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Sunday, March 31, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 32 albums, 8 A-list

Music: Current count 42039 [42007] rated (+32), 31 [28] unrated (+3).

Speaking of Which ran over again. I posted what I had late Sunday night (227 links, 9825 words; the former possibly a record, the latter well above usual but less than 10883 for the week of March 3. (Updated tally: 259 links, 11559 words, so may very well be the biggest one ever.)

I got this started early Monday afternoon, but probably won't post until late, not so much because I expect this to take much as because I'd rather spend the time cleaning up Speaking of Which. I'm under no delusions that what I say here will make any difference to the world, but times like these need witnesses. And that is the one thing I can still offer.

Not a lot of albums this week -- played a lot of old stuff again -- but I'm fairly pleased with the finds this week, including some jazz artists not previously on my radar (Espen Berg, Roby Glod, Nicole McCabe) and a couple old-timers who returned to form with their best releases in years (Kahil El'Zabar, Charles Lloyd). I'll also note that results flipped expectations for two much-hyped reissues (Joe Henderson, Alice Coltrane).

Very little non-jazz this week, especially if you count Queen Esther as jazz (which you should for her better releases below, but not for the still-recommended Gild the Black Lily). Tierra Whack came from Robert Christgau's latest Consumer Guide. I should replay the records he liked better than I did -- Yard Act, Les Amazones d'Afrique, the Guy Davis I reviewed shortly after it came out in 2021. Most other records I have similar grades for (the three I mentioned I'm just one or two notches down on), leaving unheard the Queen compilation and a Thomas Anderson album that isn't streamable yet. By the way, Christgau skipped over Anderson's recent odds & sods set, The Debris Field (Lo-Fi Flotsam and Ragged Recriminations, 2000-2021), which I gave an A- to in my review.

Unpacking below does not include Monday's haul, which looks to be substantial. Most promising among the new releases is Dave Douglas with James Brandon Lewis, but note also a new album with Kevin Sun as Mute. Plus a lot of vault discoveries: Chet Baker/Jack Sheldon, Yusef Lateef, Sun Ra, Art Tatum, Mal Waldron/Steve Lacy, in addition to the Sonny Rollins already uwrapped.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Espen Berg: Water Fabric (2023, Odin): [sp]: A-
  • Espen Berg: The Hamar Concert (2022 [2023], NXN): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Kahil El'Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Open Me, a Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (2023 [2024], Spiritmuse): [sp]: A-
  • Romy Glod/Christian Ramond/Klaus Kugel: No ToXiC (2022 [2024], Nemu): [cd]: A-
  • Julian Lage: Speak to Me (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Remy Le Boeuf's Assembly of Shadows: Heartland Radio (2023 [2024], SoundSpore): [cd]: B
  • David Leon: Bird's Eye (2022 [2024], Pyroclastic): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: A-
  • Nicole McCabe: Live at Jamboree (2023 [2024], Fresh Sound): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Moor Mother: The Great Bailout (2024, Anti-): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Willie Morris: Conversation Starter (2022 [2023], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Willie Morris: Attentive Listening (2023 [2024], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Kjetil Mulelid: Agoja (2022 [2024], Odin): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Queen Esther: Things Are Looking Up (2024, EL): [cd]: A- [04-09]
  • Queen Esther: Rona (2023, EL): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Ron Rieder: Latin Jazz Sessions (2023 [2024], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Viktoria Tolstoy: Stealing Moments (2023 [2024], ACT): [sp]: B+(*)
  • A Tonic for the Troops: Realm of Opportunities (2022 [2023], Odin): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Tierra Whack: World Wide Whack (2024, Interscope): [sp]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert (1971 [2024], Impulse!): [sp]: A-
  • Joe Henderson: Power to the People (1969 [2024], Craft): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Espen Berg Trio: Bølge (2017 [2018], Odin): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Espen Berg Trio: Fjære (2021 [2022], Odin): [sp]: B+(**)
  • The Herb Geller Quartet: I'll Be Back (1996 [1998], Hep): [r]: B+(**)
  • The Herb Geller Quartet: You're Looking at Me (1997 [1998], Fresh Sound): [r]: B+(***)
  • Herb Geller and Brian Kellock: Hollywood Portraits (1999 [2000], Hep): [r]: B+(***)
  • Herb Geller With Don Friedman: At the Movies (2007, Hep): [r]: B+(**)
  • Nicole McCabe: Introducing Nicole McCabe (2020, Minaret): [sp]: A-
  • Nicole McCabe: Landscapes (2022, Fresh Sound New Talent): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Queen Esther: Talkin' Fishbowl Blues (2004, EL): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Queen Esther: What Is Love? (2010, EL): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Queen Esther: The Other Side (2014, EL): [sp]: B+(**)


Limited Sampling: Records I played parts of, but not enough to grade: -- means no interest, - not bad but not a prospect, + some chance, ++ likely prospect.

  • Nicole McCabe: Improvisations (2022, Minaret, EP): [bc]: -


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Owen Broder: Hodges: Front and Center, Vol. Two (Outside In Music) [04-12]
  • Benji Kaplan: Untold Stories (self-released) [05-01]
  • João Madeira/Margarida Mestre: Voz Debaixo (4DaRecord) [02-17]
  • Ivo Perelman Quartet: Water Music (RogueArt) * [04-00]
  • PNY Quintet: Over the Wall (RogueArt) * [03-00)
  • Ernesto Rodrigues/Bruno Parinha/João Madeira: Into the Wood (Creative Sources) [01-09]
  • Sonny Rollins: Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings (Resonance, 3CD) [04-20]
  • Dave Schumacher & Cubeye: Smoke in the Sky (Cellar) [04-19]

 

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I was struck by this meme: "If Israelis stop fighting there will be peace. If Palestinians stop fighting there will be no more Palestinians." The first line is certainly true. This latest war has been so devastating that it's hard to imagine any fight left -- at least of the sort that would strike out at Israelis beyond their wall. The other obvious point is that there's no risk in trying. If Hamas does attack again, Israel can always strike back, and that reaction will be better understood than the systematic, genocidal war Israel is waging.

The second is less obvious, depending on what you mean by "stop fighting." Hamas has never had the capability of fighting Israel like Israel fights Gaza. Hamas has no air force, no navy, no submarines, no tanks, no heavy artillery, no anti-aircraft or anti-missile defenses, no drones. Their rockets are small and unguided, and have never produced more than accidental damage. Aside from the Oct. 7 jailbreak, the only way an Israeli gets hurt is by entering Gaza, and even then the ratio of Palestinian-to-Israeli casualties is 50-to-1 or more. That's not much of a fight.

However, the second line could be rewritten in terms that both sides will agree with, if not agree on: "Palestinians will [only] stop fighting when there are no more Palestinians." An army may sensibly surrender to a more imposing power, but this will only happen if one has hope of surviving and eventually recovering from surrender. Germany and Japan surrendered to the US to end WWII, but only because they believed that they would be given a chance to return to running their own lives. (See John Dower's Embracing Defeat for more on how Japan dealt with this. Japan is a better example than Germany, because its government was still intact when it surrendered, whereas Germany's was in tatters after Hitler's suicide.) A number of American Indian tribes surrendered with similar hopes, even though the US had given them little reason for such hope.

But Israel's current demands for ceasefire terms, following the genocidal threats of Israel's leaders, and the genocidal methodology they've practiced in this war, offer little or no hope to any Palestinian that surrender is anything but suicide. Israelis demand absolute servility, but know that they'll never get everyone to submit, that there will always be resistance of some sort, and as such their security will always be at risk. This presents them with an existential dilemma, to which there are only three solutions: equal rights, separation, or annihilation.

They have long refused to consider equal rights. (Lots of reasons we needn't consider here, like racism and demography.) They've considered separation, at least within certain bounds, but it's naturally a formula for war, so they've insisted on being the dominant power, both by building up a huge military advantage and by preventing Palestinians from ever developing their own popular leadership. But the solution they've always craved was annihilation. The problem there has been finding a time when they could get away with it. Oct. 7 was the excuse they were waiting for, dramatic enough that few of their allies grasped immediately how they had goaded Hamas into action.

Even so, Israel has always had a numbers problem. America was able to reduce its native population to levels where they became politically and economically irrelevant, after which annihilation no longer mattered, and some reconciliation was possible. But for Israel, there were always too many Palestinians, too close by, too economically developed and culturally sophisticated. For just these reasons, colonizers eventually gave up on Algeria and South Africa, but only after extraordinary brutality. Israel is the last to believe they're strong enough to beat down any and all resistance. And that's really because they have few if any scruples against killing every last Palestinian.

And don't for a moment think that Palestinians don't understand this. They've lived through it for decades, and while often beaten down, often severely, they've survived to resist again. They'll survive this, too, and will continue to resist, as peacefully as Israel will allow, or as violently as they can muster.


Looking further down my twitter feed:

From Rami Jarrah: Picture of an adult Palestinian male seated on a couch, surrounded 14 children (a couple into their teens). Text: "Nobody in this photo is alive. Israel's right to self defence."

From Kayla Bennett: Chart image. Text: "One of the most horrifying graphics ever." I looked for an article including the chart, and came up with:

From Ryan Heuser: A link to the website for The New York War Crimes, reporting on propaganda published by The New York Times (motto: "All the Consent That's Fit to Manufacture"). I haven't figured out yet where the illustrations come from.

From Yousef Munayer retweeted Heuser, adding: "A new poll found that even though some 30,000 more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis since October, half of Americans didn't know which side has lost more lives. This has a lot to do with it."

From Etan Nechin retweeted Chris Olley: "[Pennsylvania]'s richest person Jeff Yass is buying Truth Social for $3 Billion so Trump can pay off his $450 Million judgment in return for Trump doing a 180 on his Tiktok and China stance to preserve Yass's $30 Billion-with-a-B stake in Tiktok. We call this oligarchy' when it's elsewhere." Nechin adds: "Notably, Jeff Yass was the main financier of Kohelet Forum, the shadowy organization behind Israel's attempted judicial coup that was championed by the settler far right. These oligarchs care little for democracy, only market interests." The Wikipedia page for Yass is here, which documents all this and more.

From Daniel Denvir: "Truth Social has roughly twice the monthly app users as my niche left-wing intellectual podcast has monthly downloads. The Dig's own healthy but rather modest financial situation suggests to me that this company is not worth nearly $6 billion."

From Paul Krugman: "So, did the ACA bend the cost curve? Call it coincidence, but excess cost growth -- health spending growing faster than GDP -- basically ended when it passed." See chart:

I'm reminded that Switzerland long had the world's second most expensive health care system, with costs increasing in tandem with US costs, until they adopted a universal non-profit insurance scheme. While this was still much more expensive than systems in UK, Germany, and France, it halted the increase, while US costs continue to rise. ACA hasn't worked as well as Switzerland's system -- by design, it isn't universal, and still allows (and sometimes encourages) profit-seeking -- but it was a step in the right direction.


Initial count: 227 links, 9,825 words. Not really finished when posted late Sunday night, so some Monday updates have been added. While sections are marked (like this), minor edits (like the last paragraph above) are not. (Seems like there should be a finer-grained way to do this, but I haven't figured one out yet.

Updated count [03-25]: 259 links, 11,559 words.

Several breaking stories on Monday [03-25] are not reported or reacted to below, but should be significant next week: Here's the "heads up":

  • Luisa Loveluck/Karen DeYoung/Missy Ryan/Michael Birnbaum: [03-25] Netanyahu cancels delegation after US does not block UN cease-fire call: The US, for the first time since Israel attacked Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks, abstained from and didn't veto a cease-fire resolution, allowing it to pass 14-0. This is the first concrete step that the Biden administration is developing a conscience over Israel's genocide. A stronger signal would have been to vote for the resolution. Stronger still would be to withhold aid (especially munitions) until the cease-fire has been implemented (at which point Israel won't need the arms). So Biden still has a long ways to go, but at least he has found a new direction. Next step will be to show Netanyahu that his tantrum is for naught, and that his conceit that he actually runs Washington -- which, by the way, is a big part of his political capital in Israel -- is no longer true.

    PS: Yousef Munayyer tweeted after this: "The US abstention at the UNSC today as well as Netanyahu's reaction to it should be seen as each leader's attempt to manage domestic audiences. What matters is Biden signed off on $4billion more in weapons for Israel to further the genocide. Keep your eye on the ball."

  • Mark Berman/Jonathan O'Connell/Shayna Jacobs: [03-25] Trump wins partial stay of fraud judgment, allowed to post $175 million: This postpones foreclosure on Trump properties, for ten days at least (the time allowed to post the bond).

  • Shayna Jacobs/Devlin Barrett: [03-25] NY judge sets firm April 15 trial date in Trump's historic hush money case.


Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel vs. world opinion:

America's increasingly desperate and pathetic empire:

Election notes: After Super Tuesday, this is turning into a category with not much happening, or at least not much people are bothering to write against. March 19 saw presidential primaries in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, and Ohio. Biden's been winning the Democratic side by a bit over 80%, which isn't great for an incumbent, but also isn't disastrous. Trump wins as easily, but rarely hits 80% -- also not great considering no one is actively running against him. (In Arizona, the figures were 89.3% Biden, 78.8% Trump; in Florida, 81.2% Trump; in Illinois, 91.5% Biden, 80.6% Trump; in Kansas 83.8% Biden, 75.5% Trump; in Ohio, 87.1% Biden, 79.2% Trump; in Louisiana, 86.1% Biden, 89.8% Trump. Missouri had a caucus, where Trump got 100% of 924 votes.

  • Paul Krugman: [03-21] What's the matter with Ohio?

  • Nia Prater: [03-22] The Republican Party is too embarrassing for George Santos: So he's going to run as an independent in Nick LaLota's (R-NY) House district. Most people run as independents because they think they are, but the big advantage for Santos is that he can keep his campaign finance scam going all the way to November, instead of getting wiped out in the primary. So pretty much the same reason Bob Menendez is running as an independent to keep his Senate seat in New Jersey.

Trump, and other Republicans: Salon picks up some substantial pieces, but they also do a lot of stuff that basically amounts to Trump trolling. I usually skip past them, but this week they especially spoke to me, so quite a few got crammed in here this week. I can also give you some author indexes, in case you want to dig deeper (just scanning the titles is often a hoot):

This week's links on all things Republican (the Trumpier the better, but the real evil lies in the billionaire-funded think tanks):

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Perry Bacon Jr: [03-19] Voters of color are shifting right. Are Democrats doomed?

  • Hannah Story Brown: [03-25] Tim Ryan's natural gas advocacy makes a mockery of public service: Ex-Representative (D-OH), ran for Senate and lost, now "leveraging his prior career for a group backed by fossil fuel and petrochemical players." Why do you suppose he couldn't convince voters he'd serve them better than a Republican?

  • Gail C Christopher: [03-22] Stop ageism: A call for action: "It's one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice, and it needs to come to an end in society and this presidential campaign." Really, you think this is going to work? Or even help? Believe me, I know it happens, often in cases where it is inappropriate, but unlike many prejudices, there is also something substantive at root here, and finding the right combination of respect and care and understanding in each distinct case is going to take some work, and not just a bumper sticker slogan.

  • Ryan Cooper: [03-11] Democrats need a party publication: "The New York Times is not going to get Biden's campaign message before voters." Pull quote: "There is a giant right-wing propaganda apparatus blasting Republican messaging into tens of millions of homes every day, which Democrats do not have." Also: "You could do quite a lot of journalism for a tiny, tiny fraction of what the Democrats are going to spend on the 2024 campaign." I figured the line about the New York Times was some kind of joke, but here's the unfunny part:

    A recent speech from New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger makes clear that he -- perhaps unsurprisingly for a scion of multigenerational inherited wealth -- is proud of his paper's ludicrously anti-Biden slant and virulent transphobia, and will keep doing it. If it's up to him, this campaign will center around Biden's age, while Trump's numerous extreme scandals and outright criminality -- as well as his own advanced age and dissolving brain -- will be carefully downplayed. If I were Biden and the Democrats, who implicitly elevate the Times as their counterpoint to Fox, I'd be looking to change that, and quick.

  • James Downie: [03-23] House Republicans just gave Biden the biggest possible gift: "When it comes to Social Security and Medicare, Republicans just can't help themselves." I could have filed this under Republicans, but didn't want this piece to get lost among this week's Trump scuzziness. Trump is a problem, but he's merely cosmetic compared to the deep Republican mindset, which remains set on destroying the institutions that at least minimally protect us from the most predatory practices of capitalism, supposedly in favor of an entrepreneurial utopia. I was pointed to this piece by an Astra Taylor tweet (link just vanished), possibly because the piece itself cites her The Age of Insecurity.

  • Robert Kuttner:

    • [03-18] Man of steel: "President Biden's blockage of the proposed purchase of US Steel by Japan's Nippon Steel is unprecedented and magnificently pro-union."

