In time

From This Is Happiness by Niall Williams (2019):

My grandparents never took the electricity. They didn’t act as though there was a lack. They carried on as they were, which is the prayer of most people. They lived in that house until they were carried out of it, one after the other. Because the twelve sons in the corners of the worlds couldn’t reach a verdict, the house was left to itself. The thatch started sagging in two places like consternated eyebrows, brambles overtook the potato ridges and came up the garden, and soon enough in under the front door. Soon, you couldn’t see the house from the road. Soon, too, the bits of hedging Doady had stuck into the ditch to camouflage the broken Milk of Magnesia bottles grew to twelve feet and fell over and grew along the ground then, marrying thorn bushes and nettles and making of the whole a miry jungle. When the roof fell in the crows that were in the chimney came down to see the songbirds sitting in Ganga’s chair eating Old Moore’s and that way becoming eternal. When grown a man, one of the Kellys took out the kitchen flagstones for a cabin he was making. He took out the stone lintel over the fireplace after, and a year later came back for half the gable when he needed good building stones for a wall.

In time, as with all modest places of few votes, Government would be looking the other way when its policies closed Faha’s post office, barracks, primary school, surgery, chemist, and lastly the pubs.

In time, the windmills would be coming. Gairdín na scoile and Páirc na mónaigh would be bulldozed to straighten the bends in the road to let the turbines pass. Any trees in the way would be taken down. Two- and three-hundred-year-old stone walls would be pushed aside, the councillors, who had never been there, adjudging them in the way of the future.

By that time, my grandparents’ house would be another of those tumbledown triangles of mossy masonry you see everywhere in the western countryside, the life that was in them once all but escaping imagining.

Why Bernie Sanders would lose to Donald Trump

If Sanders had been allowed to win the Democratic nomination in 2016, it would have been an interesting election: two populists both running against their respective party establishments with a lot of overlap in their platforms, concerning, for example, war, trade, and even the enforcement of immigration laws for the benefit of American workers.

But now in 2020, Sanders has completely adopted the DNC imperative: “Trump is not just a pathological liar, and it’s not just that he is running the most corrupt administration in the modern history of our country, or that he is a racist, sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot. That’s true. But that’s only half the story. The other half of the story is that is that he is a total, 100 percent fraud.” (link) Besides ignoring the fact that he himself was and is still subjected to similar baseless smears, Sanders refuses to acknowledge the overlap of his and Trump’s positions on war, trade, and pro-worker enforcement of immigration laws. In his embrace of the DNC and hatred of Trump, he completely abandoned the latter. And he voted against the USMCA trade agreement that replaces the mutually criticized NAFTA – because, irrelevantly, it doesn’t address climate change! And regarding war, Sanders may occasionally oppose military intervention, but his language repeatedly supports the rationale for it: demeaning other world leaders as thugs and dictators, asserting the USA as necessary to the spread of democracy (which doesn’t reflect much faith in people’s own desire for it, and instead betrays the same tired finger-in-everyone-else’s-pie jingoism by which neoliberal globalism has spread). It is doubtful that he would defy the CIA in any meaningful way but would only continue “humanitarian” intervention, which in action is no different than old-fashioned pillage and slaughter, and in consequence requires virtually permanent occupation since the goal of freedom, democracy, and equality will always remain unattained (especially where the very intervention destroyed (deliberately, as a threat to USA hegemony) the progress that was already being made).

Sanders refuses to acknowledge – and has instead moved away from – not only the concerns that he and Trump had in common in 2016, but also Trump’s progress and achievements on them. He, like all of the Democrats, is running a fantasy campaign. They have so demonized Trump – and his supporters – that they are running against something that doesn’t exist. They are not operating in reality.

In his New York Times editorial board interview (link), Sanders almost acknowledges why voters rejected a continuation of Obama’s failures and took a chance on Trump. But he cannot accept that their choice was informed. He can only explain Trump’s victory as a triumph of racist and sexist demagoguery exploiting desperate people. That requires him to dismiss most voters as deplorable and irredeemable rather than deserving of his interest or concern. Thus Sanders aligns himself with the self-serving ruling elites, not the people.

How did Trump become president? O.K. And I think it speaks to something that I talk about a lot and that is the fact that the — not everybody, but tens and tens of millions of Americans feel that the political establishment, Republican and Democrat, have failed them. Maybe The New York Times has failed them, too.

Brent Staples: That explains the appeal of racism?

