to the public. There are obvious cases in which QAnon is used by disturbed individuals as a rationale for their actions, as in the murder of a reputed mob boss on Staten Island last year. This is the central concern, that fostering a belief that there exists a particularly evil group — its members defined by individual observers — will lead to some of those observers taking steps to confront the presumed evil. That some QAnon adherent will decide that some other person is part of the cabal Q is discussing. That is allegedly what happened on Staten Island.
Trump could have said that the theory was obviously not true and itself stood as a danger. He could have fervently denied that he or anyone in his administration was involved in any action like that Q describes. He could have indicated that his government was taking steps to contain the theory. But he didn’t. QAnon adherents like him and, hey, what’s wrong with being seen as a guy who wants to take on satanic pedophiles?
Trump tried multiple times to frame QAnon as overlapping with his (itself heavily exaggerated) war on antifa. Perhaps this seems like a clever bit of political judo. If that’s the idea, it’s a significant misread on both the QAnon ecosystem and the risk posed by giving it oxygen.
Nancy LeTourneau of Washington Monthly on how the Republican Party has politicized everything.
There was a time when the fault lines between the two major political parties in the United States centered around differences over the role of government (ie, how large the safety net should be) and the role of this country in foreign affairs. Then in the 60s and 70s, commitment to civil rights for women and people of color became part of the divide. Finally, the so-called “culture wars” were added to the list when the Republican Party set out to make the GOP a home for Christian nationalists.
Today, however, the list of items that have been politicized seems to be expanding exponentially. We’ve seen that recently, when the wearing of a mask to prevent the spread of a pandemic became part of the divide between the right and the left. That particular issue is rooted in the politicization of science, including the demonization of expertise by conservatives. I am reminded of the fact that the Republican who is running for senate in my home state of Minnesota, Jason Lewis, spent most of his previous career as a right wing radio shock jock, where he expounded on the wisdom of “garage logic.”
The politicization of science and expertise has meant that almost any issue is now cast as a disagreement between liberals and conservatives. At the top of that list is the biggest existential threat we face today: climate change. But “garage logic” can be used to dismiss almost any issue to which science, research, and data can be applied...
Ed Yong of The Atlantic writes about COVID-19 “Long-Haulers”; those people that continue to be symptomatic with COVID-19 for months.
A few formal studies have hinted at the lingering damage that COVID-19 can inflict. In an Italian study, 87 percent of hospitalized patients still had symptoms after two months; a British study found similar trends. A German study that included many patients who recovered at home found that 78 percent had heart abnormalities after two or three months. A team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that a third of 270 nonhospitalized patients hadn’t returned to their usual state of health after two weeks. (For comparison, roughly 90 percent of people who get the flu recover within that time frame.)
These findings, though limited, are galling. They suggest that in the United States alone, which has more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, there are probably hundreds of thousands of long-haulers.
These people are still paying the price for early pandemic failures. Many long-haulers couldn’t get tested when they first fell sick, because such tests were scarce. Others were denied tests because their symptoms didn’t conform to a list we now know was incomplete. False negatives are more common as time wears on; when many long-haulers finally got tested weeks or months into their illness, the results were negative. On average, long-haulers who tested negative experienced the same set of symptoms as those who tested positive, which suggests that they truly do have COVID-19. But their negative result still hangs over them, shutting them out of research and treatments.
Gregg Gonsalves of The Nation hereby dubs 2020 the Year of Magical Thinking.
...political intrigue aside, magical thinking has been elevated even further this summer, perhaps as a coping mechanism. Many of us have grasped at tidbits of scientific information to conjure a bridge to the future through the imminent arrival of a vaccine, or the fantasy that perhaps herd immunity can be achieved more quickly than we thought. Last month I wrote about the difficulties in developing a vaccine, which are about the nature of serendipity in science—hard to overcome despite our best and most determined efforts. This month, I’ve watched some colleagues suggest that herd immunity could be achieved after a small to moderate fraction (10–50 percent) of the population is exposed to the virus.
How tantalizing is it to think that places like New York City might already be over the worst of the pandemic, with community-wide protection already in existence in some pockets of the city—and with similar protection just around the corner for other neighborhoods in cities and towns hard hit by the virus? The New York Times article I linked to above includes caveats, but the headline “What if ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Closer Than Scientists Thought?” traffics in hope. Putting these hypotheses to the test entails giving in to a temptation we all feel right now: Let’s just go back to normal and see what happens. But that’s a dangerous game. Relaxing social distancing even further on a quest to step into the promised land of herd immunity risks the lives of our families, friends, and neighbors. As my colleague Virginia Pitzer, a mathematical epidemiologist here at the Yale School of Public Health, told The New York Times: “We are still nowhere near back to normal in our daily behavior. To think that we can just stop doing all that and go back to normal and not see a rise in cases I think is wrong, is incorrect.”