    • [03-22] The promise of Biden's second term: "And the exemplary effects of his green jobs creation programs in his first term."

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

  • Stephen Lezak: [03-22] Scientists just gave humanity an overdue reality check. The world will be better for it. This follows on [03-20] Geologists make it official: we're not in an 'anthropocene' epoch. For geologists, it's a fairly technical question, and given the ways geologists think about time, I'm not surprised that they don't see need for another division. The Holocene only starts with the retreat of the Wisconsin Ice Age -- the fifth major glacial advance of the Pleistocene, itself an arguably premature designation. (The factors that drove ice ages during the period have are presumably still in place -- certainly the continents haven't moved much, nor has the earth orbit changed, or solar output -- but the atmosphere has been altered enough to make renascent glaciation very unlikely.) Humans started leaving their mark on the Earth's surface as the Holocene started some 11,700 years ago, so the whole epoch could have been named the Anthropocene. Perhaps that seemed presumptuous when first named, and maybe even now, but using 1952 as an convenient dividing line is simply arbitrary.

  • Delaney Nolan: The EPA is backing down from environmental justice cases nationwide.

  • Cassady Rosenblum: [03-23] Blocking Burning Man and vandalizing Van Gogh: Climate activists are done playing nice: This is indicative of what happens with those in power deny, dissemble, and ultimately fail at problems that have become overwhelmingly obvious. Those in power should see protests -- orderly of course, but also disruptive and destructive -- as symptoms of underlying issues that require their attention.

    But most often, they think they can get away with suppressing protests, which by aggravating the protesters while ignoring the problems only makes future protests more desperate, and dangerous. As noted here, "something desperate and defiant is stirring in the climate movement." Signs of escalating tactics are as easily measured as the increasing ppm of greenhouse gases. The tipping points of catastrophic inflections are harder to guess, but their odds are approaching inevitable, as we have observed stressed humans do many times before, in many comparable situations.

  • David Wallace-Wells: [03-20] When we see the climate more clearly, what will we do? There is not a satellite designed to locate methane leeks.

Business/economic matters:

Ukraine War:

Around the world:

  • Connor Echols: [03-20] US 'prepared to deploy troops to Haiti if necessary. If Biden goes along with this, I dare say it would be political suicide. For Trump, as for most US presidents going back to Thomas Jefferson, Haiti is the quintessential "shithole country." Right-thinking Americans would bristle at the idea of doing anything to help there. Realistic Americans would realize that the US military is not capable of helping, and that its entrance would make matters worse. The left should be pushing back against Biden's warmaking on all fronts. And nobody wants another costly quagmire.

  • Sam Knight: [03-25] What have fourteen years of Conservative rule done to Britain? "Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted by constant drama. But the UK can't move on from the Tories without facing up tot he damage that has occurred."

  • Robert Kuttner: [03-13] WTO, RIP: "The annual World Trade Organization meeting came to an ignominious end last week with no 'progress' on major issues. That is a form of progress."

  • Emily Tamkin: Slovakia's presidential election is a warning to America: "What to see what the United States would look like under a reelected Trump?"


Other stories:

Laura Bult: [03-21] Why it's so hard for Americans to retire: "There's a reason so many of us don't have enough retirement savings." Video piece, but links to Teresa Ghilarducci's book, Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy. Probably good, but Astra Taylor covers the key point in her The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.

Stephanie Burt: Lucy Sante and the solitude and solidarity of transitioning: "In her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, Sante dissects her past in order to understand her future."

David Dayen: [01-29] America is not a democracy. Long piece from the print magazine. Seems like I should have noticed it before. Too much to get into just now.

Sarah Jones: The exvangelicals searching for political change. Self-evident neologism is from the book reviewed herein, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church, by Sarah McCammon. Related here:

  • Carlene Bauer: [03-12] She trusted God and science. They both failed her. Review of Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, by Anna Gazmarian, "an author who grew up in the evangelical church recounts her struggle to find spiritual and psychological well-being after a mental health challenge."

Rich Juzwiak: [03-12] A biography of a feminist porn pioneer bares all: "In Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, the historian Jane Kamensky presents a raw personal -- and cultural -- history." Another review:

Keren Landman: [03-20] Abortion influences everything: "By inhibiting drug development, economic growth, and military recruitment, as well as driving doctors away from the places they're needed most, bans almost certainly harm you -- yes, you."

Katie Moore: [03-17] When Kansas police kill people, the public often can't see bodycam footage. Here's why.

Marcus J Moore: [03-21] The visions of Alice Coltrane: "In the years after her husband John's death, the harpist discovered a sound all her own, a jazz rooted in acts of spirit and will." I'll say something about this in Music Week. Meanwhile:

Rick Perlstein: [03-20] 'Stay strapped or get clapped': "How the media misses the story of companies seeking profit by keeping traumatized veterans armed and enraged."

Andrew Prokop: [03-21] The political battle over Laken Riley's murder, explained: Riley was a 22-year-old student in Georgia who was murdered, allegedly by an "illegal immigrant," an event seized upon by right-wing agitators, like the guy who tweeted: "If only people went to the streets to demand change in the name of Laken Riley, like they did for George Floyd." Article provides more details. While the murders as isolated events were equivalent, the policy considerations are very different, starting with responsibility for enabling the killers, and regarding the more general context.

One not even mentioned here is the effect of the sanctions and isolation policy toward Venezuela -- mostly but not exclusively Trump's work -- and how that has driven many, including Riley's alleged killer, to migrate to the US. Prokop: "But reality is also more complicated than Trump's promises that he'll fix everything by getting tougher once he's president."

Brian Resnick: [03-22] The total solar eclipse is returning to the United States -- better than before: "This will be the last total solar eclipse over the contiguous United States for 21 years." I find myself with zero interest in looking up, much less traveling to do so, but family and friends in Arkansas are lobbying for visitors, and I know some people who are going. April 8 is the date.

Dylan Scott: [03-22] Kate Middleton's cancer diagnosis is part of a frightening global trend: "More and more young people are getting cancer." I have zero interest in her, or in any of "those ridiculous people" (John Oliver's apt turn of phrase), and so I've ignored dozens of pieces on them recently, but there's something more going on here. Every category of cancer they used is more common among ages 14-49 than it was in 1990. My wife swears it's environmental, and while I can think of statistical variations, I'm inclined to agree.

Jeffrey St Clair: [03-22] Roaming Charges: L'état sans merci. "Willie Pye is dead and Georgia is back in the execution business." This introduces a long section on what passes for justice in America. Much more, of course. For more on Pye, see:

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: [03-20] The problematic past, present, and future of inequality studies: Interview with Branko Milanovic, whose lates book is Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War.

Dodai Stewart: [03-16] You're not being gaslit, says a new book. (Or are you?) Review of Kate Abramson: On Gaslighting. Demands precision of a phenomenon that is deliberately imprecise ("all kinds of interactions -- lying, guilt-tripping, manipulation"; "a multi-dimensional horror show"). Cites Harry G Frankfurt's On Bullshit (2005) as a "spiritual forebear."

Astra Taylor/Leah Hunt-Hendrix: [03-21] The one idea that could save American democracy: Tied to the authors' new book, Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. Also:

By the way, I just found a link to audio for Astra Taylor: [2023-11-17] The Age of Insecurity: 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, with five hour-long lectures corresponding to the book I just read, and recommend as highly as possible -- I'd go so far as to say that she's the smartest person writing on the left these days. I was pointed to the lectures by a daanis tweet: "I finally listened to @astradisastra Massey Lectures on my way to Boston, just mainlined them one after another straight into my brain, and added her language about precarity and insecurity into my own remarks about surviving together by becoming kin."

Maureen Tkacik: [03-11] 'Return what you stole and be a man with dignity': "Doctors didn't think it was possible to loathe the world's biggest health care profiter any more. Then came the hack that set half their bookkeeping systems on fire." About the ransomware outage at Change Healthcare, which is owned by UnitedHealth ("the nation's fifth-largest company").

Bryan Walsh: [03-22] Baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani has been caught up in a gambling controversy. He won't be the last. One of the biggest changes in my lifetime has been the changed attitude toward gambling, which in my mother's day was a degenerative sin indulged by lowlifes, much to the profit of mobsters. Today the mobsters have turned into Republican billionaires -- hard to say whether that's a step up or down ethically -- and their rackets have moved out into the open. For a long time, the shame of the Black Sox kept the lid on sports gambling, but that's been totally blown open in the recent years. I hate it, which doesn't mean I want to try to ban it, but those involved are no better than criminals, and should be reminded of it as often as possible.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Daily Log

Gretchen Eick has signed off on my revised "Reading Obits" piece, for inclusion in a second edition of The Death Project: An Anthology for These Times (Blue Cedar Press, original edition, edited by Eick and Cora Poage, published 2020). Eick and Michael Poage (Cora's father) are close personal friends, as well as owners of Blue Cedar Press, and my wife does significant unpaid editing work for them, so my inclusion is arguably just a favor. It certainly doesn't mark much of a breakthrough in me being anything but self-published, but I chose to spin it a bit in a series of tweets:

Felt like noting that I have an essay selected for a 2nd ed of "The Death Project." I've self-published millions of words, but that anyone else shows an interest - in this case a 2011 blog on "Reading Obits" - so this is some kind of personal milestone. More later.

"The Death Project" was published in 2020 when, well, you remember (don't you?). A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry, which has a rep as the worst seller ever at Blue Cedar Press. Link to original edition (w/o my essay): link.

Blue Cedar Press is run by friends - it's been a long time since I've pitched pieces to strangers, and I can't recall any approaching me - so perhaps they're just humoring me. But they've published excellent work over the years, especially this novel: link

The original 2012 "Reading Obits," is still in the notebook (link follows). It's on how hard it is to keep track of people you've known, who were important to you, as they pass, and how unmoored one feels not knowing. I had to revise, as people keep dying: link.


Submitted "voluntary recall of certain models of Cosori air fryers."

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 33 albums, 8 A-list

Music: Current count 42007 [41974] rated (+33), 28 [27] unrated (+1).

Just a day late, although it feels like longer, and feels like it should have been longer still. I did manage to wrap up a small essay that's been hanging over my head for weeks -- or at least I'm hoping, as a final sign off would be nice. This pushed Speaking of Which back a day, which I didn't mind.

While I've occasionally threatened to kill it, the process of scanning my news sources, plucking out what strikes me as important and/or interesting, and occasionally commenting -- sometimes taking off on a tangent of personal/philosophical interest, sometimes just to heckle -- has been giving me a strange sense of comfort in what are clearly discomforting times.

Besides, this week the writing project I most seriously considered killing was Music Week. As to why, you're free to dig into the notebook, but what you'll find there is rather sketchily one-sided, with very little of what I really think, let alone why. Nor is there more than a hint of how much pain and anger I've felt this week. In my experience, such emotions do no good, although for better or worse -- sure, mostly the latter -- they are a big part of who I am, and how I came to be this way.

You also can simply ignore most of that paragraph, and just accept what I have to say in this one. Music Week changed this week, and may be changed for good, although I rather doubt it. Midweek I stopped reviewing new music, so everything in this week's "New records" section was done by Wednesday last. I don't plan on resuming any time soon, although that's no guarantee I won't have a few next week, and the odds of at least some appearing increase over time. In particular, it's inevitable that at some point I'll return to my promo queue, and when I do play something, I'll probably write it up in my logs, because, well, that's what I do.

Indeed, I started on that this week. After several days of playing my kind of comfort food, I decided I wanted to hear some Art Pepper. But instead of pulling out an old favorite -- of which there are dozens, including any random disc in The Complete Galaxy Recordings -- I remembered a 7-CD box that came out last year, that I thought I could stream. I put it off, mostly due to the length, but I figured I had time now, and was looking to fill it up. Unfortunately, while the title is listed (The Complete Maiden Voyage Recordings, what's actually available is a 4-CD release from 2017, which I couldn't find a label for. But I did find an Unreleased Art volume I hadn't heard, and that got me looking around. And as I did play them, I wound up doing what I always do.

I trust there are no surprises in the "Old music" section this week. Four A/A- records are ones I previously had graded that high in other forms. Getz's Nobody Else but Me is an old standby from one of the primo shelves, and I was surprised I only had it listed at B+, so an upgrade was clearly in order. The Jaki Byard is a bootleg that Allen Lowe raved about. I found it when I was trying to clear up some tabs, and decided I might as well play it, and write it up.

I moved from Getz to Geller by proximity. He's long fascinated me, so seemed worth the dive. Playing him now as I write, so next Music Week will at least have him. His late period seems to produce consistently fine but less than spectacular records.

Indexing February still delayed, as is damn near everything else in my life.

By the way, Kansas's first presidential primary in ages was today. We braved a line of absolutely no one to vote for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary. I gave up my Independent status in 2008 to caucus for Obama (against Clinton), and again in 2016 for Sanders (again, against Clinton), both of whom won big in Kansas. Williamson didn't win: current returns (91.9% in) give her 3.4% to Biden's 83.9%, with 10.2% "none of the names shown." Still, anyone who wants to create a Department of Peace gets my vote over Biden's war machine.

Trump is leading Haley 75.3% to 16.1%, with 5.2% for "none of the names shown." Trump had lost the 2016 caucus to Cruz.

PS: Oops! Was thinking about this most of the week, then slipped my mind when I initially posted. Meant to mention that the rated count ticked over another thousand mark this week, now over 42,000.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Lynne Arriale Trio: Being Human (2023 [2024], Challenge): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Blue Moods: Swing & Soul (2023 [2024], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gerald Cannon: Live at Dizzy's Club: The Music of Elvin & McCoy (2023 [2024], Woodneck): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Chick Corea Elektric Band: The Future Is Now (2016-18 [2023], Candid, 2CD): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Patrick Cornelius: Book of Secrets (2022 [2023], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Stephan Crump: Slow Water (2023 [2024], Papillon Sounds): [cd]: B+(***) [05-03]
  • Art Hirahara: Echo Canyon (2023, Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Mannequin Pussy: I Got Heaven (2024, Epitaph): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Pissed Jeans: Half Divorced (2024, Sub Pop): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Diego Rivera: With Just a Word (2022 [2024], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Jeremy Rose & the Earshift Orchestra: Discordia (2023 [2024], Earshift Music): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Bill Ryder-Jones: Iechyd Da (2024, Domino): [sp]: A-
  • Nadine Shah: Filthy Underneath (2024, EMI North): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Sheer Mag: Playing Favorites (2024, Third Man): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution (2024, Moikai): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Hein Westergaard/Katt Hernandez/Raymond Strid: The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn (2022 [2024], Gotta Let It Out): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

None

Old music:

  • Jaki Byard: Live in Chicago 1992 (1992, Jazz³+): [yt]: B+(**)
  • Herb Geller: European Rebirth: 1962 Paris Sessions (1962 [2022], Fresh Sound): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Herb Geller: Plays the Al Cohn Songbook (1994 [1996], Hep): [r]: B+(**)
  • Herb Geller: To Benny & Johnny, With Love From Herb Geller (2001 [2002], Hep): [r]: B+(**)
  • Herb Geller: Plays the Arthur Schwartz Songbook (2005, Hep): [r]: B+(**)
  • Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd: Jazz Samba (1962, Verve): [sp]: A-
  • Stan Getz With Al Haig: Prezervation (1948-51 [1967], Prestige): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Art Pepper & Warne Marsh: Unreleased Art: Volume 9: At Donte's, April 26, 1974 (1974 [2016], Widow's Taste, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)
  • Art Pepper: Surf Ride (1952-53 [1957], Savoy): [sp]: A-
  • Art Pepper Quintet: Live at Donte's 1968 (1968 [2004], Fresh Sound, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
  • Art Pepper/Warne Marsh: Art Pepper With Warne Marsh (1956 [1986], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: A-
  • Art Pepper: No Limit (1977 [1978], Contemporary): [sp]: A-
  • Art Pepper: Saturday Night at the Village Vanguard (1977 [1992], Contemporary/OJC): [r]: A-
  • Art Pepper: More for Les: At the Village Vanguard, Volume Four (1977 [1992[, Contemporary/OJC): [sp]: A
  • Sonny Redd/Art Pepper: Two Altos (1952-57 [1992], Savoy): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Sonny Red: Out of the Blue (1959-60 [1996], Blue Note): [sp]: B+(***)


Limited Sampling: Records I played parts of, but not enough to grade: -- means no interest, - not bad but not a prospect, + some chance, ++ likely prospect.