Yeah. O.K. What you have is that people are, in many cases in this country, working longer hours for low wages. You are aware of the fact that in an unprecedented way life expectancy has actually gone down in America because of diseases of despair. People have lost hope and they are drinking. They’re doing drugs. They’re committing suicide. O.K. They are worried about their kids. I have been to southern West Virginia where the level of hopelessness is very, very high. And when that condition arises, whether it was the 1930s in Germany, then people are susceptible to the blame game.

To say that it is the undocumented people in this country who are the cause of all of our problems, and if we just throw 10 million people out of the country, you’re going to have a good job, and you’re going to have good health care, and you’ll have good education, that’s all we’ve got to do. So all over the world, Trump didn’t invent demagoguery. It’s an age-old weapon used by demagogues. And you take a minority and you demonize that minority and you blame that minority, whether it’s blacks, whether it’s Jews, whether it’s Latinos, whether it’s Muslims, you name the group — gays? Gays are going to destroy education in America, we all know, yeah. On and on it goes. And you take the despair and the anger and the frustration that people are feeling and you say, “That’s the cause of your problem.”

Now, I think, you raised the question, let me take it a step further. You haven’t asked me, I suppose it’s somewhere on your list, why I think I’m the strongest candidate to beat Trump. Is that on your list of there someplace? Page 2, all right. And that is that there is a hard-core support for Trump, which I’m not going to be able to get through. You’re right. It is racist. It is sexist. I run into that. It’s hard to believe the attitude toward women in some parts of the country. You really would have a hard time to believe it. We’re back into the 18th century in some of these places. It is homophobic. It is anti-immigrant. Do I think I’m going to win those people over? Nah, no way. But do I think we can get a sliver? I can’t tell you how much, 3 percent, 5 percent, 8 percent, of people who voted for Trump because he said, “I am a different type of Republican. I’m not going to cut Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. I’m going to have trade policies that work for workers. We’re not going to be shutting down plants in America.”

But Trump has, unlike his predecessors both Democrat and Republican over the past 40 years, actually followed through on that promise. Insisting that it is not true will not win over voters. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has not betrayed his supporters. Calling people racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-immigrant if they still support him or have come to support him is desperate demagoguery itself, and, with a real alternative in the race – which Sanders himself once represented, but no longer does – it will not win.

[[[[ ]]]]
P.S.  The other Dems have even less chance.

Six common mistakes in Irish | Sé bhotún choitianta sa Ghaeilge

Five years ago, the online Irish culture journal Nós published a short list of common grammatical mistakes (botúin ghramadúla choitianta). They are interesting examples of the unique structure of Irish. Here they are, with translations.

---

MÍCHEART: Bhí sé ag bualadh mé.
CEART: Bhí sé do mo bhualadh.
Ní féidir le forainm (mé, tú, sé, sí srl.) a bheith mar chuspóir ag ainm briathartha.

“He was hitting me.” A pronoun can’t be the object of a verbal noun (present participle).

---

MÍCHEART: Theip mé sna scrúdaithe.
CEART: Theip orm sna scrúduithe.
Ní mór an forainm réamhfhoclach ar a úsáid le teip. Agus scrúduithe seachas scrúdaithe an uimhir iolra atá ag scrúdú.

“I failed in the exams.” The verb teip requires the preposition ar. And scrúduithe instead of scrúdaithe is the plural of scrúdú.

---

MÍCHEART: Bhí an cheist pléite ag an gcoiste aréir.
CEART: Phléigh an coiste an cheist aréir.
Tá rian an Bhéarla ar struchtúr na habairte seo. Ba cheart foirm chaite an bhriathair pléigh a úsáid seachas an aidiacht bhriathartha.

“The committee discussed the issue last night.” The structure of the incorrect example is that of English (“The issue was discussed by the committee last night”). It would be correct to use the past tense of the verb (pléigh) instead of the verbal adjective (past participle).

---

MÍCHEART: Tá sí pósta le beirt pháistí.
CEART: Tá sí pósta agus tá beirt pháistí aici.
Seo tionchar an Bhéarla arís, i.e. married with two children.

“She is married and has two children.” The incorrect example is the effect of English again.

---

MÍCHEART: Féachann na fuinneoga tosaigh amach ar an trá.
CEART: Tá an trá le feiceáil ó na fuinneoga tosaigh.
Is fearr gan gníomh a lua le rud éigin neamhbheo.

“The beach is visible from the front windows.” It’s better not to make a nonliving thing active. (The incorrect example translates to “The front windows look out on the beach.”)

