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fatehbaz · 1 year

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From Atlanta to Chicago [...]. These cop cities are training grounds for police violence and must be dismantled to restore a world where life is precious.

In a stunning yet utterly predictable act, Chicago’s “cop academy” has officially opened on the West Side complete with a ribbon-cutting in front of fake street signs and fake housing.

In a city reeling from extreme poverty, a lack of affordable housing, myriad environmental injustices, food apartheid, [...] and in a city where at least 65,000 people are experiencing homelessness, the leadership of the city of Chicago spent $128 million to build fake homes on the city’s resource-starved West Side where officers can practice the violence and brutality that they will mete out to Chicago residents.

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In a disturbing photo, Mayor Lightfoot, [...] Fire Commissioner Nance-Holt and others smile while cutting a red ribbon, proud to have brought this into being. Adding insult to injury, the thirty-two-acre cop academy was built on the city’s West Side, where decades of racist policy (such as redlining and other housing discrimination and disinvestment) by the city government in this majority-nonwhite community have already given way to poverty and population loss. (In just one example, the Rahm Emanuel administration closed half of the West Side’s mental health clinics in 2012, then shuttered numerous West Side schools in his historic closure of fifty schools in 2013.) [...]

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Lest there be any doubt as to whether or not West Siders actually want this cop academy, in 2018 the organizers of the No Cop Academy campaign polled West Garfield Park residents [...]. 95 percent recommended that the city invest in something else - beyond the Chicago Police Department [...]

What kind of society eagerly spends millions of dollars to build fake neighborhoods, but cannot muster the funds to provide actual housing for the unhoused? What kind of society would rather stage and practice violence than provide mental health resources or violence interruption to communities reeling from it everyday? Unfortunately, such questions arise on a routine basis in this city.

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And it is not only in this city. [...] For Chicago, like so many cities across the US, we must remember that policing is not a “rational” response to something called “crime.” Instead, it is a war on poor people (particularly Black and Brown poor people). As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, this war treats incarceration as a solution to social and economic ills while conveniently stripping poor and working-class people of color of their political rights and autonomy. [...]

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Additionally, in a cynical move decried by Chicago youth organizers, a chapter of the Boys and Girls Club is set to open at the facility. This is despite Chicago having the second most killings by police of youth under eighteen in the country, and despite several high-profile CPD murders of youth such as thirteen-year-old Adam Toledo and twenty-two-year-old Anthony Alvarez just in the last few years. [...]

They want a fake village where no one lives or thrives. They spend millions on a theme park to practice surveilling, policing, and controlling people. This vision can never be a home for anyone, and thus the Cop Academy should have no place in our city if we are to make Chicago, someday, a true home for its residents. [...]

We must refuse to allow such sadism to become normalized, and continue to make clear in the face of a city leadership which laughs, that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “where life is precious, life is precious.” [...]

Like the brave protesters facing off against the horrific violence of Atlanta’s proposed Cop City, organizers in Chicago have fought a valiant campaign against the cop academy since it was first proposed during the Emanuel administration. The No Cop Academy campaign, led by Black youth across the city, has led countless protests and actions and was endorsed by more than 100 organizations. [...]

Though the structures have been built, the fight against the cop academy (as well as similar projects in Atlanta and elsewhere) must continue: we must transform every fake cop neighborhood into real, affordable housing and vibrant neighborhoods where every person has what they need to thrive.

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Text by: Nisha Atalie. “From Atlanta to Chicago, Cop Cities Breed Violence.” Rampant Magazine. 30 January 2023. [Italicized first paragraph in this post is directly quoted from the title and subheading printed alongside the article at Rampant.]

#atlanta #this week is the Week of Solidarity with Atlanta forest

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searincosplay · 6 months

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"Ah, in Versailles a rose blooms . . ."

I wore a test run of Oscar from The Rose of Versailles to the Chicago Historical Costuming Society's apple orchard event and had an amazing time! I took inspiration from Oscar's fencing outfit in the Takarazuka Revue adaptation since I already had some suitable clothing pieces for it and some lovely blue fabric in my stash that I used for the waistcoat. I've been rewatching the series and getting super stoked to finally dig into the full costume, she's been a dream costume of mine for the past 12 years or so!

