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Josh Richman & Anish Sheth, The Complete What’s Your Poo Telling You?: Not exactly what it says, because (a) it also covers pee and gas, (b) it’s just a few paragraphs at most at a time with some tidbits of biology and history, for bathroom reading, and (c) it’s not very complete or informative, mostly devoted to making poop jokes and giving names to types of outputs. However the best advice may well be simply stated: if your poop looks weird, especially if there’s blood in it, see a doctor!
David Runciman, How Democracy Ends: Not with a bang but with a whimper. Somewhat impressive to predict that the American coup wouldn’t be military, but rather would be from the civilian side. Runciman argues that democracy can rot even when there are regular elections, independent courts, and a free press, though I think he understates just how nondemocratic the US is in electoral terms—not just the Electoral College, but felony disenfranchisement combined with racist distribution of who gets convicted of felonies, gerrymandering, voter ID, closing polling places and purging voters who move often (and are thus more likely to be poor), the fact that North Dakota gets the same number of senators as California, etc. “The battles to expand the franchise have been largely fought and won” seems to me vastly too optimistic. I have to believe that elections conducted under different circumstances would be a lot freer and fairer.
Also, at this point, I can’t agree that violence merely “stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever arriving centre stage” when the POTUS praises a representative for assaulting a journalist. Even if most of the violence that Trump talks about is imaginary, it’s not in the recesses but in the contolling obsessions of our minds, and it has real effects. I think his position on this is not unrelated to his presentation of the Trump vote as being about education—“Whether or not someone went to college is a more significant determination of how they are likely to vote than age, class or gender.” Notice any salient characteristic missing? Runciman doesn’t seem to want to get too caught up in race, because American racism is so distinctive and he also wants to talk about Brexit and Macron, but I think that’s a mistake. He’s more persuasive with a slightly different take late in the book: there’s still plenty of violence, but it’s tailored to particular groups and not noticed by most not directly subjected to it, a situation that suits those inflicting the violence just fine. “At the same time, the shadow of some unspeakably violent cataclysm hangs ove the entire country…. One false move and we could all be dead. Trump embodies this phenomenon. He deals in two kinds of political violence: the low-level, attritional variety that manifests in personal abuse; and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.”
Runciman also argues that the catastrophes we now face, like climate change, have paralyzed rather than mobilized us (contrast WWII), partially because of the dangerous affordances of new information technology. Runciman is trying to diagnose multiple societies, though, and he points out that Greece might be a more standard example—still much richer than it was when it was under military rule, and also much more elderly, both of which make violence/government collapse less likely. “One reason its high youth unemployment has not proved more destabilising is that there simply aren’t that many young people in Greece any more.” A military coup is unlikely, but what has arguably occurred is a different, secretive coup—control by the international financiers who benefit from keeping Greece immiserated. Those kinds of coups don’t want or depend on troops in the streets; they benefit from being hidden—things just don’t work the way they used to, and it’s not clear why or who if anyone could change the situation, and people who say democracy isn’t working are accused of hysteria and of being just another special interest group, or told to calm down by anonymous plotters in the NYT editorial pages.
When Runciman discusses the alternatives to democracy, he doesn’t find any that are more appealing. I liked his analysis about the way in which authoritarian regimes try to offer personal (economic) benefits plus collective (ethnonationalist or nationalist) dignity, as opposed to democracy’s personal dignity through equal citizenship and collective benefits in overall economic growth. I did not follow him when he argued that mature democracies with stagnant wages hadn’t really turned against democracy because voters haven’t endorsed “anyone threatening to take away their democratic rights,” they’re only excited by the prospect of taking away the rights of “people who don’t belong.” Pretty sure that’s what many democratic destructions look like. Ultimately, though, I agree that while democracy may not be the least worst form of politics, it’s the best of the possibilities when the government is at its worst. “More fires get started in a democracy, Tocqueville said, but more fires get put out, too.”