  • Stephan Crump/Steve Lehman: Kaleidoscope and Collage (2011, Intakt): [sp]: -


Grade (or other) changes:

  • Stan Getz: Nobody Else but Me (1964 [1994], Verve): [cd]: [was: B+]: A-


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Martin Budde: Back Burner (Origin) [03-22]
  • Four + Six: Four + Six (Jazz Hang) [03-29]
  • Romy Glod/Christian Ramond/Klaus Kugel: No Toxic (Nemu) [01-02]
  • Johnny Griffin: Live at Ronnie Scott's (1964, Gearbox)
  • Jazz Ensemble of Memphis: Playing in the Yard (Memphis International) [04-05]
  • Last Day Quintet: Falling to Earth (Origin) [03-22]

Monday, March 18, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Daily Log

I started to write a thing on two-state vs. one-state confusion in Israel/Palestine, then decided to pull it. Here's a salvaged fragment:

Not least because it extracts "two-staters" from the conflict and responsibility for its recent escalation. We need to consider a few definitions to clear up this muddle:

  • The fundamental political division is between left and right. The right promotes inequality and defends hierarchy, using all forms of persuasion including religion and violent force to secure and maintain its preferred order. The left believes that all people should be treated equally. If given no better alternative, the left may attempt revolution, but prefers democratic processes, because in the end, most people will agree to equality, while hardly anyone will submit to tyranny.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Daily Log

On Monday, I posted a review:

Laura Jane Grace: Hole in My Head (2024, Polyvinyl): Originally Thomas Gabel, singer-guitarist leader in punk group Against Me!, third solo album, a short one (11 songs, 25:28). Still sounds male, so you can just bracket the trans angle. Songs open up a bit towards folk, partly to expound on politics, e.g.: "out in the country is where fascists roam." B+(***) [sp]

Melody Esme, a former rock critic (under a different name) I respected enough to accept a Facebook friend request, commented:

I didn't get around to replying, but then Joey Daniewicz posted a screen grab of the review with this:

yo Tom Hull you cannot, cannot, cannot, absolutely cannot write about trans people this way

Esme chimed in again:

If I saw this review with no name attached, I'd assume a TERF wrote it

Even more upsetting considering LJG has been vocal about how much she wishes that name could be scrubbed from the Internet

Daniewicz added:

Per Melody's research, this isn't a one off. Tom Hull seems to have a compulsive name to deadname the trans subjects of his reviews.

Iris Demento, commented:

Sincerely doubt Tom meant harm but I agree. I profiled a trans artist in 2016 and didn't understand the negative gravity of deadnaming and I regret asking the subject for it as part of journalistic background, which I bet is where this impulse is coming from. Please rewrite this one without the "trans angle," deadnaming, or "sounds male." It's Laura's best in about a decade and she deserves the respect and professionalism.

I had been stewing on this since the original comment, and finally wrote this:

But I absolutely can, and did -- using the "archaic" meaning of those words, the one I first encountered in learning English, and not the one Joey seems to mean -- "write about trans people this way." And, as you may surmise and/or guess, so I have in the past, and there's little reason to doubt I will again in the future. Last time, as best I recall, I got roasted for not mentioning that an artist is trans, so with some people on this subject at least there may be no way out. I often do start reviews off with the actual name behind an alias: I find that a short list of background facts helps get me started, and mapping a real name to an alias helps (I think) connect me to that person, although it may well disclose attributes like sex or ethnicity that aren't necessarily relevant or important). "Deadnaming" is new vocabulary for me, although I can intuit its meaning, see its relevance, and still conclude it's not my problem. "TERF" I had to look up, and see no use for. Like "transphobic," it is a hateful term that is almost always be applied to castigate other people (unlike "racist" and "antisemite," which were originally coined by people to describe themselves). And note that I'm not saying that "*phobic" has no political value. It both suffices to label all-too-common attitudes and it turns the tables by pointing out that much hatred is used to mask fear. But when you apply to term to me, I have to ask "what's my fear?" -- and I can't find it. What I find instead is an effort at bullying, at coercing (even if just by guilt-tripping) me into using your wording and framing. And since I can't possibly mold myself into your mental framework, that's tantamount to telling me to just stop writing. I must say, it's tempting. On the other hand, I remember a day long ago when my boss told me I had a "bad attitude." I doubt she had any idea how bad that attitude would get once I embraced it. By the way, do some research of your own, on what "bracket" means. Start with Husserl. Before your time, most likely, but not before mine. Some of us earned the right to be archaic.

"TERF" stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. There is a long discussion of the term on Wikipedia, which of course links to Transphobia.

Note: The following postscript was written on 2024-03-16, but obviously belongs here.

I read several more comments the next day, then stopped for several days. When I returned to collect the more thoughtful ones here, I found the thread had 43 comments, which is probably more than my last ten Music Week notices had elicited. In chronological order (skipping a few with no interest). First, directly under my comment:

  • Joey Daniewicz: I didn't apply any of these terms to you. You've earned way less than you think, and this stands to be an area of deep personal embarrassment for your work.

  • Iris Demento: Tom if you admit that you're not familiar with the term "deadnaming" before today, please listen: doing it would not fly with any editor in 2024 whose publication isn't a Republican nest. Doing it in any workplace in 2024 would get you written up and sent to HR if not cause for termination. The level of disrespect and bigotry (and pain it causes) to knowingly call a trans person by their deadname at this time is considered to be on the level of calling someone a racial or homophobic slur. If those are things you also would not do (or defend by saying you've "earned the right to be archaic") you should not do this either. This is completely at odds with virtually all other evidence of your values that I have seen.

  • Heather Batson: I think the shocking thing here is there have been some big shifts in how we discuss trans topics and how a transition related name change is now treated as a special case. For most trans artists in 2024, a name change is not a simple artistic alias, though! It certainly makes sense to anchor her in her role with Against Me, but when a trans person changes her name in all areas of life, as Grace did, their birth name should not be thought of as their 'real name' but a wrong name forced on them for years. It is understood now that in this situation the 'real name' is the chosen legal name. This can be confusing when it comes to artists who may have a stage name separate from a legal name, but in the case of Grace, it is pretty easy to find that she is pained by her deadname and that Laura Jane Grace is clearly her real name. 'Sounds male' was like a gut punch level of rude. Like Iris, I am sure this is not intended to offend, so please know we are engaging because we care. I certainly don't want you to stop writing or feel you need my mindset on trans issues but I do want you to know that there is an updated style guide for best practices. I'm pushing 50 myself so I'm no youngster and I have to constantly relearn how to discuss certain things--but that is just part of how rapid culture shifts go!

  • Melody Esme: I don't care if you're personally transphobic or not. I think your review is deeply transphobic, and that your doubling down and disregarding terms relating to my community's shared experiences shows a lack of care in how you write about certain subjects of your reviews. Why bother reviewing Laura Jane Grace, or Backxwash, or Ezra Furman, or Laura Les, or SOPHIE, or any of the other trans artists who've put their souls into their art if you don't care to understand the fundamentals of what they're singing about? Who does it help to bring up an old name somebody purposefully shed because it causes them pain? "Laura Jane Grace" isn't a fucking non de plume, it's her name, and she's made it clear that the repeated printing of her old name hurts her. Your SOPHIE review deadnamed her and I don't even know how you did that, since her deadname has hardly even been reported -- I didn't even know it was publicly known until I read that review, to be honest. You don't include Kim Petras' deadname in your blurbs on her work, I'm guessing because it's hard to find, and the reviews don't suffer from that missing context at all. Your phobia is in your reluctance to change in a way that doesn't affect you at all but would make people in a marginalized community feel more comfortable and understood. In recent years, Christgau has made strides in improving the ways he writes about transgender artists -- even switching off on all of Ezra's (at the time) pronouns in his review of Twelve Nudes, which I thought was really cute. Rather than quitting writing, you could follow in his example and just stop writing about this one group of people in a way we unanimously find insulting and bigoted. Also, please never, ever, ever say that a trans woman sounds male. It kinda sucks a lot.

  • Eric Johnson: I'm sure you have earned the right to be archaic, but that's not really the issue.

    Archaic or modern, I'm sure you don't want to be hateful or hurtful. That's really the issue. Folks here are giving you credit for your good intentions and asking you to get your public words in line with those intentions. Please listen to them.

  • Eric Johnson: Tom Hull I hope it doesn't seem like I'm piling on. Again, this is on the Spirit of hoping you can understand why this is such a concern.

    I completely get being defensive here. But imagine going through a tremendous amount of physical, psychological, and medical work in order to make the way people see you on the outside match up with the way you have _known_ you are on the inside for a long time. Imagine doing that in a country where a major political party has turned you into a public target.

    Then imagine that someone who is ostensibly evaluating your music (or the music of another trans person) virtually ignores the musical content and spends pretty much the entire review claiming that all the work you put in making your inner and outer selves match was a charade, and claiming that "the trans angle" could be "bracketed" while really making the entire review about that angle.

    That's got to be a significantly worse feeling than the feeling we get when we get called out on account of our choices in words. So please don't let feeling sorry for yourself about this overcome the kind of empathy that makes you a good writer.

    Laura Jane Grace is not an alias, full stop. That's her name. That's who she is.

    For the record, I'm nearly 59. I know what it's like to feel like there's no right way to say something. But please listen to people who are trying to help you here.

Other comments (with threads):

  • Mark Kemp: Ugh! The weird thing is how much space the writer devotes, at this point, to LJG's transition (and, of course, the bizarre language he uses to talk about it), and how little he spends on characterizing the actual music. Reading this, I have no idea what the album sounds like.

  • Boris Palameta: Don't want to pile on here, I respect Tom a lot as a writer. And professional standards are important - though ever-shifting, as several have pointed out. And rightly so, as we listen and learn more about lived experience. As an old guy who's only recently begun to manage openly non-binary and trans staff, when they tell me what's important and what hurts, I believe them.

  • Alfred Soto: Tom, let me be as polite as possible. You seem more peeved that ugly-sounding neologisms are allowed to persist rather than trying to understand how/why they work. To respond like you did without referring to the people to whom those neologisms apply strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of how writing works, as if you thought a euphonic sentence couldn't possibly be amoral.

  • Phil Overeem: As a fellow older cis gender straight male with Kansas roots and pressurized conservative Christian post-birth incubating (I'm not sure we share that last part, Tom, but probably we do), I'd like to chime in. I was ignorant for a long time about trans people while fighting my way out of other modes of thinking until I moved to Columbia, Missouri, to teach. I have taught several trans kids, two in particular who hadn't begun transitioning when I first met / taught them and one of whom was the child of two good friends and fellow teachers. Watching those students struggle with family, friends, random hostile fellow humans, and institutions as they went through the process (including surgery) and found their true selves and as much happiness as anyone can expect in this world taught me extremely well. I have been fortunate to be able know them for that expanse of their lives. I'm still struggling to "see" my current trans students and a fellow worker with ease and habitual respect (I still screw up pronouns on occasion when my visual sense blinds what I know), but I'm getting there, and making sure I include material in class that speaks to them helps everyone--including me, because one of the best ways to really learn something is to teach it, especially over and over. Again, I'm not where I need to be, but I'm close, and it is essential I get there.

    I know you are a copious reader, and I've always been of the mind that, when all else fails, READ. I am including the covers of four very disparate books that have really opened my eyes and heart: a memoir (Lucy Sante's, which I just finished and am still processing), a YA novel--I try to read one every year--about an intersex kid, a NYC-set group of dazzling but often heart-rending stories about trans life by a trans Chilean author, and Torrey Peters' very complex (for a cis mind), funny, and torturous DETRANSITION, BABY.

    One reason I was so fully behind Anohni's album last year was how it dovetailed with the impact of my experiences with students and those books. It's really good aesthetically, but its power as a statement about how it must feel to be trans and try to live in this country (and world) made it impossible for me NOT to understand that feeling and feel it empathetically as much as that's possible for someone like me.

    Tom, we also both live in states where our legislators and many of our fellow residents are a straight-up danger to the lives of trans people, so I think that further obligates us to be as supportive as we possibly can as we keep trying to understand more fully.

    • Phil Overeem: Maybe I'm way off base with this reply and it's about linguistics more than anything. If so, I'm not sure it still wouldn't be helpful, but I'm just trying to help.

    • Tim Niland: I agree, when I moved to blue state New Jersey from the highly Republican/Catholic Upstate NY area where I grew up in 2001 I had no idea. Working in a public library for fifteen years was a big eye-opener for me, learning and becoming much more empathetic toward LGBTQI+ issues. It's a process, we all learn and grow, I don't think Tom meant ill will.

    • Phil Overeem: Tim, I cannot imagine he would be deliberately hurtful.

    • Alfred Soto: Phil, using the language of DeSantis to adduce his toughness sure doesn't help. [TH: what the fuck is he talking about here?]

    • Phil Overeem: I don't get why he used it. It doesn't sound like him. [TH: does Overeem know?]

    • Phil Overeem: Heather, thank you. I "read around" and in this case it's been really important. Have you read any of those?

    • Heather Batson: Phil Overeem during the pandemic I was in a book group with - a few gender variant and trans pals, and with them, I read detransition Baby and LOVED it. one of those friend told me too much about None of the Above so then I didn't read it 😂, and I recently heard a long interview with Lucy Sante that I really enjoyed so I'm on a waiting list for the ebook from the library but did not read yet!

  • Scott Coleman: Although the review makes me uncomfortable, so does reposting it here. A comment could have been sent to Tom on his site to discuss the issue. That may have been more effective in prompting a consideration of the very real issue and would likely have been perceived as less confrontational.

    • Joey Daniewicz: My impression had been that Tom had ignored engagement on the issue previously. Thanks for your comment

    • Kenneth Coleman: But we do this kind of thing all the time with Christgau reviews. While I think it's wrong to repost private conversations, this was a public review for all the world to see. And since Hull runs the Christgau site and does reviews in the same format, many of us view his site as something of a more jazz-friendly extension of the Consumer Guide. I suppose there's a difference in that Hull actually posts here on occasion. But if Christgau (or Greil Marcus) participated here, I would assume we could still use this space to point out problematic aspects of their reviews.

      I probably wouldn't have framed or worded my critique like Joey Daniewicz did, but I definitely support the crux of it--and his right to use this space this way. It's also evident here that more constructive attempts with collegial, good faith suggestions also hit a brick wall.

  • Greg Morton: I would just like to remind everyone that someday you'll be older too, and new conventions will happen faster than you can keep up with.

    • Alfred Soto: Greg sure, but I intend to keep my sense of empathy, especially when a thread has the folk he's referring to

      • Greg Morton: Just ftr, I was referring to myself with my previous comment. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as "deadnaming" til this all came up. And if I may be so bold, if there were an Empathy Quotient test I would happily compare my score with anyone. So much so that I feel a substantial regret for everyone involved in this conversation. Not least Hull, and Grace, who probably doesn't know that this battle is being fought in her name. And oh yeah, the 81 year old who prompted this whole site.

      • Brian O'Neill: Being ignorant of something is fine. However when I find I am guilty of this and it results in me saying or posing something that is hurtful, and I am informed of this, my response is to apologize, learn from it, and not do it again.

        The author's response in this thread did not instill me with confidence that he even understands the issue, let alone would take steps to not repeat it.

        • Alfred Soto: And the I-won't-back-down attitude in the post was jaw-dropping. Your boss thought you difficult? Um, okay?

  • Alfred Soto: I don't even know the posters who _liked_ Hull's post.

I was tempted to respond to Soto's last post: "I didn't notice any who did." Some were less hostile, but everyone who commented except me seemed to agree with the charges.

Another comment that occurred to me is: "Thank you for your comments. I will take them under advisement." I do, and I will, but at this late date, it seemed unwise to prime this particular pump.

But my gut feeling right now is pure trauma. It's exactly the same feeling I had after two gunmen broke into our house, hogtied me in the basement, ransacked the place, stealing everything they took a fancy in, then kidnapped my wife. (After several hours, she was abandoned in our car they stole, and contacted the police, who ultimately rescued me.) Well, it probably won't last that long (unless I keep writing this entry). Probably more like the time Dana Daum screamed at me for disobeying a software design order I found completely unreasonable. (It was, by the way, a grudge he never showed any sign of giving up.)

So this hurts. But most immediately, this makes me very angry. And that's something I'm not used to, and not at all comfortable with. That brings up the obvious question, which is whether I should retreat from my anger -- an easy way to do that would be to follow through on my threat to stop writing reviews, which is what I've mostly (but not yet publically) done this week, or channel that anger into more pointed writing. I'm reminded here that China Miéville, in his book on The Communist Manifesto, sees anger as valuable (maybe even essential) to political writing.

One thing I can say is that I won't be going on an anti-trans rant, nor am I likely to try to raise my unhappiness into a defense of free speech against the vigilantes of political correctness and cancel culture. (Does the DeSantis thing mean they think I'm calling them woke?)