Trudy Rubin writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer on why Americans should be keeping an eye on what’s going on in Belarus.
Lukashenko has ruled for 26 years over a small (population 9.5 million) post-Soviet state at a geopolitical crossroads, bordered by Russia, the Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine. Yet, despite the huge, obvious differences between Belarus and the U.S., there are some remarkably similar themes and some clear warning signals from Minsk.
The popular revolt in the former emerged in part from Lukashenko’s failure to deal with COVID-19 — he ignored it.
Public revulsion mounted over his blatant lies about election numbers. Leading opposition figure Valery Tsepkalo, a former ambassador to the United States who has fled with his family to Poland, claims Lukashenko simply cooked the figures when it became clear that opposition leader Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya was winning, claiming he had 80% of the vote and she had 10%. This 37-year-old former English teacher had stepped in after her candidate husband was jailed. Disdainful of women, Lukashenko claimed she would “collapse” in office.
But back to faked numbers. Juggling a cell phone as he made his way to Warsaw, Tsepkalo described the rigging process to a Zoom webinar hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “I collected 220,000 signatures to run, although only 100,000 were necessary, and another candidate collected 400,000, but they were thrown in the garbage. Lukashenko simply gave instructions to the chairman of the central election commission.”
Fortunately, White House lies have not reached that point — yet.
Michael Chugani of the South China Morning Post writes a lament to the old Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong the world knew is gone. It was a brand built over many decades: Asia’s top financial centre with a thriving semi-democracy, a freewheeling media, fearless free speech and unhampered anti-government protests.
That brand was already fading after what many in the international community saw as heavy-handed
police tactics to crush last year’s often violent anti-government protests. The national security law imposed by Beijing, which the government used to raid a media outlet and arrest its owner, has left the brand in tatters.
It doesn’t matter how many times Beijing and local leaders insist today’s Hong Kong is as it always was despite the new law. Images can be more powerful than words. The images of more than 200 police officers raiding the headquarters of Next Digital, the parent company of Apple Daily, shocked not only many in Hong Kong but also the Western world.
Television and social media footage of police using social distancing rules or the security law to warn or arrest people singing protest songs or holding blank sheets of paper in protest in shopping malls didn’t help. Much of the West no longer sees Hong Kong as a city with a
high degree of autonomy
Li Zhou of Vox with an interesting account of how and, possibly, why the b-word became so popular.
According to a 2014 Vice report by Arielle Pardes, the use of “bitch” in literature and articles doubled between the years 1915 and 1930. While part of this surge was due to a spike in the word’s use to describe female dogs, as well as the rise in popularity of the term “son of a bitch,” some of this increase was also driven by its use as an insult against women.
“There is an uptick in use of ‘bitch’ as a term of abuse for women that starts gradually in the 1920s and 1930s, and then really gains traction in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s for a woman who is seen as conniving, malicious, or just plain bad,” says Kory Stamper, a lexicographer and former associate editor for Merriam-Webster dictionaries.
Although scholars are unsure whether this trend is directly tied to women’s suffrage, several noted that such backlash made sense and spoke to overwhelming discontent with women’s power.
“If there was ever a time for this term to gain prominence, it would be with the passage of the 19th Amendment, when women were given the right to have an independent voice,” says Kira Hall, a linguistics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Finally today is, of course, an Angry Grammarian writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer and noting an increased and correct usage of the term racist.
In a 2018 column, I documented the crime of using phrases like racially charged, racially coded, and racially inflected, all of which are euphemisms for racist. The adjective racist is more concise and precise than phrases that use the weaker adverb. Many word stylists (Strunk and White, Stephen King, and Mark Twain, to name a few) recommend minimizing adverb use, since adjectives (or better nouns and verbs) are frequently more accurate. But the racist charge still feels explosive, so news writers are often hesitant to use it. Yet when we don’t call out racism in the most direct way possible, we perpetuate it — which is a racist act unto itself.
The bad news about the announcement that Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris to be his running mate is that it unleashed a torrent of racist and sexist attacks on the California senator. The good news: This time, the media were actually much better about calling out those attacks as racist and sexist.
In the last week, news articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, the Boston Globe, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, Al Jazeera, and plenty of others used the words racist and/or sexist to describe the jokes, statements, conspiracy theories, and insinuations about Harris. For many readers, the reaction was, well, duh. But it’s a significant change from just two years ago, when outlets like the New York Times, in its coverage of George H.W. Bush’s death, referred to the former president’s “racially charged” Willie Horton ads against Michael Dukakis; the Washington Post, covering Donald Trump’s description of “s--thole countries,” called his words “racially incendiary” and “racially charged”; and NPR described newly minted Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s campaign as “racially charged.” Racist is the better word choice — grammatically and otherwise.
Everyone have a good morning!