---

MÍCHEART: Bhí mé ag caint léi roimh na Nollag.
CEART: Bhí mé ag caint léi roimh an Nollaig.
Ní chuirtear ainmfhocail sa tuiseal ginideach i ndiaidh roimh. Tá sé de nós ag daoine é sin a dhéanamh sa chaint ach níl sé caighdeánach.

“I was talking with her before Christmas.” A noun is not put in the genitive case after roimh (“before”). It’s customary for people to do that in speech but it is not standard.

Russian Ass-Hat

The charge that Donald Trump “serves the interests of the Russian state and its president, Vladimir Putin,” as Maclean Gander asserts in extensive detail in the November 27 Commons (Windham Co., Vt.), reads like classic conspiracy theory: The premise is assumed to be the conclusion, and thus all evidence, even when countervailing, is presented as confirming it rather than to test it. But conspiracy theories at least call into question the mainstream or official story, whereas the tale of Trump as Russian asset is itself the mainstream prejudice. Gander’s long narrative serves to defend imperial power against any challenge to it. Although he would identify himself as liberal left, his distaste for Donald Trump has caused him to make common cause with war and fear mongers. Or perhaps his nostalgia for the Cold War had already brought him to embrace Barack Obama’s demonization of Putin and by extension all things Russian.

Let us go through his essay, which primarily cites the Mueller report and the Steele dossier as clinching the “conclusion” that “Trump is working on behalf of the Russian state.” But the Mueller report shows nothing of the sort (only that there was no “collusion” between them during the 2016 election campaign), and the Steele dossier has been widely discredited and was itself a product of foreign agents, notably Ukrainians, working first on behalf of Senator John McCain and then for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Never mind, because as if sensing the weakness of those well known fiascos, Gander tells us it’s complicated and that House Democrats are wise to stick to the “simple facts” of withholding aid (military aid, to counter an imagined Russian invasion of western Europe) to Ukraine, and he warns that the larger story may be “darker than anything that we are ready to face.” The darkness we must face,, however, is the attempt to delegitimize, sabotage, and remove the President by means other than electoral — and the forces on whose behalf this is being pursued.

(And ignore the fact that the Ukraine story appeared only after 3 years of prior dud attempts to find something on which to hang impeachment, with a deadline for action looming, i.e., another election year.)

As an aside, it is notable that people like Gander decry Trump’s coup mongering in South and Central America while they pursue the same thing here at home (and supported it in Ukraine in 2014), and that Trump himself lends support to those coups while being subjected to one himself. One of the lines used by all of these coup mongers is that they are acting to protect democracy. By rejecting and overthrowing the people’s choice when you don’t like the result, however, you rather betray yourself as having contempt for democracy and thus for the people themselves.

Back in Gander’s current piece, “the facts of the Ukraine story are clear: Trump abused his power to run a rogue foreign-policy operation ...” — how can the President, the one person responsible for setting foreign policy, run a rogue operation? — “... focused on having the Ukrainian government dig up nonexistent dirt about Joe Biden ... as well as Biden’s son, Hunter ...” — “nonexistent”! Joe Biden is on video boasting about successfully threatening to withhold aid from Ukraine unless the prosecutor investigating the gas company that put Hunter Biden on their board was fired — the very thing that Gander and the House Democrats imagine that Trump did, but to investigate the company and the fact that Biden abused his power on their behalf to protect his son.

The case thus closed, Gander emphasizes that to be an asset does not require conscious or willing agreement nor the belief that one is doing anything wrong. And so the bulk of his essay is a stew of McCarthyite innuendo, ahistorical Putin bashing, and Cold War paranoia. It ends with a hateful and crude “joke” presenting “Russia” as distastefully clever and effective in accomplishing a brutal task that “Britain” and “America” nonetheless also attempt. That’s what it comes down to: a crude cartoon. Because that’s exactly where it started from.

Yarn heard from a burntlander in Panama

«Back when the Fall was fallin’, humans f’got the makin’ o’ fire.  O, diresome bad things was gettin’, yay.  Come night, folks cudn’t see nothin’, come winter they cudn’t warm nothin’, come mornin’ they cudn’t roast nothin’.  So the tribe went to Wise Man an’ asked, Wise Man, help us, see we f’got the makin’ o’ fire, an’, O, woe is us an’ all.