Thank you mistresspennywhistle on IG for helping me get some gorgeous photos on my camera! Editing by me.

#rose of versailles #lady oscar #oscardejarjayes #oscar françois de jarjayes #rose of versailles cosplay #takarazuka #takarazuka revue #lady oscar cosplay #oscar de jarjayes cosplay #rov cosplay #retro anime #classic anime #old school anime #70s anime

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diddyrivera · 4 months

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additional resources to marxist feminism:

living a feminist life by sara ahmed

the rise and decline of patriarchal systems by nancy folbre

this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color by cherrie moraga and gloria anzaldua

delusions of gender: how our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference by cordelia fine

close to home: a materialist analysis to women's oppression by christine delphy

(pdf) the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism

(medium) on women as a class: materialist feminism and mass struggle by aly e

(sagejournals) capital and class: the unhappy moments of marxism and feminism: towards a more progressive union

(substack) the marxfem pulpit by abigail von maure (earth2abbs on tiktok)

if anything else related to marxist feminism, just let me know :)

additional resources to eco feminism:

gossips, gorgons, and crones: the fates of the earth by jane caputi

parable of the sower by octavia e butler

neither man nor beast: feminism and the defense of animals by carol j. adams

bitch: on the female of species by lucy cooke

fresh banana leaves: healing indigenous landscapes through indigenous science by jessica hernandez

the intersectional environmentalist by leah thomas

right here, right now by natalie isaacs

feminism or death by francoise d'ealibonne

violent inheritance: sexuality, land, and energy in making the north american west by e cram

animal crisis: a new critical theory by alice grary

unsettling: surviving extinction together by elizabeth weinberg

land of women by maria sanchez

sexus animalis: there is nothing unnatural in nature by emmanuelle pouydebat

windswept: walking the paths of trailblazing women by annabel abbs

andrea smith - rape of the land

andy smith - ecofeminism through an anticolonial framework

carolyn marchant - nature as female

charlene spretnak - critical and constructive contributions of ecofeminism

heather eaton - ecological feminist theology

heather Eaton - The Edge of the Seat

janet abromovitz - biodiversity and gender Issues

joni Seager - creating a culture of destruction

karen warren - ecofeminism

karen warren - taking empirical data seriously

karen warren - the power and promise of ecological feminism

l. gruen - dismantling oppression

martha e. gimenez - does ecology need marx?

n. sturgeon - the nature of race

petra kelly - women and power

quinby - ecofeminism and the politics of resistance

rosemary radford ruether - ecofeminism: symbolic and social connections

sherry ortner - is female to male as nature is to culture?

sturgeon - the nature of race

val plumwood - feminism and ecofeminism

winona laduke - a society based on conquest cannot be sustained

if anyone has any other recommendations related to eco feminism, plz let me know :)

additional resources related to trans feminism:

the empire strikes back: a posttransexual manifesto by sandy stone

(chicago journals) trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance by talia mae bettcher

(philpapers.org) trans women and the meaning of woman by talia mae bettcher

the transgender studies reader by susan stryker and stephen whittle

if anyone has other recommendations related to trans feminism, plz let me know :)

additional resources related to anarcha feminism:

the anarchist turn by jacob blumenfeld

we will not cancel us and other dreams of transformative justice by adrienne maree brown

burn it down: feminist manifestos for the revolution by breanne fahs

reinventing anarchy, again by howard ehrlich

anarcho-blackness by marquis bey

a little philosophical lexicon of anarchism from proudhon to deleuze by daniel colson and jesse cohn

joyful militancy by nick montgomery and carla bergman

wayward lives, beautiful experiments by saidiya v. hartman

we won't be here tomorrow and other stories by margaret killjoy

writing revolution by christopher j. castaneda

paradoxes of utopia by juan suriano

twelve fingers by jo soares

for a just and better world by sonia hernandez

if anyone has other recommendations related to anarcha feminism, plz let me know :)

#feminism #intersectionalfeminist #intersectionality #anti terf #anti swerf #womens rights #marxist feminism #eco feminism #anarcha feminism #trans feminism #queer feminism #pro lgbtq+#pro disabled #pro trans #pro palestine #pro sex worker

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ausetkmt · 8 months

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In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

When journalist Dorothy Tucker first learned about the 10 Million Names genealogical project, it helped amplify memories of long car journeys from Chicago to “Down South” in the 1960’s, where her mother’s family owned land.