One thing I will grant is that some of the points above deserve future consideration. But even having considered them, I still like my review. Aside from pissing off more people off than expected, it says what I wanted to say, precisely and economically. I'm loathe to follow Trump and claim it's a "perfect review" -- it certainly isn't (for one thing, the transition from "folk" to politics ought to be more secure, and I haven't figured out how the politics relates to the "trans angle" I perhaps too cavalierly brushed aside -- but for my everyday purposes it sufficed. In particular, I don't buy that "sounds male" is an insult, and it definitely isn't inaccurate.

True that I didn't really need to mention trans at all, and that may be the best way forward, but it seems like everywhere I look it's made up to be such a big deal. And it's hard to say it isn't without mentioning what it is.

Some of this will come out in next Monday's Music Week. How much, we'll see. I'm sorely tempted to quash it, but having written reviews before this blew up, I should probably go ahead and post what I have.

Super late here and now, but at least I won't have to start Sunday with this as something to do. "Reading Obits" edit done, should be good to go after a quick re-read. "Speaking of Which" crunch time. It won't be super-big, but I have a good start on it already.


Updates, compiling on March 22. Not sure I need any more of this, but it does keep coming.

  • Rex Harris: I'm just coming to this thread myself. Aside from Tom's semi-hissy fit of a defense (and I can put that aside. Being called out for supporting bigotry, one may not feel, can be a hard slap. Takes a bit for the sting to wear off, and allow for an honest self- assessment), this thread, and its well thought out replies, has made me feel a bit better about the condition of my fellow humans. Heather Batson, Iris Demento, and friendly Phil Overeem gave me especially nice reading. By the way, I'm in no way suggesting I'm not a fuck-up in my language or comprehension toward others (hard to see outside myself), but I try. Thanks all.

  • Brian O'Neill: This reminds me of my grandmother on my dad's side. She was born in 1900 in upstate New York. She never even saw a black person until my grandfather - who contacted her after buying a pair of pants she put her name in when she made them (a story in and of itself!) - courted and married her and whisked her away to Queens, NY in the 1920s.

    I loved grandma and she was a sweet lady, but she was also a racist. Not the burning-crosses-on-yards type. She just was very suspicious of black people - even my best friend Cliff, even the paramedics who came to help her ("they might come back to steal something," she told me while the man was right there; he just gave me a look that said he's heard this before and he gets it).

    [More "stream of consciousness" here, then:]

    Maybe it would take a real humiliation for Tom to reconsider, but I don't think so. If he viewed this thread as a "pile on," I cannot imagine how he would handle being truly and rudely embarrassed.

    All I do know is that grandma was my grandmother whether I liked or approved of her or not. Tom's just some guy who writes about music and in recent years I have a lot of experience cutting out acquaintances online and even friends in real life out of my life because I didn't approve of their views or how they expressed them.

    I used to love Ted Nugent. Now? Fuck Ted Nugent.

    I'm sure I read Tom before. Now? Fuck Tom.

  • Liam Harper: I'm late to all of this, but I'd like to add a few points. (Without sharing personal details, this is a discussion that concerns me.)

    I admire Tom's writing, but ofc the LJG review and subsequent comment here were very bad. Personally I'm most concerned about the "TERF is hateful" comment as it resembles the "TERF is a slur" talking point advanced by various transphobes. Also, it's not good practice to post comments from a private group on a public site without getting permission first.

  • I think that ultimately the role of allies in these conversations should be to persuade and inform, not to find catharsis for one's feelings of outrage. I worry that public callouts can backfire and cause people to retreat from discussion, or else double down. So I prefer to err on the side of civility out of pragmatism: public transphobia is worse than it has ever been and the community needs all the support it can get. I've seen that some people have reached out to Tom via private messages, which I think is the best approach going forward.

    All that being said, I thought most of the commentary here was v nuanced and thoughtful. I really liked Heather and Phil Overeem's posts in particular.

    It's also worth keeping in mind is how generally awful the current media environment is with regard to trans commentary. Republicans aside, most of the landscape is dominated by transphobes self-promoting through the "I'm not allowed to say this" angle and uninformed/disingenuous attempts to "objectively" understand the "debate". I think that the effect has been to successfully shift the focus of public discourse onto bad-faith discussions about bathrooms, sports, and detransitioners. Imo the most pressing issues are actually: prison justice, violence against trans POC and sex workers, workplace harassment & employment discrimination, teenage homelessness, and interactions with the police. (That being said, allowing access to children / teenagers to access puberty blockers and hormones is v important.)

    I'm going to take the chance to recommend a few more trans writers and media creators who deserve people's attention:

    • Mia Mulder (good video unpacking the hormones and sports issue)
    • Kai Cheng Thom
    • Kama la Mackeral
    • Contrapoints (controversial figure who has drawn justified anger from queer leftists on a few occasions, but her videos are highly researched and well-argued . . . her video "Pronouns" is a good debunking of some common arguments from right-wingers)
    • Julia Serano
  • Joey Daniewicz: So I don't know if we've all read this yet: [url for this entry, quoting from above]

    Key passage: "One thing I will grant is that some of the points above deserve future consideration. But even having considered them, I still like my review. Aside from pissing off more people off than expected, it says what I wanted to say, precisely and economically. I'm loathe to follow Trump and claim it's a "perfect review" -- it certainly isn't (for one thing, the transition from "folk" to politics ought to be more secure, and I haven't figured out how the politics relates to the "trans angle" I perhaps too cavalierly brushed aside -- but for my everyday purposes it sufficed. In particular, I don't buy that "sounds male" is an insult, and it definitely isn't inaccurate."

    Tom Hull, this is pretty disappointing. It's obviously a bit weird that you've used your blog to name all of us, but whatever, maybe some folks care about that more than I do. But some folks did a pretty good job explaining what was wrong with your review, but I'll confess I mostly did not put in that work.

    So I'm going to just go over again why two parts of your review are unacceptable, not just by woke mob standards but by professional standards. Alfred mentioned that you'd be blacklisted from submission by basically any site if you submitted these in a review of this album, and I have to agree! This isn't us being finnicky, this is a very severe issue, and I would very much like to see you understand and remedy it. It appears that you do not.

    "Originally Thomas Gabel"

    This might be confusing, because you are technically correct! However, this information is both completely irrelevant and unhelpful (mentioning that she's part of Against Me! is more than enough for anyone confused about the new name that she adopted over a decade ago now), but also painful. Let me be clear: including Laura's former name is something that a right wing reviewer would do with malice and disrespect towards her trans identity. Laura is not a stage name. It is her name. It's true that you are not exactly saying otherwise, but you are using a name that she has said she'd like to be scrubbed from memory. You can greatly improve your writing about trans artists simply by not bringing these former names (deadnames, as we call them) up at all.

    "Still sounds male"

    I get that you don't think this is an insult. Again, maybe I wouldn't technically call it an insult. But it's also, again, the sort of thing you'd say if you were trying /very hard/ to insult Laura and make her feel bad about her voice and her music. Trans women would really love to be seen as women, and saying you don't is entirely cruel. It doesn't sound like you meant any harm by this or by anything, but you do need to consider both how they appear and how they would be taken.

    Just from those two bits, I have to imagine that if Laura ever came by your review, it would make her feel very, very bad, and not for any valid reasons, such as you not liking her music. The above moments are firmly within your control and frankly do not contribute any positive qualities to your review.

    I also understand that people are often stuck in their ways and haven't quite understood equality issues the way that's natural to us who have gone to college in the last twenty years. That's true, but it also shows that you aren't doing the work necessary of a music writer. Bringing up that artists are trans is fine and often essential to a review, but you should be trying to put in the work to see how people have come to approach those topics. Again, no respectable music publication, absolutely none, would allow a review that states a trans artist's "former" name or that states an artist's voice sounds like their "former" gender. These aren't cutting edge developments, either, this has been figured out for the better part of a decade.

    I'm sorry you felt attacked, Tom. I could have done a better job initiating this, and feel partially responsible for your extremely defensive responses. But I do hope we can bring one of our most esteemed writers in line on this issue. I do promise that I brought this up not in the hopes of "canceling" you, but in the hopes we could figure this out. I probably didn't put in the effort necessary for such a thing, so hopefully this does something more.

    • Phil Overeem: Joey, you have done your level best, patiently, clearly, thoroughly and encouragingly, to open the clouds. I hope it helps. I don't know how else or how much better it could be said.

    • Mark Kemp: [Joey Daniewicz] This is all very nice, and you're right: He's a smart music writer and a perceptive critic. But the fact that he can't appreciate criticism himself, offer thanks to you all for the very clear guidance you've given, and own up to the gaffe(s) tells me he may not be the quick learner that he (and others) think he is. Alfred said it best: a simple "thank you" -- and, I'd add, a sincere apology -- would have gone a long way. Who knows? Maybe that's yet come.

  • Alfred Soto: So I guess this is all cool and no big deal and we can keep interacting with him, eh?

    • Alfred Soto: If anyone commented on this thread, you have no business liking his posts unless you think he's earned the forgiveness.

    • Eric Marcus: TH's review and his defense of it were both awful. But shaming people for liking his posts, rallying people to shun him, and telling people under what conditions they can forgive him, is lame.

    • Eric Johnson: The review itself, the single defensive double-down response, and then a week's worth of ignoring a bunch of us crediting him with good intentions but asking him to reconsider those harmful words is not something I can forget.

    • Alfred Soto: Eric, please! If he'd written that thing about gays and Blacks you think the response would be the same?

    • Eric Marcus: I think it's easy to overestimate how much independence each of us has from the patterns of thinking we grew up with. Yes, he should know better. He should have learned at least from the incredibly thoughtful and often generous comments of the people here. I don't know TH at all, but I have no doubt that the past week of shaming has been brutal for him. Yes, trans people (including one of my wonderful kids) have it much worse than an internet drubbing. But if I ever found myself on the wrong end of one, my reaction would probably be to curl up into a ball and not get out of bed for a month. And yes he doubled-down instead. But I am in no way ready to write him off as a person.

    • Eric Johnson: I'm puzzled by this response. I'm agreeing with you here, regarding the likes on Tom's newest post, and also saying personally that I couldn't simply go on interacting with Tom as if this was nothing.

      Btw, just saw the notebook entry on his site, which makes all of this worse. I'm fucking done with this dude.

    • Eric Marcus: I didn't mean to say that everyone must carry on as before. I meant just that I am uncomfortable with Afred's exhortation to shun. And I totally get your reaction, even if I'm inclined towards a more hopeful one. Steve put it best below.

    • Phil Overeem: Alfred, I'm guilty of this, and I did sit and think about it considerably. Also, I did read his intro to his reviews, which was not encouraging. I'd really like to know his thoughts, but I'd been meaning to tell him about the Geller recommendation of two columns ago and decided for better or worse to do so. I understand your position, which now makes me regret clicking a "like," but I would be dishonest unclicking it, right?

    • Steve Alter: I don't think Tom is ignoring the issue, as his Notebook entry makes clear; he's very much grappling with it, though how he's doing so may not be satisfactory to folks. I've been on the perimeter of conversations on addressing gender expansiveness and related issues (and have really enjoyed many of the thoughtful responses from you all here) and honestly have had to control my desire to verbally punch some people in the face because even though I am an old straight white guy, I have some deep personal experiences with trans friends and families. But, outside of some folks who are truly hateful transphobics (and guess what, they're often racist, too!) I've come to feel that a lot of people need to be on a learning journey here (and sometimes it's suprising who does) and I try to show some grace to folks and support them on that path. I can't blame Tom for disappearing from this conversation and don't think that should be interpreted has him hiding from the issue and burying his head in the sand. I hope he gets on that learning journey and evolves his understanding in ways that benefit him, his readers and the communities he's a part of. There have been points at which I have completely disengaged from people whose thinking was stuck in cul-de-sacs, but I try to start by hoping for change and evolution. Understand everyone's MMV.

    • Alfred Soto: Steve, I understand your point. One isn't born to wisdom, and the pile-on can make us more obstinate -- it's happened to me! But EW is not a mean place, nor does it discourage. Several posters less patient than yours truly have attested to his good faith. I've enjoyed reading him. He needn't address every one of points -- and why would he? who has the time -- but a simple "Thanks, all, I'm taking this in," etc. would've been a palliative.

    • Eric Johnson: Yeah, I just don't see much "learning journey" in that notebook. Just more doubling down on how awful it is to be criticized on the internet. Meanwhile, in my non-internet life, I'm seeing people deal with actual hurt caused by the kind of shit he's shoveling, and I'm seeing those people do so with far more bravery and kindness and far less self-pity. I'm deeply, deeply unimpressed.

    • Steve Alter: Brian O'Neill, people hear and process things differently, hence my clarifier on that remark. We're mostly all narcissists, too, and it's not terribly surprising that when someone crushes you on something you don't fully comprehend, your response is going to initially be about you, and be pretty defensive. The fact that he exposed the conversation and is clearly upset by it is a start, even if the focus is still on himself. If it doesn't move beyond that, it'd be a damn shame (especially for someone so deeply immersed in politics and social issues) but I'm hoping he finishes somewhere different in the not too distant future.

    • Phil Overeem: Steve, my hopes align with yours. In that intro, I found myself wondering what his specific anger was. I suppose, too, that his posting today (I was wondering if he would withdraw) surprised me (arrogance? guts? carrying on until he's had more time do get things straight), and it got me to thinking of Mencken: I'll take from him what I need and leave the rest, since he's providing information. I appreciated the Geller recommendation (spot-on, as it turns out), wanted to thank him for that (I perhaps too automatically click "like"), and move on. There are more than a few live people (unlike Mencken) in my life who have views I abhor (such as being certain I am going to hell for not accepting Jesus--and very likely being trans-haters) whom I appreciate (they take very good care of my mom and look after her, have been her joy for 40 years, and live in her town, whereas I'm 3.5 hours away). What am I supposed to do? (I say that calmly.)

    • Steve Alter: [Brian O'Neill], yeah, maybe "engaging" would have been a better word (though probably no more satisfying to you). I've seen folks in similar situations just ignore anything ever happened, and not respond at all. At least a defensive and ill-informed response is an opportunity for education and change. Can't say that will happen, but it's rolling around in his brain and hopefully leads up rather than down.

    • Steve Alter: [Eric Johnson], I totally get it, but change is not binary. I don't know Tom well enough to know how his brain works, why he may think the way he did here, and why he responded the way he did (which I indeed found deeply offensive). But I do know I've not always behaved well when confronted with things that I wasn't ready to admit to, or own, particularly things that required me to get out of myself and step into someone else's shoes. I don't mean to sound Pollyanna-ish about it. Tom may change, he may not, he many feign change on the surface but not really mean it, etc. But I understand it being super raw for him right, and getting into a defensive posture, and I'm at least OK giving him a little breathing room to see if some self-discovery and adaptation happens. If not, he'll end up ignored like many other folks I've admired and dropped along the way because I wasn't OK with their behavior or values.

    • Eric Johnson: [Steve Alter] I hear you, and that's all good. But for me, I'm done. A bunch of people put a lot of energy into assuring him that we knew his heart was good, while also trying to explain why that prose didn't look like it reflected that good heart. For our trouble we got called cancelers and bullies. Fuck that. I don't have time to be part of another crusty old writer's effort to fix his damn heart.

    • Steve Alter: [Eric Johnson], totally respect everyone's choices here - and appreciate that we can have the conversation here.

    • Kevin Bozelka: [Alfred Soto] you have a like policy that I'm very much opposed to. But that's democracy. I chose my response carefully in accordance with my policy on using Facebook reactions. It was not meant to convey that he's earned my forgiveness but rather something closer, though not identical, with what Steve Alter has written so eloquently above.

I wasn't keeping score at first, but it appears that I'm banned and shunned for life by: Alfred Soto, Eric Johnson, Brian O'Neill. This diverges somewhat from Joey Daniewicz and Melody Esme, who I trust will continue to read, if only to look for more opportunities to push their agenda. Also from Iris Demento and Phil Overeem, who see me more as someone in need of, and possibly still receptive to, help. (I should follow up with them offline, as I have corresponded with them on other topics before, and I think I know them well enough to be able to continue to help one another.)

Not much more to say on this, as only Harper seems to have added anything new. I'm especially disappointed with Soto here. Sure, we've had disagreements before (like on Franco), but he's a good critic, and one I follow regularly.

Some more comments appeared under my Music Week post, so I might as well include them as well:

  • Eric Johnson: So, no further engagement with us on reconsidering your approach to reviewing the album by Laura Jane Grace, Tom?

    • Steve Alter: [Eric Johnson], read his Notebook entry on the site.

    • Eric Johnson: [Steve Alter] Read it, and I'm pretty much done.

      I know a couple of trans kids through my kid. One of those kids is the only reason she ever made it to school at all last year while negotiating a maze of grief and medical issues.

      Politicians from one of the two major political parties in the country are using state and institutional powers to make these kids' lives living hells. Kids are literally dying because of the rhetoric that these monsters traffic in. Meanwhile, Tom is tossing around references to "cancel culture" and "free speech" and moaning about how traumatic it is to be criticized by one's peers. Cry me a fucking river.