«So Wise Man summ’ned Crow an’ say-soed him these words: Fly across the crazed’n’jiffyin’ ocean to the Mighty Volcano, an’ on its foresty slopes, find a long stick. Pick up that stick in your beak an’ fly into that Mighty Volcano’s mouth an’ dip it in the lake o’ flames what bubble’n’spit in that fiery place. Then bring the burnin’ stick back here to Panama so humans’ll mem’ry fire once more an’ mem’ry back its makin’.

«Crow obeyed the Wise Man’s say-so, an’ flew over this crazed’n’jiffyin’ ocean until he saw the Mighty Volcano smokin’ in the near-far.  He spiralled down on to its foresty slopes, nibbed some gooseb’ries, gulped of a chilly spring, rested his tired winds a beat, then sivvied ’round for a long stick o’pine.  A one, a two, a three an’ up Crow flew, stick in his beak, an’ plop down the sulf’ry mouth o’ the Mighty Volcano that gutsy bird dropped, yay, swoopin’ out of his dive at the last beat, draggin’ that stick o’ pine thru’ the melty fire, whooo-ooo-ooosh, it flamed!  Up’n’out o’ that Crow flew from the scorchin’ mouth, now flew with that burnin’ stick in his mouth, yay, toward home he headed, wings poundin’, stick burnin’, days passin’, hail slingin’, clouds black’nin’, O, fire lickin’ up that stick, eyes smokin’, feathers crispin’, beak burnin’ . . .  It hurts!  Crow crawed.  It hurts!  Now, did he drop that stick or din’t he? Do we mem’ry the makin’ o’ fire or don’t we?

«See now, said Meronym, riding backwards on that lead-ass, it ain’t ’bout Crows or fire, it’s ’bout how we humans got our spirit.»

—Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, 2004

The Kefahuchi Tract: three novels by M. John Harrison

   
This (Light, by M. John Harrison) is an amazing book. The writing is electric, with an authority and mastery I haven't seen since first reading Thomas Pynchon. Harrison is often quite lyrical as well as hep. The book is ultimately ecstatic and poignant both.

There are 3 threads increasing related, one in 1999, 2 in 2400. The latter world is a weird one indeed. The whole book is of a piece, like it all happens at once, all of it happening in every part, similarly but with different players or masks.

Moving on now to the next book in the series: Nova Swing. (main character Vic Serotonin, from Scienza Nuova)

«You sign up for the K-ships in sterile white rooms at even temperatures: nevertheless, whatever you do you can’t get warm. You mustn’t have eaten. They give you the emetics anyway. They give you the injection. They give you the tests, but to be honest that is only to pass the two or three days it takes the injection to work. By then your bloodstream is teaming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to bite on. The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon. They pump you sith a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators. They core you at four points down the spine. You are conscious all the way through this process, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits, even now, don’t make it past that point. If you do, they seal you in the tank. By then they have broken most of your bones, and taken some of your organs out: you are blind and deaf, and all you are aware of is a kind of nauseous surf rolling through you forever. They have cut into your neocortex so that it will accept the software bridge known ironically as the ‘the Einstein Cross’ from the shape you see the first time you use it. You are no longer alone. You will soon be able to consciously process billions of billions of bits per second; but you will never walk again. You will never laugh or touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself again. You have signed up. It comes to you for an instant that you were able to choose this but that you will never, ever, ever be able to unchoose it.» —Light, M. John Harrison, 2002

«Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid – if you stretched a point – and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less that reliable new entertainment technology.

«Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:

«‘I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know?’»

—Light, M. John Harrison, 2002

«Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being – their simple promise – catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.» —Nova Swing, M. John Harrison, 2006

«She found herself descending steep chalky ground into sweeps of water meadow and low-lying pasture dotted here and there with thistles, dog rose and spreading bramble, where willows lined a small river winding through. This composition was spoiled only by the house that stood to one side of the pasture.

«A four-bedroom new build in the 1990s, assembled from unremitting pale brick and still looking like an architectural drawing, it hadn’t weathered. Its profile was low, yet it was clearly not a bungalow. There was a patio like a hard standing for machinery. The white lattices of security grilles, which from a distance looked as if they had been taped on, divided every window. Sunshine glittered off the clutter of photovoltaic and hot water panels set into the shallowly-sloping roof. The only character it possessed lay at the end of its long asymmetric garden: a few trees inherited from some previous, more authentic dwelling on the site. Something resembling life would be lent it each spring by the energetic scraping conversations of the starlings that nested in its gutters. Otherwise, it reminded Anna of a cheap toy abandoned on a carpet; something unable to age because of the sheer purposive artificiality of the materials used to construct it. If it was familiar, she realised, that was because it was her own house.»