The Mississippi property purchased by her great-grandfather George Trice in 1881 was special for several reasons. First, nobody’s really sure how a formerly enslaved man was able to purchase 160 acres, but Trice came up with the $800. And every time Tucker and her family drove down to Shannon, Mississippi each summer to visit relatives, it was more than just a vacation.

“I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast at my aunt's house. I'd go a few feet down the road and have lunch at my great-aunt's house. And then I'd play outside at my cousin's house,” says Tucker, an award-winning investigative journalist with CBS2 WBBM-TV in Chicago. “It was that way all day long. Every house was owned by a relative. I thought everybody lived like this. I thought everybody had land and stuff that was theirs.”

Tucker finally got specific details about how and why that land was purchased during the final months of her term as president of the National Association of Black Journalists. In early 2023, NABJ Board Member Paula Madison, a retired NBC Universal executive, informed the group about an offshoot of the Georgetown Memory Project, the initiative that unearthed information about the 1838 sale of enslaved Africans to fund Georgetown University. The 10 Million Names Project was created to recover the names of an estimated 10 million men, women and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500’s and 1865. By engaging with expert genealogists, cultural organizations, and family historians both Black and white, the initiative hopes to provide more African Americans with information that only formally began to be captured for their ancestors in the 1870 United States Census.

Up until that year, enslaved Africans and their descendants were only acknowledged as the property of their owners. If their existence was noted, it was in the form of sales documents or as catalogued property in civil records. Also, the relatives of enslavers often maintain troves of information about those purchased and sold off that would otherwise be completely lost.

(This database is helping to uncover the lost ancestry of enslaved African Americans.)

Much of the work will be dependent on oral histories passed down thru generations of families, and researchers of the 10 Million Names Project also hope that more white families will aid in the search by making familial records, like letters and pages from family bibles, available to them.

Tucker, who ended her term as NABJ president during that organization’s annual conference in August, revealed at the awards banquet in Birmingham, Alabama that she’d been able to learn more about her great grandfather’s real-estate ventures, through a collaboration between NABJ and the New England Historical Genealogical Society’s American Ancestors initiative.

The 10 Million Names Project was formally launched at the convention. Tucker considers it an especially timely parting gift to her journalistic colleagues. As societal divisions along racial lines widen, hate crimes continue, and attempts to ban books and curtail African American studies programs in schools and universities increase, strengthening historical knowledge is urgently important for Black Americans, Tucker says.

“I think that the ability to tell these stories and to know them is so critically important,” she says. “When you know your personal story, then as a journalist, it gives you the perspective to dig deeper when you're doing the next story, whether it’s about the school board or about Ukraine or the next elections. You know, these stories are all tools that are really good for all of us.”

How the initiative evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

“To me, genealogy was sort of like butterfly collecting,” says Richard Cellini, a faculty fellow at Harvard University and founding director of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Remembrance Program. “It’s impressive because of the amount of effort invested into it. But I never quite understood the point.”

Cellini was born in 1963 in Central Pennsylvania to a Penn State University professor and homemaker mother. His Catholic upbringing steered him to Georgetown University and an eventual decade-long law career before pivoting toward the software and technology realm. In 2015, Cellini learned that his alma mater had formed a working group to explore the sale of 272 men, woman, and children in 1838 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. As a white American of European descent, he says he did not live with or know many Black people growing up, going to school or during his legal and technology careers, so the initiative opened a window in his mind.

When Georgetown President John DeGioia invited alumni to weigh in, Cellini wrote an email asking one simple question that had nothing to do with the university. He wanted to know, “What happened to the people?”

Cellini says a senior member of the working group wrote back to say that research had concluded that all of the enslaved men, women, and children had died fairly quickly after arriving in the swamps of Louisiana where they had been transported.