    • Criticism isn't an attack on free speech. It's pretty ironic that a working critic needs to be told this.

      Tom Hull I was pretty sure previously that you were a kind person who hadn't considered how this rhetoric affects real people. What I'm seeing instead here is a preposterous combination of self-importance and self pity. It's pretty clear that you don't really have any empathy for the people you write about. Whatever comments you've transcribed onto your notebook, you clearly still have your head too far up your own ass to understand what anyone is saying. So, fuck you

      To be clear, I'm not trying to "cancel" you. I'm not trying to interfere with how you write. I'm just telling you that you're acting like a piece of shit.

    • Tom Hull: [Eric Johnson] I added a note to the previous Music Week noting the objections and also that I stand by the review. I see no point in further engaging on this issue in this or any other semi-public forum, which probably includes my scarcely noticed Q&A. Private media, as Iris Demento constructively offered, is another option, guaranteed a hearing if not necessarily a response. Of course, you can continue to harangue me on your own forum, including here. Curiously when I first read your question, I started to answer a different one, which I had more on my mind. That's an easy trap to fall into, especially when one is angry.

      [Note: In chronological order, this was a response to Johnson's initial question, not his subsequent tirade. The question I was originally entertaining was why was I still posting to the EW group, despite at least the intimation I might not.]

    • Joey Daniewicz: Really sad stuff, Tom. Don't think you're worth reading without confronting what went wrong here. Hearing all that and still coming down with, "I like my review, deadnaming isn't my problem" just shows that you don't really take any of what was said very seriously.

  • Iris Demento: Tom - extending an invite to chat privately if you'd like, as I'm in the unique position of understanding the experience of semipublic online humiliation firsthand and the trauma response. I think you have my email but feel free to message if you need it.

    All I'll say here is I don't think anyone wants you to stop writing or reviewing albums, they just urge you to steer clear of verbiage that will no longer fly in regards to one of the most oppressed groups of people today, who are still struggling extremely hard to be understood and have their human rights recognized.

    • Phil Overeem: Very open-hearted of you. I definitely support that strategy and hope he takes you up on it!

    • Iris Demento: [Phil] regardless of the validity/necessity of this discussion taking place in a public forum I virtually never think personal reflection is best served with an audience

    • Michael Imes: Same, I don't get the public peacocking. It's obvious to a long time reader of this group and Tom's that better ground will be gained from all parties with real dialog not FB posting. Some great points have been made all around butto prove it's more than a performative gesture to a symnpathetic group then a real ole fashioned phone call or discussion should take place.

  • Joey Daniewicz: Reposting from the other thread: [already have this, above]

    • Iris Demento: Just to add an anecdote that supports this: in 2015 I wrote the SPIN review of Sophie's Product and gave it a 9 out of 10, one of our highest scores of that year (i pazzed it at 2010s). It got a 6 from pitchfork and a negative review from Sasha geffen of all people (for consequence) and a lot of people who loved the singles felt like the compilation didn't add enough new to them. Despite it being overwhelmingly the most positive review I'm pretty sure that record received (I think xgau was actually responding to me in his A- by saying it "wasn't the future of pop" which I'm pretty sure I said it was), my review/score - tantamount to a full A - wasn't really used in future sophie press kits or emails at all. Sophie wasn't out as trans yet, but I had dug up her then-"real" name-now deadname and used it in the opening bars of the review. (In 2020 I worked with spin again briefly and had the deadname removed.) I can't prove that's why her team didn't wear it as a badge of honor but I'd be really shocked if it didn't have something to do with it.

    • Dalton Mobley: For what it's worth, I would personally keep "bracket the trans angle" on that list--I agree with Tom that many people who might object to it aren't familiar with its origins/use in phenomenology, but that is probably a very good reason -not- to use it in this context--because to most people it just sounds like the review is saying the trans angle is irrelevant, bordering on a nuisance.

      It's also probably true that this is the kind of subject matter that the capsule review can be ill-suited to handling--it's very easy to come off as dismissive in 53 words, when you might just be trying for concision and accuracy as you see it.

Again, nothing much to add at this point. I suppose I could note that I've received several private emails offering support -- not for being transphobic, as none of the correspondents and few if any people who actually know me think I am, but I get the sense that they think I'm not alone in getting slammed in this way. No need to include them here. The point here isn't to relitigate, but just to document what transpired, in case I ever wish to revisit it.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 6 A-list

Music: Current count 41974 [41938] rated (+36), 27 [21] unrated (+6).

Another substantial Speaking of Which yesterday, plus some late additions today, bringing it up to 206 links, 9408 words. Otherwise, I have nothing much to show for the week, and I'm feeling as drained and hapless as I can recall, perhaps ever. Lots of tasks and projects piling up, unattended. At least I feel fairly well informed, and like I'm making sense when I drop into whatever topics come my way. Reflexes, and a substantial backlog of references I can still call up.

Meanwhile, I listened to the following bunch of records. I spent a lot more time with the R&B comp, eventually replaying all of it, which was enough for the promotion. Good tip from the redoubtable Clifford Ocheltree, so thanks again. The Hawkwind album tip came from a follower who goes by Cloudland Blue Quartet, who featured it in a #13at13 list. I didn't spend enough time on it -- certainly nothing like I would have had I encountered it at 13 (or 21, which I was when it came out; I certainly didn't have 13 albums at that age, and none to brag about). It seems like I must have heard more from them at the time than I have in the database, but not enough to really register (except as noted).

Three relatively mainstream jazz albums in the A-list this week. I feel a bit bad about not finding less obvious choices, but sometimes it breaks that way. The Potter album isn't actually in the 36 count, but I moved it in to wrap it up here. None scored high enough to be strong top-ten candidates at EOY (11, 13, 14 at the moment, or 6, 8, 9 among jazz), but they are likely to finish high in EOY polls.

Hurray for the Riff Raff is another pick with pretty broad support (86 on 21 reviews at AOTY; making it the year's highest-ranked album so far with that many reviews). It's taken over the number 2 slot in my 2024 list.

As for Old Music, the Gebru album I most recommend is still Éthiopiques 21: Ethiopia Song (1963-70 [2006], Buda Musique), attributed more precisely to Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, but any of the recent Emahoy/Mississippi compilations could do the trick. For solo piano, I usually prefer something upbeat (Earl Hines), fanciful (Art Tatum), and/or abrasive (Cecil Taylor), but all rules seem to have exceptions, and this is definitely one.

PS: [03-19] I have it on good authority that my Laura Jane Grace review, below, is "archaically transphobic." I understand their arguments, and will consider them in the future. But I will let this review stand. I've spent considerable time considering how I might respond, but after one rash attempt, I doubt that further discussion will do anyone any good.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Albare: Beyond Belief (2023 [2024], AM): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Bob Anderson: Live! (2023 [2024], Jazz Hang): [cd]: B+(*) [03-29]
  • Jonas Cambien: Jonas Cambien's Maca Conu (2023 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Ian Carey & Wood Metal Plastic: Strange Arts (2019 [2024], Slow & Steady): [cd]: B+(**) [03-22]
  • Giuseppe Doronzo/Andy Moor/Frank Rosaly: Futuro Ancestrale (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Fire!: Testament (2022 [2024], Rune Grammofon): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Glitter Wizard: Kiss the Boot (2023, Kitten Robot, EP): [sp]: B
  • Laura Jane Grace: Hole in My Head (2024, Polyvinyl): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Dave Harrington/Max Jaffe/Patrick Shiroishi: Speak, Moment (2021 [2024], AKP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Keyon Harrold: Foreverland (2023 [2024], Concord): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Brittany Howard: What Now (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive (2024, Nonesuch): [sp]: A-
  • Idles: Tangk (2024, Partisan): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Vijay Iyer: Compassion (2022 [2024], ECM): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Last Dinner Party: Prelude to Ecstasy (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Little Simz: Drop 7 (2024, Forever Living Originals, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Mike McGinnis + 9: Outing: Road Trip II (2023 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Emile Parisien/Roberto Negro: Les Métanuits (2023, ACT): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Emile Parisien Quartet: Let Them Cook (2024, ACT): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Chris Potter/Brad Mehldau/John Patitucci/Brian Blade: Eagle's Point (2023 [2024], Edition): [sp]: A-
  • Joel Ross: Nublues (2023 [2024], Blue Note): [sp]: A-
  • Scheen Jazzorkester & Cortex: Frameworks: Music by Thomas Johansson (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Patrick Shiroishi: I Was Too Young to Hear Silence (2020 [2023], American Dreams): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Smile: Wall of Eyes (2024, XL): [sp]: B
  • Vera Sola: Peacemarker (2024, Spectraphonic/City Slang): [sp]: B+(**)
  • John Surman: Words Unspoken (2022 [2024], ECM): [sp]: A-
  • Michael Thomas: The Illusion of Choice (2023 [2024], Criss Cross): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Akiko Tsugura: Beyond Nostalgia (2023 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
  • The Umbrellas: Fairweather Friend (2024, Tough Love): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Yard Act: Where's My Utopia? (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebru: Souvenirs (1977-85 [2024], Mississippi): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru (1963-70 [2016], Mississippi): [sp]: A-
  • Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Jerusalem (1972-2012 [2023], Mississippi): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gigi W Material: Mesgana Ethiopia (2010, M.O.D. Technologies): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido (1972, United Artists): [sp]: B+(***)


Grade (or other) changes:

  • The R&B No. 1s of the '50s (1950-59 [2013], Acrobat, 6CD): [cd]: [was: A-] A


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Neal Alger: Old Souls (Calligram) [03-01]
  • Sam Anning: Earthen (Earshift Music) [04-05]
  • Alex Beltran: Rift (Calligram) [03-01]
  • Julieta Eugenio: Stay (self-released) [03-29]
  • Julien Knowles: As Many, as One (Biophilia) [04-26]
  • Travis Reuter: Quintet Music (self-released) [04-19]
  • Claudio Scolari Project: Intermission (Principal) [03-25]
  • Dan Weiss: Even Odds (Cygnus) [03-29]
  • Hein Westergaard/Katt Hernandez/Raymond Strid: The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn (Gotta Let It Out) [02-25]

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Once again, started early in the week, spent most of my time here, didn't get to everything I usually cover. Late Sunday night, figured I should go ahead and kick this out. Monday updates possible.

Indeed, I wasted most of Monday adding things, some of which, contrary to my usual update discipline, only appeared on Monday. The most interesting I'll go ahead and mention here:

  • Alexander Ward/Jonathan Lemire: [03-11] If Israel invades Rafah, Biden will consider conditioning military aid to Israel. There are several articles below suggesting that the Biden administration is starting to show some discomfort with its Israeli masters. I've generally made light of such signals, as they've never threatened consequences or even been unambiguously uttered in public. I've seen several more suggesting that the long promised invasion of Rafah -- the last corner of Gaza where some two million people have been driven into -- could cross some kind of "red line."

    I am willing to believe that "Genocide Joe" is a bit unfair: that while he's not willing to stand up to Netanyahu, he's not really comfortable with the unbounded slaughter and mass destruction Israel is inflicting. I characterize his pier project below as "passive-aggressive." I think he's somehow trying (but way too subtly) to make Israel's leaders realize that their dream of killing and/or expelling everyone from Gaza isn't going to be allowed, so at some point they're going to have to relent, and come up with some way of living with the survivors.

I don't recall where, but I think I've seen some constructive reaction from Biden to the "uncommitted" campaign that took 13% of Michigan and 18% of Minnesota votes. So it's possible that the message is getting through even if the raw numbers are still far short of overwhelming. The Israel Lobby has so warped political space in Washington that few politicians can as much as imagine how out of touch and tone-deaf they've become on this issue.

Still, Biden has a lot of fence-mending to do.

I'll try not to add more, but next week will surely come around, bringing more with it.


Initial count: 181 links, 7,582 words. Updated count [03-11]: 207 links, 9,444 words.

Top story threads:

Not sure where to put this, so how about here?

  • Jacob Bogage: [03-08] Government shutdown averted as Senate passes $459 billion funding bill: In other words, Republicans once again waited until the last possible moment, then decided not to pull the trigger in their Russian roulette game over the budget. It seems be an unwritten rule that in electing Mike Johnson as Speaker, the extreme-right gets support for everything except shutting down the government.

Israel:

Israel vs. world opinion: Note that Biden's relief scheme for Gaza, announced in his State of the Union address, has been moved into its own sandbox, farther down, next to other Biden/SOTU pieces.

  • Kyle Anzalone: [03-07] South Africa urges ICJ for emergency order as famine looms over Gaza.

  • James Bamford: [03-06] Time is running out to stop the carnage in Gaza: "Given the toll from bombing and starvation, Gaza will soon become the world's largest unmarked grave." Actually, time ran out sometime in the first week after Oct. 7, when most Americans -- even many on the left who had become critical of Israeli apartheid -- were too busy competing in their denunciations of Hamas to notice how the Netanyahu government was clearly intent to commit genocide. At this point, the carnage is undeniable -- perhaps the only question is when the majority of the killing will shift (or has shifted) from arms to environmental factors (including starvation), because the latter are relatively hard to count (or are even more likely to be undercounted). Of course, stopping the killing is urgent, no matter how many days we fail.

  • Greer Fay Cashman: [03-07] President Herzog faces calls for arrest on upcoming Netherlands visit.

  • Jonathan Cook: [03-07] How the 'fight against antisemitism' became a shield for Israel's genocide.

  • Richard Falk: [02-25] In Gaza, the west is enabling the most transparent genocide in human history.

  • Noah Feldman: [03-05] How Oct. 7 is forcing Jews to reckon with Israel. Excerpt from his new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

  • Daniel Finn: [03-07] Slaughter in Gaza has discredited Britain's political class.

  • Fred Kaplan: [03-06] Four things that will have to happen for the Israel-Hamas war to end: I have a lot of respect for Kaplan as an analyst of such matters, but the minimal solution he's created is impossible. His four things?

    1. The Hamas leadership has to surrender or go into exile. ("Qatar will have to crack down on Hamas, or perhaps provide its military leaders refuge in exchange for their departure from Gaza.")
    2. "Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Sunni powers in the region will have to help rebuild Gaza and foster new, more moderate political leaders."
    3. "Israel will at least have to say that it favors the creation of a Palestinian state and to take at least a small movement in that direction." Why anyone should believe Israel in this isn't explained.
    4. "The United States will have to serve as some sort of guarantor to all of this -- and not only for Israel."

    In other words, every nation in the region has to bend to Israel's stubborn insistence that they have to maintain control over every inch of Gaza, even though they've made it clear they'd prefer for everyone living there to depart or die. In any such scenario, it is inevitable that resistance will resurface to again threaten Israel's security, no matter how many layers of proxies are inserted, and no matter how systematically Israel culls its "militants." Short of a major sea change in Israeli opinion -- which is a prospect impossible to take seriously, at least in the short term -- there is only one real solution possible, which is for Israel to disown Gaza. Israel can continue to maintain its borders, its Iron Walls and Iron Domes, and can threaten massive retaliation if anyone on the Gaza side of the border attacks them. (This can even include nuclear, if that's the kind of people they are.) But Israel no longer gets any say in how the people of Gaza live. From that point, Israel is out of the picture, and Gaza has no reason to risk self-destruction by making symbolic gestures.

    That still leaves Gaza with a big problem -- just not an Israel problem. That is because Israel has rendered Gaza uninhabitable, at least for the two million people still stuck there. Those people need massive aid, and even so many of them probably need to move elsewhere, at least temporarily. Without Israel to fight, Hamas instantly becomes useless. They will release their hostages, and disband. Some may go into exile. The rest may join in rebuilding, ultimately organized under a local democracy, which would have no desire let alone capability to threaten Israel. This is actually very simple, as long as outside powers don't try to corrupt the process by recruiting local cronies (a big problem in the region, with the US, its Sunni allies, Iran, its Shiite friends, Turkey, and possibly others serial offenders).

    Sure, this would leave Israel with a residual Palestinian problem elsewhere: both with its second- and lesser-class citizens and wards, and with its still numerous external refugees. But that problem has not yet turned genocidal (although it's getting close, and is clearly possible as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are part of Israel's ruling coalition). But there is time to work on that, especially once Israel is freed from the burden and horror of genocide in Gaza. There are lots of ideas that could work as solutions, but they all ultimately to accepting that everyone, regardless of where they live, should enjoy equal rights and opportunities. That will be a tough pill for many Israelis to swallow, but is the only one that will ultimately free them from the internecine struggle Israelis and Palestinians have been stuck with for most of a century. There's scant evidence that most Israelis want that kind of security, so people elsewhere will need to continue with BDS-like strategies of persuasion. But failure to make progress will just expose Israelis to revolts like they experienced on Oct. 7, and Palestinians to the immiseration and gloom they've suffered so often over many decades decades.