—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

Whereas “Light” was about lost memories, the 2nd book in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract series, “Nova Swing”, was about the burden of memories, about trying to liberate oneself from their burden – not to forget, but to be free from serving them.

It’s not as mind-blowing as the 1st book, but great story-telling nonetheless, and it sets up the 3rd book, “Empty Space: A Haunting”, which is again (like the 1st book) set in both the early 21st and the late 25th centuries.

The passages in “Nova Swing” set in the “event zone” (overt nod to the Strugatsky brothers’ “Roadside Picnic” (on which Tarkhovsky’s “Stalker” was based)) are quite moving; the whole book before them seems all to have been for those passages.

«For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse, new universes awaited, furled up like tiny dimensions inside each abandoned technology. Back-engineering became the order of the day. Everyone could find something to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found, you could find something bigger. At the other end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins, nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.

«Ten per cent of it was still functioning. Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the outset: to them, the Beach was an interregnum, a holiday from common sense, an exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, extraordinary, panoramic instant they congratulated themselves on living in: the instant in which everything that went before somehow met and became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.

«It was, in short, a chance to make some money.»

—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

«Projected into the carefully deodorised air of Uptown Six’s human quarters, feeds from fifteen planets showed, in quick succession, all the signs of modern conflict: street demonstrations, agitated financial markets, rows of top-shelf EMC hardware hulking around in parking orbits up and down the Beach. Within an hour all sides were broadcasting atrocity-footage as fast as it could be manufactured. Psychodrama raged. Everyone claimed the minority position. Everyone described their grievances as longer-standing and more asymmetric than the enemy’s. Iconic buildings fell in towers of smoke. Sleeping genes, inserted into entire populations three or four generations in advance, expressed themselves as plagues of ideological change. Up and down the Beach, innocent CEOs, brand managers and celebrities found themselves kidnapped then subjected to sexual assault, at the hands of provocateurs who had no idea why they had begun to act to so illiberally. By noon, exhausted attack ads fluttered up and down the streets of every Halo capital. Gaines studies these indicators with a kind of appalled impatience. Away from the media war not a shot had been fired.» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

«All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Fran-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one. In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war …» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

«‘They’d be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what’s fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone’s stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in.’» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

«He stopped in front of what appeared to be a section of bas reliefs, which showed three modified diapsids wearing complex ritual clothing. One of them was strangling a fourth, who lay passively on what looked like a stone bier.

«‘These people were a million years ahead of us, but they were still trying to work out how to be rational. I don’t think they ever quite made it. …’

...

«Upper management loved itself at war. In the corporate enclaves – which constructed themselves as little market towns called Saulsignon, Burnham Overy or Brandett Hersham, featuring stone churches and water meadows under blue rainwashed skies, perfect windy weather and ponies on the green – war felt real and grown up, a contingency for which your values and education had prepared you. Although obviously some sacrifices would have to be made.»

—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012

« What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories? »

I finished Empty Space: A Haunting last night – what an experience! It’s a complex novel that draws on the 2 previous novels in the series. Mind-bending, to say the least. A poetic epic exploration of the flux of self-creation and -destruction. The physics-confounding Kefahuchi Tract (around which the Beach systems float) is the mad force driving it all, drawing it all.

Microcosm of a postmodern coup

Rashida Tlaib @RashidaTlaib Retweeted Big Boss*:

You are beautiful, A—— A——. You are courageous & strong. You are loved.

You see, A——, you may not feel it now, but you have a power that threatens their core. I can't wait to watch you use it and thrive.

Stay strong.

*Big Boss @escapedmatrix:

Three white boys attacked 12-year-old A—— A——, held her hands behind her back, and cut her dreadlocks.