“And I remember just staring at that email, even though I didn't really know much about the history of slavery or African American history, and just thinking that just doesn't make any sense,” Cellini says. Curiosity drove him to form an independent research group, funded initially through his own credit card and then from other Georgetown alumni who eagerly offered financial backing. To date, the Georgetown Memory Project has fully identified 236 of the 272 enslaved people sold by the university's leaders. Of those identified through archival records, the project has verified more than 10,000 of their direct descendants.

“The 1838 slave sale at Georgetown brought home to me, again, they were real people with real families and real names,” Cellini says. “More than 50 percent of them were children. William was the youngest, and he was six months old. And Daniel was the oldest at 80. Len was sickly, and Stephen was lame. I mean, this is all from the original documentation. From that moment on, I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

The gathering of history

The genealogists and historians connected with the project suggest that the richest vein of information may well be in the oral histories they’ve already begun gathering through hundreds of interviews. They contain fascinating stories like the ones that Kendra Field’s grandmother Odevia Brown used to tell about her African American and Native American forebears in Oklahoma. When Field was in high school, she never really liked history classes, but she always loved her grandmother’s stories.

“It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, thanks to a wonderful professor, that my grandmother's stories were history,” Field says. After the death of her father, Field began to travel back to those historically Black Oklahoma towns to explore her African American and Creek Indian heritage. Now in her career as a historian, author and professor at Tufts University, Field also has taken on the role of chief historian for 10 Million Names.

Technology, including the use of artificial intelligence programs, is allowing project investigators to do quicker, more efficient searches for information. Field says that can happen by identifying the location of plantation ledgers, advertisements, and receipts from auctions. “Particularly, there's been a lot of advancements made in optical character recognition, which allows researchers to identify names and handwritten records,” Field says.

Prior to this, a researcher had to find the document, transcribe the information, and then pivot to another database to go deeper. But with the development of other genealogical data sets such as Enslaved.org, locating individuals and making connections becomes much easier. “So that means we can move closer to that 10 million much more quickly than we would have been able to even a decade ago,” Field says. Also, the collection at the Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938” has yielded important clues from the estimated 2,300 people interviewed during that project.

(The search for lost slave ships led this diver on an extraordinary journey.)

Though identifying 10 million people who were never meant to be known as human beings may sound like a staggering task, the people behind the initiative believe it’s a totally attainable goal—even amidst all the current cultural and ideological turmoil in American society. That’s because, Cellini says, there are certain inalienable truths in this world.

“John Adams said that facts are stubborn things. You know, our Black brothers and sisters have always known their history and white people have always tried to prevent Black people from learning that history. What's new here is that white people are now trying to prevent other white people from learning this history.”

Cellini believes that Black Americans aren’t the only ones who want or need to know the full story. “It's white people who hunger for knowledge of that history, as well. It’s our duty to engage in determined resistance, to strike repeated blows for the truth. And nothing is more stubborn than facts.”

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

#Africans #Black Lives Matter #Black Lineage #american freedmen #Black Freedmen #Black Americans #10 million enslaved Americans' names are missing from history. AI is helping identify them #10 million names project

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1863-project · 1 year

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I've been seeing screenshots of this tweet making the rounds lately:

I did a thread on Twitter adding some historical context, but it's easier to write long-form stuff on websites like Tumblr, so I'll do it here, too.

This is a screenshot from a 1944 election propaganda film called Hell-Bent For Election. The locomotives do indeed represent FDR (left) and his rival, Thomas E. Dewey (right). Dewey would famously try to run again in 1948 and was considered the favorite against Harry Truman, leading to the famous Dewey Defeats Truman newspaper headline. The film was directed by Chuck Jones (yes, that Chuck Jones) and distributed by United Auto Workers. It was made amidst WWII, and it isn't subtle about making sure the viewer knows a vote against FDR is a vote for Hitler. (Weirdly enough, there's a character that can easily be read as an antisemitic caricature trying to get the protagonist to vote for Dewey despite what we know was happening in retrospect; this is actually quite jarring and uncomfortable from a historical perspective.)