  • Colbert I King: [03-08] The United States cannot afford to be complicit in Gaza's tragedy: True or not, isn't it a bit late to think of this?

  • Nicholas Kristof: [03-19] 'People are hoping that Israel nukes us so we get rid of this pain': Texts with a Gazan acquaintance named Esa Alshannat, not Hamas, but after Israeli soldiers left an area, found "dead, rotten and half eaten by wild dogs." Kristof explains: "Roughly 1 percent of Gaza's people today are Hamas fighters. To understand what the other 99 percent are enduring, as the United States supplies weapons for this war and vetoes cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, think of Alshannat and multiply him by two million."

  • Debbie Nathan:

  • Vivian Nereim: [03-10] As Israel's ties to Arab countries fray, a stained lifeline remains: The United Arab Emirates is still on speaking terms with Israel, but doesn't have much to show for their solicitude.

  • Ilan Pappé: [02-01] It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [03-07] Replacing Netanyahu with Gantz won't fix the problem.

  • Rebecca Lee Sanchez: [03-06] Gaza's miracle of the manna: Aid and the American God complex.

  • Philip Weiss:

  • Brett Wilkins: [03-06] AIPAC's dark money arm unleashes $100 million: "Amid the Netanyahu government's assault on Gaza and intensifying repression in the West Bank, AIPAC is showing zero tolerance for even the mildest criticism of Israel during the 2024 US elections."

America's increasingly desperate and pathetic empire: I started this section to separate out stories on how the US was expanding its operations in the Middle East, ostensibly to deter regional adversaries from attacking Israel while Israel was busy with its genocide in Gaza. At the time, it seemed like Israel was actively trying to promote a broader war, partly to provide a distraction from its own focus (much as WWII served to shield the Holocaust), and partly to give the Americans something else to focus on. Israel tried selling this as a "seven-front war" -- a line that Thomas Friedman readily swallowed, quickly recovering from his initial shock at Israel's overreaction in Gaza -- but with neither Iran nor the US relishing what Israel imagined to be the main event, thus far only the Houthis in Yemen took the bait (where US/UK reprisals aren't much of a change from what the Saudis had been doing, with US help, for years). So this section has gradually been taken over by more general articles on America's imperial posture (with carve outs for the still-raging wars in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine/Russia.

  • Ramzy Baroud:

    • [03-04] To defend Israel's actions, the US is destroying the int'l legal system it once constructed: I'm not sure that the US ever supported any sort of international justice system. The post-WWII trials in Japan and Germany were rigged to impose "victor's justice." The UN started as a victors' club, with Germany and Japan excluded, and the Security Council was designed so small states couldn't gang up on the powers. And when Soviet vetoes precluded using the UN as a cold war tool, the US invented various "coalitions of the willing" to rubber-stamp policy. The US never recognized independent initiatives like the ICJ, although the US supports using the ICJ where it's convenient, like against Russia in Ukraine. The only "rules-based order" the US supports is its own, and even there its blind support for Israel arbitrary and capricious -- subject to no rules at all, only the whims of Netanyahu.

    • [03-08] On solidarity and Kushner's shame: How Gaza defeated US strategem, again.

  • Mac William Bishop: [02-23] American idiots kill the American century: "After decades of foreign-policy bungling and strategic defeats, the US has never seemed weaker -- and dictators around the world know it."

  • Christopher Caldwell: [03-09] This prophetic academic now foresees the West's defeat: On French historian/political essayist Emmanuel Todd, who claims to have been the first to predict the demise of the Soviet Union (see his The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, from 1976), has a new book called La Défaite de l'Occident. Caldwell, who has a book called The Age of Entitlement, seems to be an unconventional conservative, so even when he has seeming insights it's hard to trust them. Even harder to get a read on Todd. (The NYTimes' insistence on "Mr." at every turn has never been more annoying.) But their skepticism of Biden et al. on Ukraine/Russia is certainly warranted. By the way, here are some old Caldwell pieces:

  • Brian Concannon: [03-08] US should let Haiti reclaim its democracy.

  • Gregory Elich: [03-08] How Madeleine Albright got the war the US wanted: NATO goes on the warpath, initially in Yugoslavia, then . . . "the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations."

  • Tom Engelhardt: [03-05] A big-time war on terror: Living on the wrong world: "A planetary cease fire is desperately needed."

  • Connor Freeman: [03-07] Biden's unpopular wars reap mass death and nuclear brinkmanship.

  • Marc Martorell Junyent: [03-07] Tempest in a teapot: British illusions and American hegemony from Iraq to Yemen. Review of Tom Stevenson's book, Someone Else's Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony.

  • Joshua Keating: [03-09] The Houthis have the world's attention -- and they won't give it up: "What do Yemen's suddenly world-famous rebels really want, and what will make them stop?" One lesson here is that deterrence only works if it threatens a radical break from the status quo. The Saudis, with American support, have been bombing the Houthis for more than a decade now, causing great hardship for the Yemeni people, but hardly moving the needle on Houthi political power. So how much worse would it get if they picked a fight with Israel's proxy navy? Moreover, by standing up to Israel and its unwitting allies, they gain street cred and a claim to the moral high ground. For similar reasons, sanctions are more likely to threaten nations that aren't used to them. Once you're under sanctions, which with the US tends to be a life sentence, what difference does a few more make? It's too late for mere threats to change the behavior of Yemen, Iran, North Korea, and/or Russia -- though maybe not to affect powers whose misbehaviors have thus far escaped American sanctions, like Israel and Saudi Arabia. But for the rest, to effect change, you need to do something positive, to give them some motivation and opportunity to change. In many cases, that shouldn't even be hard. Just try to do the right thing. Respect the independence of others. Look for mutual benefits, like in trade. Help them help their own people. And stop defending genocide.

  • Nan Levinson: [03-07] The enticements of war (and peace).

  • Blaise Malley: [03-06] Opportunity calls as Cold War warriors exit the stage: "Will Mitch McConnell's replacement represent the old or new guard in his party's foreign policy?"

  • Paul R Pillar: [03-06] Why Netanyahu is laughing all the way to the bank: "David Petraeus said recently that US leverage on Israel to do the right thing in Gaza is 'overestimated' -- that's just not true."

  • Robert Wright: [03-08] The real problem with the Trump-Biden choice: This piece is far-reaching enough I could have slotted it anywhere, but it has the most bearing here: the problem is how much Trump and Biden have in common, especially where it comes to foreign affairs: "America First" may seem like a different approach from Biden's, but the latter is just a slightly more generous and less intemperate variation, as both start from the assumption that America is and must be the leader, and everyone else needs to follow in line. Trump thinks he can demand the other pay tribute; Biden possibly knows better, but his pursuit of arms deals makes me wonder. Wright cites a piece by Adam Tooze I can't afford or find, quoting it only up to the all-important "but" after which the Trump-Biden gap narrows. While I'm sure Tooze has interesting things to say, Wright's efforts to steer foreign policy thinking away from the zero-sum confrontations of the Metternich-to-Kissinger era are the points to consider.

  • Fareed Zakaria: [03-08] Amid the horror in Gaza, it's easy to miss that the Middle East has changed.

Election notes: Sixteen states and territories voted for president on Super Tuesday, mostly confirming what we already knew. Biden won everywhere (except American Samoa), even over "uncommitted" (which mostly got a push from those most seriously upset over his support for Israeli genocide). Trump won everywhere -- except in Vermont, narrowly to Nikki Haley, who nonetheless shuttered her campaign (but hasn't yet endorsed Trump). Dean Phillips dropped out of the Democratic race after getting 8% in his home state of Minnesota and 9% in Oklahoma. He endorsed Biden. I'm not very happy with any of the news summaries I've seen, but here are a few to skim through: 538; AP; Ballotpedia; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Guardian; NBC News; New York Times; Politico; USA Today; Washington Post. One quote I noticed (from CNN) was from a "reluctant Democrat" in Arizona: "It's hard to vote for someone with multiple felony charges; and it's also very hard to vote for someone that is pro-genocide."

  • Michael C Bender: [03-06] How Trump's crushing primary triumph masked quiet weaknesses: "Even though he easily defeated Nikki Haley, the primary results suggested that he still has long-term problems with suburban voters, moderates, and independents."

  • Aaron Blake: [03-08] The Texas GOP purge and other below-the-radar Super Tuesday nuggets.

  • Nate Cohn: [03-07] Where Nikki Haley won and what it means: Inside the Beltway (61%), Home base and Mountain West cities (57%), Vermont (56%), University towns (56%), Resort towns (55%): In other words, the sorts of places that would automatically disqualify one as a Real Republican.

  • Antonia Hitchens: [03-06] Watching Super Tuesday returns at Mar-a-Lago.

  • Ro Khanna: [03-07] The message from Michigan couldn't be more clear: Actually, these figures (see Nichols below) are hardly enough for a bump in the road to Biden's reelection -- unlike, say, Eugene McCarthy's New Hampshire showing in 1968, where Lyndon Johnson got the message clearly enough to give up his campaign. What they do show is that the near-unanimity of Democratic politicians in support of Israel is not shared by the rank and file.

  • Adam Nagourney/Shane Goldmacher: [03-09] The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same: I bypassed this first time around, but maybe we should offer some kind of reward for the week's most inane opinion piece. Wasn't Nagourney a finalist in one of those hack journalists playoffs? (If memory serves -- why the hell can't I just google this? -- he finished runner-up to Karen Tumulty.)

  • John Nichols: [03-05] Gaza is on the ballot all over America: "Inspired by Michigan's unexpectedly high 'uncommitted' vote, activists across the country are now mounting campaigns to send Biden a pro-cease-fire message." Uncommitted slate votes thus far (from NYTimes link, above): Minnesota: 18.9%; Michigan: 13.2%; North Carolina: 12.7%; Massachusetts: 9.4%; Colorado: 8.1%; Tennessee: 7.9%; Alabama: 6.0%; Iowa: 3.9%.

  • Alexander Sammon:

    • [03-09] Katie Porter said her Senate primary was "rigged." Let's discuss! "Her complaint was kind of MAGA-coded. But it wasn't entirely wrong." Adam Schiff had a huge fundraising advantage over Porter, as Porter did over the worthier still Barbara Lee. This is one of the few pieces I've found that looks into where that money came from (AIPAC chipped in $5 million; a crypto-backed PAC doubled that), and how it was used, explained in more depth in the following:

    • [03-05] Democrats have turned to odd, cynical tactics to beat one another in California's Senate race. Schiff wound up spending a lot of money not trying to win Democrats over from Porter and Lee -- something that might require explaining why he supported the Iraq War (which itself partly explains why he got all that AIPAC money) -- but instead spent millions raising Republican Steve Garvey's profile. In the end, Schiff was so successful he lost first place to Garvey (on one but not both of the contests: one to finish Feinstein's term, one for the six year term that follows), but at least he got past Porter and Lee, turning the open primary into a traditional R-D contest (almost certainly D in California).

  • Michael Scherer: [03-08] Inside No Labels decision to plow ahead with choosing presidential candidates: "The group announced on a call with supporters Friday plans to announce a selection process for their third-party presidential ticket on March 14 with a nomination by April." More No Labels:

  • Li Zhou: [03-06] Jason Palmer, the guy who beat Biden in American Samoa, briefly explained.

Trump, and other Republicans:

Biden's band-aid folly: Unveiled in Biden's State of the Union address, q.v., but for this week, let's give it its own section:

  • Alex Horton: [03-08] How the US military will use a floating pier to deliver Gaza aid: "Construction will take up to two months and require 1,000 US troops who will remain off shore, officials say. Once complete, it will enable delivery of 2 million meals daily."

  • Jonathan Cook: [03-10] Biden's pier-for-Gaza is hollow gesture.

  • Kareem Fahim/Hazem Balousha: [03-08] Biden plan to build Gaza port, deliver aid by sea draws skepticism, ridicule. Sounds like they had a contest to come up with the most expensive, least efficient method possible to trickle life-sustaining aid into Gaza, without in any way inhibiting Israel's systematic slaughter.

  • Miriam Berger/Sufian Taha/Heidi Levine/Loveday Morris: [03-05] The improbable US plan for a revitalized Palestinian security force: Because the US did such a great job of training the Afghan security force?

  • Noga Tarnopolsky: [03-09] The Biden plan to ditch Netanyahu: "The 'come to Jesus moment' is already here, according to Israeli and US sources." I don't give this report much credit, but it stands to reason that eventually Biden will tire of Netanyahu jerking him around just so he can further embarrass both countries with what is both in intent and effect genocide. I do see ways in which Biden's initial subservience is evolving into some kind of passive-aggressive resistance. Rather than denounce Israel for making reasonable aid possible, Biden has challenged Israel to spell out what they would allow, and agreed even as these schemes are patently ridiculous. It's only a matter of time until Israel starts attacking American aid providers. For another piece:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [03-08] Are Biden and the Democrats finally turning on Israel? "Biden's new plan to build a pier on the Gaza coast seems to say yes. The continued military aid to Israel says otherwise."

Biden's State of the Union speech: A section for everything else related, including official and unofficial Republican responses:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

  • Elie Honig: [03-08] Biden's looming nightmare pardons: Ever since this "former federal and state prosecutor" started writing for Intelligencer, his pieces have sounded like stealth briefs from the Trump legal team, even if not things they would actually want to own. This one at least assumes things not yet in evidence: that Trump is actually tried and convicted and sentenced to jail time -- the power may be to pardon, but all he's asking for is commutation of prison time, not full pardons. As that's increasingly unlikely before November, the assumption may also be that Biden wins then, so has some breathing room before having to consider the issue, which would leave plenty of time for this discussion, unlike now.

  • Josh Kovensky: [03-05] Feds slap 12 new counts on Bob 'Gold Bars' Menendez: Senator (D-NJ).

  • Ian Millhiser: [03-10] Do Americans still have a right to privacy? "With courts coming for abortion and IVF, it's hard not to wonder what the Supreme Court will go after next."

Climate, environment, and energy:

Ukraine War:

Around the world:


Other stories:

Michelle Alexander: [03-08] Only revolutionary love can save us now: "Martin Luther King Jr's 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War offers a powerful moral compass as we face the challenges of our time."

Indivar Dutta-Gupta/Korian Warren: [03-04] The war on poverty wasn't enough: "While Lyndon B Johnson's effort made some lasting impacts, the United States still has some of the highest rates of nonelderly poverty among wealthy nations." As the article notes, Johnson's programs brought big improvements, but the Vietnam War hurt him politically, and his successors lost interest: e.g., Nixon's appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to run the Office of Economic Opportunity. And while Republicans deserve much of the blame, Democrats like Daniel Moynahan and Bill Clinton were often as bad, sometimes worse.

Henry Farrell: [02-27] Dr. Pangloss's Panopticon: A very thoughtful critique of Noah Smith's "quite negative review of a recent book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity. There are complex issues at dispute here, many much more interesting than those that dominate this (and all recent) posts. Dr. Pangloss (from Voltaire) stands in for techno-optimism: the idea that unfettered innovation, accelerated as it is through modern venture capitalism, promises to deliver ever-improving worlds. Panopticon (from Jeremy Bentham) is an early form of mass surveillance, a capability that technology has done much to develop recently, with AI promising a breakthrough to the bottleneck problem (the time and people you need to surveil other people).

Luke Goldstein: [02-23] Crunch time for government spying: "Congress has a few weeks left until a key spying provision sunsets. Both reformers and intelligence hawks are plotting their strategies."

Oshan Jarow: [03-08] The world's mental health is in rough shape -- and not getting any better: "Guess where the US ranks?"

Sarah Kaplan: [03-06] Are we living in an 'Age of Humans'? Geologists say no. A recent proposal for delineating a stratigraphic boundary for the Anthropocene, based on "a plume of radioactive plutonium that circled around the world" in 1952, was proposed recently and, at least for now, voted down. More:

Alvaro Lopez: [03-08] The making of Frantz Fanon: Review of Adam Shatz's new book, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Also:

Rick Perlstein: [03-06] The spectacle of policing: "'Swatting' innocent people is the latest incarnation of the decades-long gestation of an infrastructure of fear."

Dave Phillipps: [03-06] Profound damage found in Maine gunman's brain, possibly from blasts: "A laboratory found a pattern of cell damage that has been seen in veterans exposed to weapons blasts, and said it probably played a role in symptoms the gunman displayed before the shooting." Robert Card was a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve for eight years. He went on to shoot and kill 18 people and himself. Something not yet factored into the "Costs of War" accounting. Another report:

Jeffrey St Clair: [03-08] Roaming Charges: Too obvious to be real.