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon & Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City:Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. America’s racial sins through the lens of Chicago, in which the geography (and thus race) of one’s birth heavily determine one’s life chances. Some areas have good jobs, good schools and minimal police surveillance, while others are the opposite; life expectancy in Cook County varies by more than thirty years depending on geography. The authors emphasize the fact that the government is investing heavily in these poor blocks—but the money is going to keep their (former) residents in prison, not to improving their economic or other circumstances. “In essence, policymakers have been willing to pay to ensure absence and loss rather than economic revitalization.” This “concentrated punishment” harms communities, not just individuals. This also sets up a conflict between poor rural whites where prisons are now located and poor urban minorities, and the rural whites often win—jobs for guards justify keeping prisons open and needing to be filled.
Lots of individual policies are also counterproductive—seizing property used in drug sales, for example, led young black men to sell on the street to protect their parents and grandparents from loss, but that made public space more valuable as territory and thus increased the incentives for violent conflict over it. Also, young men adopted a uniform of white t-shirts and jeans to make themselves less identifiable to police if approached, but that helped police decide that every young man deserved the same risk. Focusing on disrupting gangs led the police to target older men who exercised a moderating influence on younger, more violent men, who now have even fewer authority figures in their lives counseling restraint. (I was also intrigued by the connections they drew between policies mandating lots of futile arrests and encouraging brutality and high police suicide rates; Chicago’s police suicide rate is significantly higher than the national average.)
Of course, blaming individuals for structural failures excuses those failures. The authors make that point and then also defend those individuals, citing evidence that, for example, black fathers (who are allowed to do so) spend as much or more time with their children than white fathers. But people who have to work two jobs to keep from being evicted have a hard time supervising their children, and then we blame them for inattention.
Women suffer uniquely—along with higher levels of violence, they fear reporting abuse to the police because of what the police might do, and sexual assaults are often lower on their lists of problems than other things like homelessness or a child’s hunger. This connects to the authors’ bedrock point: you can’t solve tough social problems with law enforcement and punishment. (And you also can’t shrink prison populations significantly only by releasing people who were convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual crimes.) This is also why they argue that most current non-prison based programs are still too connected to the criminal justice system to avoid a punishment-oriented approach, especially since their operators often profit by putting people under surveillance and control. Unfortunately, we can’t fix these problems just by reinvesting in non-prison social services; the damage to family structures and individual psyches of generations of abuse is too great. But that would be a start.
David Runciman, How Democracy Ends: Not with a bang but with a whimper. Somewhat impressive to predict that the American coup wouldn’t be military, but rather would be from the civilian side. Runciman argues that democracy can rot even when there are regular elections, independent courts, and a free press, though I think he understates just how nondemocratic the US is in electoral terms—not just the Electoral College, but felony disenfranchisement combined with racist distribution of who gets convicted of felonies, gerrymandering, voter ID, closing polling places and purging voters who move often (and are thus more likely to be poor), the fact that North Dakota gets the same number of senators as California, etc. “The battles to expand the franchise have been largely fought and won” seems to me vastly too optimistic. I have to believe that elections conducted under different circumstances would be a lot freer and fairer.
Also, at this point, I can’t agree that violence merely “stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever arriving centre stage” when the POTUS praises a representative for assaulting a journalist. Even if most of the violence that Trump talks about is imaginary, it’s not in the recesses but in the contolling obsessions of our minds, and it has real effects. I think his position on this is not unrelated to his presentation of the Trump vote as being about education—“Whether or not someone went to college is a more significant determination of how they are likely to vote than age, class or gender.” Notice any salient characteristic missing? Runciman doesn’t seem to want to get too caught up in race, because American racism is so distinctive and he also wants to talk about Brexit and Macron, but I think that’s a mistake. He’s more persuasive with a slightly different take late in the book: there’s still plenty of violence, but it’s tailored to particular groups and not noticed by most not directly subjected to it, a situation that suits those inflicting the violence just fine. “At the same time, the shadow of some unspeakably violent cataclysm hangs ove the entire country…. One false move and we could all be dead. Trump embodies this phenomenon. He deals in two kinds of political violence: the low-level, attritional variety that manifests in personal abuse; and the threat of nuclear Armageddon.”