OP probably doesn't know this, but FDR isn't being depicted as a bullet train. The Shinkansen doesn't show up until the 1960s, and at any rate, the US was very much at war with Japan at the time this film was made, so there's no way FDR would be depicted using Japanese railroad technology even if it did exist at the time. What he is being shown as, however, is a streamliner.

Notice this gap here? Streamlined steam locomotives usually still had their drive wheels exposed to a degree to make maintenance easier. In particular, FDR resembles a New York Central Mercury (4-6-4 Hudson) with his chin as an added cowcatcher.

The streamlined cladding for the Mercury was designed by Henry Dreyfuss, who would go on a few years later to design arguably the most famous streamlined NYC Hudson locomotives: the Dreyfuss Hudsons.

You can see a bit of influence from these in the FDR locomotive, as well, as it has a ridge along the top. These pulled prestigious passenger trains known for high speed, including the flagship 20th Century Limited. FDR was, of course, from old money and could afford that sort of thing, but that's likely not the reason they depicted him as a streamliner here.

Streamlined locomotives emerged in the 1930s despite the economic hardships in the United States at the time. They were designed to evoke a sense of speed and modernity, and they represented a society moving forward. By depicting FDR as one, it projects a sense of strength, especially in comparison to the tired old Dewey locomotive, which looks nearly half a century old. This was a crucial portrayal considering that FDR had polio (or possibly Guillain-Barré Syndrome, another explanation) and due to ableism he had to hide that affliction to avoid being seen by opponents (both political and wartime) as "weak." Additionally, Dewey's consist (the train cars he's pulling) is made up of outdated policies, including a caboose labeled with "Jim Crow."

I find the use of a streamliner rather ironic because at the time this film was made, many streamlined locomotives were being un-streamlined so the extra metal could be used for the war effort. It's a bit of an odd choice from that angle, but it's clear that the imagery of streamliners and what they represented in the minds of the public was still going strong.

Also worth noting: yes, FDR won the November 1944 election and began a fourth term in office. He died only a few months later, in April 1945, and was succeeded by his Vice President, Truman, who finished his term and then, as mentioned above, beat Dewey again in an upset to win a full term in 1948.

(Truman gleefully holding up the incorrect Chicago Tribune at St. Louis Union Station, 1948)

So that's that, I suppose! You can watch the film here, as it's in the public domain:

youtube

(If you enjoy my historical writing, consider donating to my Ko-Fi so I can keep AGI running as smoothly as the 20th Century Limited! Thanks for reading!)

#history #I like trains #WWII #FDR #Thomas Dewey #Youtube

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 5 months

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by David Litman

Consider how the Middle East Studies center responded to the last Israel-Hamas war in 2021: with a ‘teach-in’ entitled ‘A Third Intifada? Palestinians and the Struggle for Jerusalem.’ As Hamas rockets were still raining down on Israeli civilians, Brown professor Adi Ophir glorified the terrorist organisation, proclaiming that ‘Hamas is fighting for the residents of Jerusalem and those who pray in al-Aqsa [mosque]…’ The quote might as well have come from Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar.

Rana Barakat, a Palestinian professor invited to lecture Brown students, glorified the May 2021 violence by comparing it to a series of massacres, which she called ‘uprisings,’ carried out in 1929 by Arab mobs that left over 130 Jews dead (19 years before the State of Israel even existed).

At the same event, Professor Doumani approvingly spoke of the ‘amazingly wide range of forms of resistance’ over ‘the past two weeks.’ Another invited Palestinian speaker, Birzeit University professor Weeam Hammoudeh, rhetorically asked: ‘Is the bad form of resistance the unacceptable form, this violent form of resistance?’ Not a word of condemnation was issued for Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians. It should go without saying that if you’re not sure whether the intentional targeting of innocent civilians is bad or not, you don’t belong anywhere near civilised society, let alone in a position of influence over impressionable young minds.

Yet these are academics influencing young minds, and that is what they were telling students the last time Hamas tried to murder Jews en masse.

And it didn’t stop after 10/7.