I ran across a link to this David Brooks [02-08]: Trump came for their party but took over their souls. A normal person would have little trouble writing a column under that headline. Even Brooks hits some obvious points, like: "Democracy is for suckers"; "Entertainment over governance"; and "Lying is normal." But the one that really upsets Brooks is: "America would be better off in a post-American world." The other maxim that Brooks castigates Trump for is "Foreigners don't matter." This leads to his rant against "isolationism," which inevitably devolves into invoking the spectre of Neville Chamberlain.

Brooks celebrates the triumph of Eisenhower over Taft in 1952, when "the GOP became an internationalist party and largely remained that way for six decades" -- glorious years that spread capitalist exploitation to the far corners of the globe, transforming colonies into cronies ruled by debt penury, policed by "forever wars" and, wherever the occasion arose, ruthless counterrevolutions and civil wars.

Meanwhile, instead of enjoying the wealth this foreign policy generated, America's middle class -- the solid burghers and union workers who, as Harry Truman put it, "voted Democratic to live like Republicans" -- got ground down into their own penury. The Cold War was always as much about fighting democracy at home as it was about denying socialism abroad, much as the "war on terror" was mostly just an authoritarian tantrum directed against anyone who failed to submit to America's globe-spanning military colossus.

Sure, it is an irony that blows Brooks' mind that it now seems to be the Republicans -- the party that most celebrates rapacious capitalism, is most devoutly committed to authoritarian rule, and whose people are most callously indifferent to the cries of those harmed by their greed -- should be the first give up on the game.

Of course, they weren't. The left, or "premature antifascists" (as the OSS referred to us in the 1940s, before "communists and fellow travelers" proved to be a more effective slur), knew this all along, but that insight came from caring about what happens to others, and solidarity in what we sensed was a common struggle. It took Republicans much longer to realize that globalized capitalism, under the aegis of American military power, not only didn't work for them personally, but that it directly led to jobs moving overseas, and all kinds of foreigners flooding America. And since Republicans had put so much propaganda effort into stoking racism and reaction, not least by blaming Democrats (with their "open borders" and focus on wars as "humanitarian") for loving foreigners more than their own people.

I was pointed to Brooks' piece by a pair of tweets: Simon Schama linked, adding: "Heartfelt obituary by David Brooks for the expiring of last vestiges of the Republican Party. No longer has supporters but 'an audience.' Lying normalised. Total abandonment of internationalism." To which, Sam Hasselby added:

People have really memory-holed the whole Iraq catastrophe which is in fact what normalized a new scale of lying and impunity in American politics. It was also a lie which cost $7 trillion dollars, killed one million innocent Iraqis, and displaced 37 million people.

Yet Iraq War boosters like Brooks still have major mainstream media gigs, while Adam Schiff trounced Barbara Lee (the only member of Congress to vote against the whole War on Terror) in a Democratic primary, and Joe Biden became president -- finally giving up the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, only to wholeheartedly embrace new, but already even more disastrous, wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Daily Log

Cloudland Blue Quartet published a "#13at13" list: "Here are 13 of the 16 LPS I owned at the age of 13. No wonder I am warped . . ." As best I can make out:

  • The Animals: The Most of the Animals
  • The Who: A Quick One
  • Various Artists: Fill Your Head With Rock
  • Various Composers: The World of Your Hundred Best Things
  • Alice Cooper: Love It to Death
  • The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter (Live)
  • Black Widow: Black Widow III
  • Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido
  • Mott the Hoople: All the Young Dudes
  • T Rex: Ride a White Swan
  • Uriah Heep: Demons and Wizards
  • Uriah Heep: Magician's Birthday
  • Alice Cooper: Billion Dollar Babies

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Daily Log

I got this message via Facebook from Ken Brown:

Tom - since you know by far the most about the Brown family, I have a question: someone once told me that the Brown boys went to school until they were old enough to pick cotton, and they then picked cotton until they were old enough to run away from home. So, my dad maybe only went to the 5th or 6th grade? What do you know? I do have some letters that my dad wrote to my mom - and you can barely read the handwriting.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 38 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 41938 [41900] rated (+38), 21 [22] unrated (-1).

I'm having a rough time getting anything done, which is my best explanation for wasting most of last week on a still-unfinished Speaking of Which -- posted well after midnight last, with a few further adds flagged today. The most important add is the link to Pankaj Mishra's The Shoah after Gaza (also on YouTube).

I've neglected pretty much everything and everyone else. My apologies to anyone expecting a response from me. As I must have noted already, I gave myself a month to write a quick, very rough draft of my long gestating political book, with the promise that if I couldn't pull it off, I'd shelve the idea once and for all, and spend my waning days reading fiction -- forty years later, I still have a bookmark 300 pages into Gravity's Rainbow, and enough recollection I'm not sure I'll have to retrace -- while slipping in the occasional old movie and dawdling with jigsaw puzzles (ok, I'm already doing the latter). I certainly wouldn't have to plow through any nonfiction that might be construed as research -- e.g., a couple items currently on the proverbial night stand: Franklin Foer's book on Biden, or Judis/Teixeira on the missing Democrats.

That month was supposed to be January, but the Jazz Critics Poll and EOY lists lapped over without me starting, so I decided I'd give it February. I still have no more than a fragment of a letter stashed away in a notebook entry, so the obvious thing to do at this point is admit failure, and be done with it. Aside from easing my mind -- the last six months have been unbearably gloomy for my politics, my prognostications turning markedly dystopian -- ditching politics might be good news for those of you more interested in my writing on music.

Two small projects that I've also neglected are: a thorough review of the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll website, which is missing some unknown quantity of historical material (hopefully Davis has it stashed away), and needs some modernization; I'm also behind on maintenance, not to mention the long-promised redesign, of the Robert Christgau website. It would also make sense to reorganize my own data along those same lines, as even now it's virtually impossible for even me to look up what I've written about any musician.

I also have neglected house projects: the most pressing of which is the imminent collapse of a chunk of ceiling in my wife's study room. I used to be pretty competent at carpentry and home improvement tasks. About all I can claim to have managed in the last month has been replacement of two light bulbs, which took me weeks (in my defense, both involved ladders and unconventional sockets).

Nothing special to say about this week's music. A copy of the year 2023 list has been frozen, but I am still adding occasional records to my tracking file, jazz and non-jazz EOY lists, and EOY aggregate, but mostly just my own belatedly graded items. But I'm not very focused on what I'm listening to, and often get stuck wondering what to play next. I can't say I've reached the point of not caring, but I'm getting there.

My most played record of the last couple weeks is The R&B No. 1s of the '50s, especially the final disc, which has left me with Lloyd Price's "I'm Gonna Get Married" as the ultimate earworm. I should probably bump the whole set up to full A. I played the last three discs while cooking on Saturday, and I'm satisfied with them. Then I started Sunday and Monday with disc 6. As this post lapsed into Tuesday, I was tempted again, but had unfinished Vijay Iyer queued up.

Found this in a Facebook comment: "I'm not sure keeping up with Tom Hull is possible. The very thought makes my synapses cry out, 'no mas, no mas.'" But from my view, they really just keep coming poco a poco. During the long delay from listing out this file to posting it -- mostly spent on the Speaking of Which intro -- I only managed to collect four more reviews for next week: two marginally A- jazz albums (Joel Ross, John Surman), and two more marginally below A- (Vijay Iyer, Emile Parisien).


New records reviewed this week:

  • Black Art Jazz Collective: Truth to Power (2024, HighNote): [sp]: B
  • The Choir Invisible [Charlotte Greve/Vinnie Sperazza/Chris Tordini]: Town of Two Faces (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Djeli Moussa Condé: Africa Mama (2023, Accords Croises): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gui Duvignau/Jacob Sacks/Nathan Ellman-Bell: Live in Red Hook (2022 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Alon Farber Hagiga With Dave Douglas: The Magician: Live in Jerusalem (2023 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
  • R.A.P. Ferreira & Fumitake Tamura: The First Fist to Make Contact When We Dap (2024, Ruby Yacht): [sp]: B+(***)
  • David Friesen: This Light Has No Darkness (2023 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B
  • The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: Sob Story (2023 [2024], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Vanisha Gould and Chris McCarthy: Life's a Gig (2022 [2024], Fresh Sound New Talent): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Heems & Lapgan: Lafandar (2024, Veena Sounds): [sp]: A
  • Katy Kirby: Blue Raspberry (2024, Anti-): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Lapgan: History (2023, Veena Sounds): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Lapgan: Duniya Kya Hai (2021, Veena Sounds): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Lapgan: Badmaash (2019, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Les Amazones d'Afrique: Musow Danse (2024, Real World): [sp]: B+(***)
  • James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Transfiguration (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: A-
  • Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock: Maromas (2022 [2023], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Corb Lund: El Viejo (2024, New West): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Brady Lux: Ain't Gone So Far (2024, 6483357 DK): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Mali Obomsawin/Magdalena Abrego: Greatest Hits (2024, Out Of Your Head): [bc]: B+(**)
  • QOW Trio: The Hold Up (2024, Ubuntu Music): [sp]: A-
  • Zach Rich: Solidarity (2021 [2024], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Dex Romweber: Good Thing Goin' (2023, Propeller Sound): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Ignaz Schick/Oliver Steidle: Ilog3 (2021 [2023], Zarek): [bc]:" B+(***)
  • Fie Schouten/Vincent Courtois/Guus Janssen: Vostok: Remote Islands (2023, Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Håkon Skogstad: 8 Concepts of Tango (2023 [2024], Øra Fonogram): B+(*) [03-15]
  • Simon Spiess Quiet Tree: Euphorbia (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope (2024, Loma Vista): [sp]: B
  • Albert Vila Trio: Reality Is Nuance (2022 [2023], Fresh Sound New Talent): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Roberto Magris: Love Is Passing Thru: Solo/Duo/Trio/Quartet (2004 [2024], JMood): [cd]: A-
  • Jack Wood: The Gal That Got Away: The Best of Jack Wood, Featuring Guest Niehaud Fitzgibbon ([2024], Jazz Hang): [cd] [03-29]

Old music:

  • Gigi: Gigi (2001, Palm Pictures): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gigi: Illuminated Audio (2003, Palm Pictures): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Gigi: Gold & Wax (2006, Palm Pictures): [sp]: A-
  • Barney McAll: Precious Energy (2022, Extra Celestial Arts): [sp]: B
  • Pajama Party: Up All Night (1989, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
  • QOW Trio: QOW Trio (2020, Ubuntu Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Stacey Q: Greatest Hits (1982-95 [1995], Thump): [sp]: B+(***)
  • SSQ: Playback (1983, Enigma): [sp]: B+(**)
  • SSQ: Jet Town Je T'Aime (2020, Synthicide): [sp]: B+(*)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Guillermo Gregorio: Two Trios (ESP-Disk) [2023-12-01]
  • Mercer Hassy Orchestra: Duke's Place (Mercer Hassy) [04-15)
  • Ellie Lee: Escape (self-released) [05-24]
  • Matthew Shipp Trio: New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disk) [04-05]
  • Ronny Smith: Struttin' (Pacific Coast Jazz) [04-19]

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I started this early, on Wednesday, maybe even Tuesday, as I couldn't bring myself to work on anything else. There's a rhythm here: I have twenty-some tabs open to my usual sources, and just cycle through them, picking out stories, noting them, sometimes adding a comment, some potentially long. By Friday night, I had so much, I thought of posting early: leaving the date set for Sunday, when I could do a bit of update.

I didn't get the early post done. Sunday, my wife invited some friends over to watch a movie. I volunteered to make dinner, and that (plus the movie) killed the rest of the day. Nothing fancy: I keep all the fixings for pad thai on hand, so I can knock off a pretty decent one-dish meal in little more than an hour. And I had been thinking about making hot and sour soup since noticing a long-neglected package of dried lily buds, so I made that too. First actual cooking I had done in at least a month, so that felt nice and productive.

This, of course, feels totally scattered. I'm unsure of the groupings, and it's hard for me to keep track of the redundancies and contradictions. And once again, I didn't manage to finish my rounds. Perhaps I'll add a bit more after initially posting it late Sunday night. But at the moment, I'm exhausted.


My wife mentioned an article to me that I should have tracked down earlier, but can only mention here: Pankaj Mishra: [03-07] The Shoah after Gaza. Mishra grew up in a "family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India," deeply sympathetic to Israel, so his piece offers a slightly distant parallel to what many of us who started sympathetic only to become dismayed and ultimately appalled by what Israel has turned into. Beyond that, the piece is valuable as a history of how the Nazi Judeocide -- to borrow Arno Mayer's more plainly factual term in lieu of Holocaust or Shoah -- has been forged into a cudgel for beating down anyone who so much as questions let alone challenges the supremacy of Israeli power.

There is also a YouTube video of Mishra's piece.

On Facebook, I ran across this quote attributed to Carolina Landsmann in Haaretz:

We (Israelis) continue to approach the world from the position of victim, ignoring the 30,000 dead in Gaza, including 12,000 children, assuming that the world is still captive to its historic guilt toward Israel without understanding that this is over. The era of the Holocaust has ended. The Palestinians are now the wretched of the earth.

It's impossible to go back to the pre-Oct 7 world. To the blame economy between the Jews and the world, which gave the former moral immunity. Enough; it's over. Every era draws to a close. The time has come to grow up.

There was a time, and not that long ago, when I still thought that the experience of victimhood would still temper the exercise of Israeli power: sure, Israel was systematically oppressive, and Israeli society was riddled with the ethnocentrism we Americans understand as racism, but surely they still had enough of a grip on their humanity to stop short of genocide. That's all changed now, and it's coming as quite a shock -- no doubt to many Israelis as they look at their neighbors, but even more so to Americans (not just Jews but also many liberals who have long counted on Jews as allies).

It's hard to know what to do these days, beyond the call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and the constant need to remind anyone who's still echoing the Israeli hasbara that it's genocide, and by not opposing it, they're complicit. It may be unfair to go so far as to make placards about "Genocide Joe" -- he's just in thrall, having fully adapted to the peculiar gravity of the Israel lobby when he arrived in Washington fifty years ago -- as there is still a difference (maybe not practical, but certainly in spirit) between him and the people in Israel (and some Republicans in Congress) who really are committed to genocide. But in times like this, nice sentiments don't count for much.

Another important piece I noticed but skipped over on Sunday: Aaron Gell: [03-03] Has Zionism lost the argument? "American Jews' long-standing consensus about Israel has fractured. There may be no going back." There is a lot to unpack here. It's worth your time to read the interview with Ruth Wisse, with her absolutist defense of Israel, then the digression where the author considers the charge that Jews who doubt Israel are becoming non-Jews, ending in a reference to the Mishnah, specifically "by far the hardest to answer: If I am only for myself, who am I? Many Zionists long justified their project as providing a haven from anti-semitism, but their exclusive focus on their own issues, turning into indifference or worse towards everyone else, has finally turned Israel into the world's leading generator of anti-semitism.

Wisse insists that "the creation of the state changes the entire picture, because now to be anti-Zionist is a genocidal concept. If you're an anti-Zionist, you're against the existence of Israel . . . the realized homeland of nine million people." But later on, Gell notes: "I've spoken to dozens of anti-Zionists over the past few months, and not a single one thought Israel should cease to exist." They have various ideas of how this could be done, in part because they've seen it work here:

American Jews are justifiably proud to live in a successful multiethnic democracy, imperfect though it is. As citizens of a nation in which Jews are a distinct minority, we owe our well-being, our prosperity, and, yes, perhaps our existence to the tolerance, openness, and egalitarianism of our system of government and our neighbors. No wonder we shudder at Israel's chauvinism, its exclusionary nationalism, its oppression. It's all too obvious how we'd fare if the United States followed Israel's lead in reserving power for an ethnic or religious majority. Seen in this light, what's surprising isn't that some American Jews are anti-Zionists; it's that many more aren't.

I've been reading Shlomo Avineri's 1981 book (paperback updated with a new preface and epilogue 2017), The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, which offers a highly sympathetic survey of most of the reasons people have come up with to justify and promote Zionism. I'm still in the last profile chapter, on David Ben Gurion, before the initial epilogue, "Zionism as a Permanent Revolution." Immediately previous were chapters on Jabotinsky (who built a cult of power based on fascist models and used it to flip the script on race, promoting Jews as the superior one) and Rabbi Kook (who reformulated Zionism as God's will).

Ben Gurion's major contribution was the doctrine of "Hebrew labor," where Jews would fill all economic niches in the economy, leaving native Palestinians excluded and powerless. This was a significant change from the usual practice of settler colonialism, which everywhere else depended on impoverished locals for labor. Ben Gurion's union bound Jews into a coherent, self-contained, mutual help society, including its own militia, well before it was possible to call itself a state. But in doing so, he excluded the Palestinians, and plotted their expulsion -- his endorsement of the 1937 Peel Commission plan, his campaign for the UN partition plan, and finally his "War of Independence," remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba.