Runciman also argues that the catastrophes we now face, like climate change, have paralyzed rather than mobilized us (contrast WWII), partially because of the dangerous affordances of new information technology. Runciman is trying to diagnose multiple societies, though, and he points out that Greece might be a more standard example—still much richer than it was when it was under military rule, and also much more elderly, both of which make violence/government collapse less likely. “One reason its high youth unemployment has not proved more destabilising is that there simply aren’t that many young people in Greece any more.” A military coup is unlikely, but what has arguably occurred is a different, secretive coup—control by the international financiers who benefit from keeping Greece immiserated. Those kinds of coups don’t want or depend on troops in the streets; they benefit from being hidden—things just don’t work the way they used to, and it’s not clear why or who if anyone could change the situation, and people who say democracy isn’t working are accused of hysteria and of being just another special interest group, or told to calm down by anonymous plotters in the NYT editorial pages.
When Runciman discusses the alternatives to democracy, he doesn’t find any that are more appealing. I liked his analysis about the way in which authoritarian regimes try to offer personal (economic) benefits plus collective (ethnonationalist or nationalist) dignity, as opposed to democracy’s personal dignity through equal citizenship and collective benefits in overall economic growth. I did not follow him when he argued that mature democracies with stagnant wages hadn’t really turned against democracy because voters haven’t endorsed “anyone threatening to take away their democratic rights,” they’re only excited by the prospect of taking away the rights of “people who don’t belong.” Pretty sure that’s what many democratic destructions look like. Ultimately, though, I agree that while democracy may not be the least worst form of politics, it’s the best of the possibilities when the government is at its worst. “More fires get started in a democracy, Tocqueville said, but more fires get put out, too.”
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon & Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City:Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. America’s racial sins through the lens of Chicago, in which the geography (and thus race) of one’s birth heavily determine one’s life chances. Some areas have good jobs, good schools and minimal police surveillance, while others are the opposite; life expectancy in Cook County varies by more than thirty years depending on geography. The authors emphasize the fact that the government is investing heavily in these poor blocks—but the money is going to keep their (former) residents in prison, not to improving their economic or other circumstances. “In essence, policymakers have been willing to pay to ensure absence and loss rather than economic revitalization.” This “concentrated punishment” harms communities, not just individuals. This also sets up a conflict between poor rural whites where prisons are now located and poor urban minorities, and the rural whites often win—jobs for guards justify keeping prisons open and needing to be filled.
Lots of individual policies are also counterproductive—seizing property used in drug sales, for example, led young black men to sell on the street to protect their parents and grandparents from loss, but that made public space more valuable as territory and thus increased the incentives for violent conflict over it. Also, young men adopted a uniform of white t-shirts and jeans to make themselves less identifiable to police if approached, but that helped police decide that every young man deserved the same risk. Focusing on disrupting gangs led the police to target older men who exercised a moderating influence on younger, more violent men, who now have even fewer authority figures in their lives counseling restraint. (I was also intrigued by the connections they drew between policies mandating lots of futile arrests and encouraging brutality and high police suicide rates; Chicago’s police suicide rate is significantly higher than the national average.)
Of course, blaming individuals for structural failures excuses those failures. The authors make that point and then also defend those individuals, citing evidence that, for example, black fathers (who are allowed to do so) spend as much or more time with their children than white fathers. But people who have to work two jobs to keep from being evicted have a hard time supervising their children, and then we blame them for inattention.
Women suffer uniquely—along with higher levels of violence, they fear reporting abuse to the police because of what the police might do, and sexual assaults are often lower on their lists of problems than other things like homelessness or a child’s hunger. This connects to the authors’ bedrock point: you can’t solve tough social problems with law enforcement and punishment. (And you also can’t shrink prison populations significantly only by releasing people who were convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual crimes.) This is also why they argue that most current non-prison based programs are still too connected to the criminal justice system to avoid a punishment-oriented approach, especially since their operators often profit by putting people under surveillance and control. Unfortunately, we can’t fix these problems just by reinvesting in non-prison social services; the damage to family structures and individual psyches of generations of abuse is too great. But that would be a start.
From:
no subject
A wise and benevolent philosopher-king/queen may well be the best way to go; the problem, as usual, is the succession. If you want a Marcus Aurelius, you have to take the chance of getting a Commodus as a follow-up. Given the low odds of a continuing line of wisdom and benevolence, I'll take the ragged and shambling creature that is the system we've got.