At an October 20, 2023 ‘teach-in,’ co-organised by the Brown Center for Middle East Studies, nearly a dozen speakers addressed the ongoing events. Only one of them had anything negative to say about the 10/7 massacre, which she still managed to blame on Israel. One speaker, Noura Erakat, even proclaimed that it is a ‘dehumanising, crude, very racist talking point’ to say ‘that this is about Hamas.’ It’s another common theme one finds in Brown events and syllabi: there is no Palestinian responsibility for the lack of peace or their lack of statehood. Another speaker, University of Chicago professor Lisa Wedeen, similarly claimed, ‘Israel is a machine for the conversion of grief into power; it transmutes grief into violence,’ and ‘we see that grief machine hard at work in the coverage of major newspapers…’

Jews aren’t even allowed to grieve, let alone defend themselves.

Of course, no such event could pass without glorifying the brutal massacre. Barakat – a regular guest at Brown University events – proclaimed that ‘2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism.’

The hideous irony of claiming that burning innocent Jews alive was an act of standing against fascism apparently never dawned on any of the other speakers.

#middle east studies #brown university #campus antisemitism

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ajl1963 · 5 months

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Deco Doings - December, 2023

View On WordPress

#Art Deco Society of Los Angeles #Art Deco Society of New York #Art Deco Society of the UK #Art Deco Society of Washington #Art Deco Society of Western Australia #Art for the Millions #Avant-Garde Posters #Chicago Art Deco Society #Chrysler Building #Cocktails in Historic Places #Detroit Area Art Deco Society #Fred Astaire #Ginger Rogers #Metropolitan Museum of Art #New York Adventure Club #Phoenix Art Deco Society #Poster House

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Nathan J. Robinson's "Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments"

In Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments, Current Affairs founder Nathan J. Robinson addresses himself in a serious, thoughtful way to the arguments advanced by right-wing figures, even when those arguments aren’t themselves very serious:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250777744/respondingtotheright

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/14/nathan-robinson#arguendo

Robinson is a keen student of right-wing media. He reads the books, watches the talk shows, listens to the podcasts. This is a lot of work, because the right wing media machine is extremely repetitive, often unhinged, and frequently grossly offensive. But, Robinson argues, a close study of right-wing media is worth it for what it reveals: the currents and fracture lines, and the underlying beliefs that the whole edifice is built upon.

Robinson sets up his subject with an essay on the curious un-reason of conservative arguments, which are inevitably styled by their proponents as “rational” (with left arguments condemned as irrational, softheaded and sentimental). But conservative arguments, motivated by fear and discomfort with uncertainty, are frequently, demonstrably, historically, provably irrational.

The arguments against letting everybody vote — proffered in the mid-19th century — threatened societal collapse if the “wrong” people were given a say. Despite society’s manifest failure to collapse, these same arguments were advanced again for the next 150 years (and are still repeated today) in conservative circles.

Likewise, the general conservative pessimism that reform isn’t possible — bad regulations can’t be replaced with good ones, bad working conditions can’t be improved through unionization. These arguments are repeated again and again, impervious to evidence.

Robinson describes conservativism as a comforting, fixed ideology that allows its adherents to move through the world without having to question themselves: you broke the law, so you’re guilty. No need to ask if the law was just or unjust. This sidelines sticky moral dilemmas: no need for judges to ask if something is good or fair — merely whether it is “original” to the Constitution. No need for a CEO to ask whether a business plan is moral — only whether it is “maximizing shareholder benefit.”

There are rigid, dogmatic leftists, too (whom Robinson decries) but conservatives who are quick to point out how Marxist dogma can lead to ghastly atrocities — as in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — are completely indifferent to, say, the horrors of US imperialism in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conservative arguing techniques break down into a dozen categories:

Speculative fiction: “More immigrants will destroy the social fabric of our society” — anything we can vividly imagine is certain to occur. Likewise, “companies that abuse their workers will lose those workers when they quit.”

Saying things rather than proving things: “Central America is poor because bad laws restrict capital formation” — asserting dogma as though it was obviously true, rather than a proposition in need of evidence and proof.

Extrapolating from narrow examples: “All the private housing in Chicago is terrible, therefore public housing is impossible to do well.” No attention is spared for counterexamples that disprove the proposition or analysis that asks why this situation arose.