Second Lady @KarenPence, wife of VP Mike Pence, teaches part-time at #ImmanuelChristianSchool. We will protest in Virginia if this isn't handled.
|
Coming from someone with dreadlocks and love for your skin, you are beautiful A—— A——. You don't deserve this. #JusticeForA——
|
Pardon me, but @FLOTUS your #BeBest campaign isn't working for black kids. Why am I not surprised?
|
.@KarenPence @FLOTUS You're a disgrace to our country, all educational institutions, and our youth in America if you don't immediately address and handle this racism. I'm certain your administration is partially responsible. #BeBestForBlacksToo
|
.@KarenPence @FLOTUS Failure to respond will only confirm, you allow and promote hate crimes committed against black kids in school.
|
.@chelseahandler I thought the #HelloPrivilegeItsMeChelsea thing was about realizing how you can help black people with your white privilege. Ummm. Help perhaps? #JusticeForA—— #2ndChance
|
Now keep in mind, recently a black 6-year-old girl was handcuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum at school. You would think an actual hate crime would receive the same attention. #EndRacism
|
.@BrookeBCNN @donlemon @andersoncooper @maddow We need you all over this. Please amplify #JusticeForA——. #EndRacism
|
The leading headline wasn't 'White kids arrested for assaulting black 12-year-old girl' -- even with a clear article about a black girl assaulted, and a video of her crying as she revisited her pain & fear.

This is what white privilege looks like. #EndRacism
|
Black girl 'says'... after being assaulted by white kids.

Black boy charged... after a white kid gets hit while playing dodgeball.

Aside from the white privilege, notice how the media always paints blacks as the violent ones. Even when it comes to kids. #EndRacism
|

[Notice the muddling of real and fantasy, and confusion of justice versus blind revenge, in the last tweets: The arrest of a 6-year-old girl for a tantrum is outrageous in itself, as is the assault charge against a 10-year-old boy. (And such police-state outrages happen to white kids, too.) Yet the tantrum and the assault actually happened. In this case, in contrast, the girl is reported as merely “saying” she was assaulted, because that is in fact all the information available. An arrest on that basis would only add injustice, however satisfying it may be to some racists. And the media interest in the story, rather than reflecting an anti-black bias, was precisely because it is in line with their narrative of the last 3 years about an existential threat from white racists. And the media reporting of the other cases was precisely to fan the very outrage expressed in these tweets. Also note earlier how quickly this thread became an attack on Trump via Karen Pence working part-time at the school, as if that’s what this is really about.]

|
Thank you @RoArquette for using your platform to call out this racism. #JusticeForA——
|
#ImmanuelChristianSchool told A—— and her grandmother not to speak about her assault on social media, and to just pray about it. That's something Trump or Pence would say, clear signs of a cover-up.

Our message to them is clear. No justice. No peace. #JusticeForA——

Two days later:

Statement of apology from the family of A—— A—— who now admits she made a false assault allegation against 3 white boys in her class. @nbcwashington

[[[[ o ]]]]
New York Times:

“While we are relieved to hear the truth and bring the events of the past few days to a close, we also feel tremendous pain for the victims and the hurt on both sides of this conflict,” the school’s principal, Stephen Danish, said in a statement.

He continued: “We recognize that we now enter what will be a long season of healing. This ordeal has revealed that we as a school family are not immune from the effects of deep racial wounds in our society.”

This is a microcosm of the reaction to Brexit and Trump. The consultant class has joined with the politicians, both elected and not, and the media to defend and restore the neoliberal globalism and neoconservative imperialism that were clearly repudiated in 2016.

They have done this with a narrative smearing that repudiation as a racist backlash that itself must be repudiated, even to spurning democracy and the law.

And so, just as Hillary Clinton started the refusal to accept Trump’s election and still 3 years later eggs it on, just as all of the Democrats clamor for his removal on imagined and increasing hysterical charges, this poor little girl thought it would be OK to make up a racist assault to get a little attention — because, on the model that the presumed “truth” of Trump’s evil – one’s “lived experience” of it – makes actual evidence and unbiased observation an inconvenience to be kicked aside in this righteous crusade, she has evidently absorbed the idea that the truth of racism is bigger than any truth about anything actually happening.

(There’s also the extra frisson of Karen Pence working at the school — one might start to think that there is more to this than one girl’s personal caper.)

If desired evidence isn’t found or isn’t strong enough, then it must be manufactured, so that the truth can be revealed. The consultant class, the academics and NGOs, whose livelihoods depend on fighting or studying injustice, must ensure that injustice persists. They reveal themselves as courtiers to, not the enemies of, power.

This is obviously immoral and destructive. In the name of defending liberalism, it is fanning the flames of hatred, scapegoating now this group now that group, a mob being easily manipulated as the useful idiots of Wall Street and War. It is as fascist as the Western world has come since the end of World War II.

As everyone is urged to assert their myriad victimhoods against an ever-fungible oppressor, real victims of actual crimes are forgotten. Real overarching hierarchies of oppression and inequity are ignored, because the very purpose of all these charades is to protect and preserve injustice.

See also:  “How knitters turned nasty”