Lofty abstractions rather than actual thought: “Nothing is more important than the freedom to explore the destiny of one’s soul and risk it at every moment” — it’s inspiring, but what does it mean? How does it apply to the climate? Family leave? Health care?

The rhetoric of “reason, fact and knowledge”: “Facts don’t care about your feelings” — but “facts” are just what conservatives call their “feelings.”

Assumptions about human nature: “Man, acting without religion, is unable to break any chains that oppress him” — unproven, blithe statements that humans are naturally greedy, or hierarchical, or lazy, etc. These are unfalsifiable superstitions masquerading as science.

Ludicrous hyperbole: “American Marxism is actively working to destroy our society and culture”

Bad stats: “The NHS costs British households £5000/year. Governments can’t run efficient services.” Sure, the NHS costs UK households 5 grand per year — how much do American households pay for private insurance?

(Allegedly) unanswerable questions: “We’re supposed to be in awe of teachers’ dedication and outraged at their low pay. Which is it? Are they in it for the money, or because of their mission to help kids?” These “gotcha” questions usually have straightforward answers (for example, people can be dedicated to their jobs and deserving of a living wage).

Gish gallops: Throwing out so many assertions in a single tirade that you don’t even know where to begin.

Plausible, but terrible, analogies: “If a million Mexican soldiers tried to invade the USA every year and 150,000 of them made it and claimed territory for Mexico, we’d be outraged. We should be just as alarmed at 150,000 Mexican migrants who settle here.” Mexican migrants aren’t an occupying army annexing territory to a foreign power — they’re low-waged, hard workers who pay tax, don’t get to use the systems that their taxes pay for, and come at their own direction, not at the direction of a foreign power.

Selective omissions: “Thousands of Canadians go to the USA to get health care they can’t get at home” — not said: millions of Canadians get excellent health care at home, and tens of millions of Americans can’t get healthcare in the USA.

After this anatomy of bad argumentation, Robinson offers general tips for countering these arguments, including “don’t assume they’re stupid,” “focus on arguments, not statistics,” and “stories matter as much as empirical correctness.” These are hard-won, field-tested tactics for both winning over persuadable conservatives and keeping neutral observers from being sucked in by bad arguments.

The next two thirds of the book are taken up with analyses of specific conservative arguments, and responses to them. All told, Robinson takes on 25 of these, from “the woke left want to destroy free speech” to “immigration is harmful” to “there is no such thing as white privilege.”

For each of these arguments, Robinson lays out the best versions of the conservative positions, quoting extensively from both right wing intellectuals and demagogues, and then describes their weaknesses and suggests avenues for arguing these points. He also provides a bibliography at the end of each section.

Robinson also signposts areas where no common ground can be had — true believers in fetal personhood are likely to stay that way, and nothing you say is going to change that. The best you can hope for is to make sure that observers hear the better arguments.

But there are other conservative positions, like “the Nazis were socialists,” that are just plain wrong (Robinson quotes an authoritative source on why Nazis are not socialists — one A. Hitler). These are areas where it’s possible to disabuse people of things they don’t understand well but have fallen into reflexive opinions over.

In his conclusion, Robinson rounds up some conservative positions he agrees with:

many authoritarian “socialist” governments of the 20th century were horrifying;

some leftists are unpleasant and self-righteous;

the Democratic Party is pretty worthless;

conserving things is good.

Though Robinson notes that even on these areas of seeming agreement, conservatives often fall short of their rhetoric (for example, conservation of our forests, oceans, animals and atmosphere are antithetical to conservative policies).

Robinson also anatomizes the most effective parts of conservative rhetoric and exhorts his leftist comrades to learn from it, and put it to better use.

I confess that I find it hard to spend a lot of time in conservativeland; the podcasts and books and TV are often excruciating. Robinson’s book is proof that it’s worth the effort, though.

This week (Feb 14–17), I’m in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re in Sydney tonight (Feb 15) (more tickets just released!), then Canberra (Feb 16/17).

[Image ID: The cover for the St Martin's edition of 'Responding to the Right.']

#pluralistic #books #reviews #discourse #gift guide #national review

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