Ben Gurion was an enormously talented political figure, and his establishment of Israel through the 1950 armistices, the citizenship act, and the law of return, was a remarkable achievement against very stiff odds. He might have gotten away with it, but he couldn't leave well enough alone. He always wanted more, and he cultivated that trait in his followers. And while he feared the 1967 war, his followers launched it anyway, and in the end -- even as his fears had proven well founded -- he delighted in it. Like Mao, he so loved his revolution he kept revitalizing it, oblivious to the tragedy it caused. I expect the book, with its "permanent revolution" epilogues, will end on that note.

There is a lot of wishful thinking in the early parts of Avineri's book -- most obviously, Herzl's fairy-tale liberalism, but also the socialism of Syrkin and Borochov, which could have been developed further in later years, but it's appropriate to end as it does, with the real Israeli state. Great as he was, Ben Gurion made mistakes, and in the end the most fateful was allowing Jabotinsky and Kook, or more precisely their followers, into the inner sanctumm, from which they eventually prevailed in shaping Israel into the genocidal juggernaut it has become. The path from Jabotinsky to Netanyahu is remarkably short, passing straight through the former's secretary, the same as the latter's father. The other intermediaries were Ben Gurion's rivals of 1948, Begin and Shamir, who became favored tools in driving the Palestinians into exile, and future prime ministers.

Less obvious was Ben Gurion's decision to invite the Kookists into government, but what politician doesn't want to be reassured that God is on his side? Rabbi Kook was succeeded by his son, Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) was the driving force behind the West Bank settlements, leading directly to Smotrich and Ben Gvir. The first casualty in Ben Gurion's schemes was the socialism that unified the Yishuv in the first place. That was what gave Israel its foundational sense of justice, a reputation that is now nothing but ruins.


Initial count: 174 links, 8,842 words. Updated count [03-05]: 193 links, 10,883 words.


Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel vs. world (including American) opinion: This week we lead off with a singular act of self-sacrifice, by an American, an active duty serviceman, Aaron Bushnell, in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. I feel like I should add an opinion, but I don't really have one. My inclination is to view him as just another casualty of the more general madness, so not a hero or martyr or even a fool, but I'm also not so callous as to look the other way -- especially when so many people do have things to say.

Other stories:

  • Spencer Ackerman: [03-28] The anti-Palestinian origins of the War on Terror: Interview with Darryl Li, who wrote the report Anti-Palestinian at the core: The origins and growing dangers of US anti-terrorism law.

  • Ammiel Alcalay: [02-28] War on Gaza: How the US is buying time for Israel's genocide: "As the US ambassador to the UN recently made clear in a rare moment of honesty, Washington is fully committed to facilitating Israel's destruction of the Palestinians."

  • Kyle Anzalone: [03-01] US vetoes UN resolution condemning Israel for flour massacre.

  • Muhannad Ayyash: [02-26] Boycotting Israel could stop the genocide: At this point, this is probably just wishful thinking: "the world must ensure Tel Aviv's legal, economic and political isolation." The nice thing about BDS was that it provided a forum for grass-roots organizing against the apartheid regime in Israel: something that individuals could start and grow, and eventually recruit more powerful organizations, while ultimately appealing to the better consciences within Israel itself. That it worked with South Africa was encouraging.

    But it was always going to be a much more difficult reach in Israel -- I could insert a half-dozen reasons here -- and it never came close to gathering the collective moral, let alone financial, force it had with South Africa. Now, about all you can say for it is that it allowed people of good will to express their disapproval without promoting even more violence. I would even agree that it's still worth doing -- Israel deserves to be shamed and shunned for what it's doing, now more than ever. And, as we witness what Israel is doing, many more people, indeed whole nations, may join us.

    But will boycotting stop the genocide now? Maybe if the US and NATO banded together and put some serious teeth in their threats, some Israelis might reconsider. But sanctions usually just push countries deeper into corners, from which they're more likely to strike back than to fold. I'm not about to blame BDS for Israel's rampant right-wing -- their racism dates back further than any outsider noticed -- but they would claim their ascent as the way of fighting back against foreign moralizers. Even if we could count on eventually forcing some kind of reconciliation, the people in power in Israel right now are more likely to double down on genocide. It's not like anyone in the Nazi hierarchy saw the writing on the wall after Stalingrad and decided they should call the Judeocide off, lest they eventually put on trial. They simply sped up the extermination, figuring it would be their enduring contribution to Aryan civilization.

    • Jo-Ann Mort: [02-28] BDS is counter-productive. We need to crack down on Israeli settlements instead: "A future peace depends on drawing a line between Israel proper and the illegal settlements in Palestinian territory." This article is so silly I only linked to it after the Ayyash piece above. It does provide some explanation why BDS failed, but it doesn't come close to offering an alternative. Israel has been continuously blurring and outright erasing the Green Line ever since 1967. (It started with he demolition of the neighborhood next to the Al-Aqsa Mosque's western wall, just days after the 7-day war ended.) There is no way to force Israel to do much of anything, but few things are harder to imagine them acceding to is a return to what from 1950-67 were often decried as "Auschwitz borders."

  • Phyllis Bennis:

  • Amena ElAshkar: [02-28] Gaza ceasefire: Talk of an imminent deal is psychological warfare. I haven't bothered linking to numerous articles about an imminent ceasefire deal because, quite frankly, possible deals have never been more than temporarily expedient propaganda, mostly meant to humor the hostage relatives and the Americans. If Israel wanted peace, they could ceasefire unilaterally, and having satisfied themselves that they had inflicted sufficient damage to restore their Iron Wall deterrence, leave the rubble to others to deal with. The hostages would cease to be a bargaining chip, except inasmuch as not freeing them would keep much needed international aid away. So why is Netanyahu negotiating with Hamas? Mostly to squirrel the deal, while he continues implementing his plan to totally depopulate/destroy Gaza.

  • Paul Elle: [02-26] The Vatican and the war in Gaza: "A rhetorical dispute the Church and the Israeli government shows the limits -- and the possibilities -- of the Pope's role in times of conflict." On the other hand, if you look at the Pope's recent comments on "gender theory," you'll realize that he has very little to offer humanity, and that a Church that follows him could be very ominous. (For example, see [03-02] Pope says gender theory is 'ugly ideology' that threatens humanity.) Sometimes I'm tempted to take heart in that the Catholic Church is one of the few extant organizations to predate, and therefore remain somewhat free of, capitalism. But in it the spirit of Inquisition runs even deeper.

  • Madeline Hall: [02-28] Israeli genocide is a bad investment: For one thing, Norway has divested its holdings of Israeli bonds.

  • James North:

  • Peter Oborne: [02-27] These ruthless, bigoted Tories would have Enoch Powell smiling from his grave: "The recent spate of vile anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Tories shows they have decided that stoking hatred against minorities is their only way to avoid electoral annihilation." Also in UK:

  • Charles P Pierce: [02-29] The US has enabled Netanyahu long enough: "Two democracies, hijacked for alibis."

  • Vijay Prashad: [02-14] There is no place for the Palestinians of Gaza to go.

  • Barnett R Rubin: [03-02] Redemption through genocide: "The ICJ ruled that Israel's Gaza campaign poses a plausible and urgent threat of genocide. Future historians of Jewish messianism may recount how in 2024 "redemption through sin" became "redemption through genocide," with unconditional US support."

  • Sarang Shidore/Dan M Ford: [02-29] At the Hague, US more isolated than ever on Israel-Palestine.

  • Adam Taylor: [02-29] Democrats grew more divided on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, poll shows. Interesting that the Democratic split has always favored "take neither side," from a peak of 82% down to 74% before Gaza blew up -- the 12% drop since looks to be evenly split. Republicans, on the other hand, never had any sympathy for Palestinians, and became more pro-Israeli since (56% would "take Israel's side," vs. 19% for Democrats).

  • Philip Weiss: [02-28] PBS and NPR leave out key facts in their Israel stories: "Pundits and reporters in the mainstream media have a double standard when it comes to Israel and all but lie about apartheid, Jewish nationalism, and the role of the Israel lobby."

America's empire of bases and proxy conflicts, increasingly stressed by Israel's multifront war games:

  • Juan Cole: [03-03] How Washington's anti-Iranian campaign failed, big time.

  • Dave DeCamp: [02-29] US officials expect Israel to launch ground invasion of Lebanon: "Administration officials tell CNN they expect a ground incursion in late spring or early summer." The logic here is pretty ridiculous, and if it's believed in Washington, you have to wonder about them, too. Israel had a lot of fun bombing Lebanon in 2006, but their ground incursion was a pure disaster. There's no possible upside to trying it again. The argument that Netanyahu will, for political expediency, enlarge the war in order to keep it going "after Gaza," overlooks their obvious desire to "finish the job" by doing the same to Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank.

  • Sasha Filippova/Kristina Fried/Brian Concannon: [03-01] From coup to chaos: 20 years after the US ousted Haiti's president.

  • Jim Lobe: [03-01] Neocon Iraq war architects want a redo in Gaza: "Post-conflict plan would put Western mercenaries and Israel military into the mix, with handpicked countries in charge of a governing 'Trust.'" Pic is of Elliott Abrams, who was the one in charge of US Israel policy under Bush, and who pushed Sharon's unilateral withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, so that Gaza could be blockaded and bombed more effectively. That directly led to Hamas seizing power in Gaza, so one could argue that Abrams already had his "redo in Gaza."

The Michigan primaries: Of minor interest to both party frontrunners, so let's get them out of the way first. Trump won the Republican primary with 68.1% of the votes, vs. 26.6% for Nikki Haley, splitting the delegates 12-4 (39 more delegates will be decided later). Biden won the Democratic primary with 81.1% of the vote, vs. 13.2% for an uncommitted slate, which was promoted by Arab-Americans and others as a protest vote against Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. Marianne Williamson got 3%, and Dean Phillips 2.7%. Everyone's trying to spin the results as much as possible, but I doubt they mean much.

Next up is "Super Tuesday," so here's a bit of preview:

Trump, and other Republicans:

Mitch McConnell, 82, announced he will step down as Republican Leader in the Senate in November. This led to some, uh, appreciation?

  • Ryan Cooper: [02-29] Mitch McConnell, Senate arsonist.

  • Jack Hunter: [02-29] Sorry AP: Mitch McConnell is no Ronald Reagan: "The paper deploys the usual neoconservative trope that their foreign policies are the same. They are not." Still, I hate it when critics think they're being so clever in claiming that old Republicans were so sensible compared to the new ones. Reagan's "willingness to talk to America's enemies" didn't extend much beyond Russia, and that only after the door had been opened by Gorbachev. He left nothing but disasters all over Latin America and the Middle East through Iran and Afghanistan.

  • Ed Kilgore: [02-29] Mitch McConnell's power trip finally comes to an end.

  • Ian Millhiser: [02-29] How Mitch McConnell broke Congress.

  • John Nichols: [02-29] Good riddance to Mitch McConnell, an enemy of democracy: Sorry to have to break this to you, but he isn't going anywhere. He'll serve out the rest of his six-year term. He's not giving up his leadership post out of a sudden attack of conscience. He's doing it so some other Republican can take over, and possibly do even worse things than he would have done. By holding out until November, he's giving Trump the prerogative of hand-picking his successor -- assuming Trump wins, of course.

  • David A Graham: Mitch McConnell surrenders to Trump: That's more like it, but at least he's given himself some time. If Trump wins in November, there'll be no fighting him. And if Trump loses, why should he want to be the one stuck cleaning up the mess?

  • Andrew Prokop: [02-28] How Mitch McConnell lost by winning.

  • Jane Mayer: [2020-04-12] How Mitch McConnell became Trump's enabler-in-chief: Sometimes an old piece is the best reminder. Had McConnell a bit more foresight and backbone, he could have swung enough Republican votes to convict Trump over Jan. 6, and followed that with a resolution declaring Trump ineligible to run again, according to the 14th Amendment -- such a resolution was discussed at the time, and would undoubtedly be upheld. Sure, it would have been unpopular among Republicans at the time, but popular will has almost never entered into McConnell's political calculus.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [02-27] Biden has been bad for Palestinians. Trump would be worse. "On Israel, the two are not the same." Probably true, but this really isn't much comfort. Biden is effectively an Israeli puppet, with no independent will, or even willingness to caution Netanyahu in public, and as such has had no effect on moderating Israel's vendetta -- and may reasonably be charged with not just supporting but accelerating it. For instance, Biden did not have to send aircraft carriers into the region, threatening Iran and provoking Yemen and Lebanon. Nor did he have to accelerate arms deliveries when a ceasefire was obviously called for. As for Trump, sure, he doesn't even know the meaning of "caution." He is largely responsible for Netanyahu believing that he can get away with anything.

    • Dave DeCamp: [03-03] Poll: Majority of Democrats want a presidential candidate who opposes military aid to Israel: With Marianne Williamson unsuspending her campaign, there actually is one, but will anyone find out?

    • Isaac Chotiner: [02-28] Does the Biden administration want a long-lasting ceasefire in Gaza? Interview with John Kirby, Biden's National Security Council spokesman, explaining that Biden only wants whatever Netanyahu tells him to want. It's like a form of hypnosis, where Hamas is the shiny object that so captures America's gaze that it will support Israel doing anything to it wants as long as it's saying it's meant to eliminate Hamas. Sure, Biden understands that Palestinians are suffering, and he implores Netanyahu to make them suffer less, but he can't question his orders.

      The key to this is that he buys the line that Hamas is a cancer that can be excised from the Palestinian body politic, allowing Israel to regain its security. I hesitate to call that the Israeli line: sure, they developed it with their targeted assassinations (they go back at least as far as Abu Jihad in 1988), but Israelis never claimed one strike would suffice -- they tended to use metaphors like "mowing the grass"). It was only the Americans, with their romantic conceits about their own goodness and the innate innocence of ignorant savages, that turned this systematic slaughter into magical thinking. Israelis don't think like that. They understand that Hamas (or some other form of militant backlash) is the inevitable result of their harsh occupation. And, their consciences hardened by constant struggle (including their carefully cultivated memory of the Holocaust), they're willing to live with that brutality.

      If they can't distinguish Hamas from the mass of people they've emerged from, they see no reason to discipline their killing. They figure if they destroy enough, the problem will subside. Even if it inevitably erupts again, that's later, and they'll remain eternally vigilant. There are no solutions, because they don't want to accept the only possible one, which is peaceful coexistence. But silly Americans, they need to be told stories, and it's amazing what they'll swallow.

    • Mitchell Plitnick: [03-01] Biden memos show Palestine advocacy is working: "Two recent presidential orders show the Biden administration is feeling the heat from months of protests against his support for Israel's genocide in Gaza."

    • Alexander Ward: [03-01] 'We look 100 percent weak': US airdrops in Gaza expose limit to Biden's Israel policy.

    • Fareed Zakaria: [03-01] Biden needs to tell Israel some difficult truths. Only he can do it.

    • Erica L Green: [03-03] Kamala Harris calls for an 'immediate cease-fire' in Gaza: Promising title, but fine print reveals it's only the "six-week cease-fire proposal currently on the table," and that she's calling on Hamas, not Israel, the ones who are actually doing all of the firing, and who have already broken off talks on that particular proposal. A cease fire, especially where the war is so one-sided, doesn't need to be negotiated: just do it (perhaps daring the other side to violate it, but the longer it lasts, the better). Sure, prisoner exchanges have to be negotiated, but not cease-fire, which is just common sense.

  • Frank Bruni: [03-03] How Democrats can win anywhere and everywhere.

  • Michelle Goldberg: [03-01] The Democrat showing Biden how it's done: Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan. This follows on recent columns by Goldberg:

  • Ezra Klein: [02-16] Democrats have a better option than Biden: Starts by heaping considerable praise on Biden and his accomplishments of the last three-plus years, then lowers the boom and insists that he should step aside, not so much because one reasonably doubts that he can do the job for more years, but that he's no longer competent as a candidate. (Never mind that Trump is far from competent, in any sense of the term. He's a Republican, and one of our many double standards, we don't expect competency from Republicans, or for that matter caring, or even much coherence.) He goes into how conventions work, and offers a bunch of plausible candidates. It's a long and thorough piece, and makes the case as credibly as I've seen (albeit much less critically of Biden than I might do myself).

    Klein's columns are styled as "The Ezra Klein Show," which are usually just interviews, but this one is monologue, with multiple references to other conversations. He's had a few other interviews recently with political operatives, a couple adding to his insight into Democratic prospects, plus a couple more I'll include here. (Also see the pieces I listed under Ukraine.)

  • Paul Musgrave: [03-03] An inside look at how Biden's team rebuilt foreign policy after Trump: Review of Alexander Ward: The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.

  • Bill Scher: [02-29] "Nightmare in America": How Biden's ad team should attack Trump: "In 1984, Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign ran a series of ads that evoked how different life felt in America compared to under his opponent's administration four years prior. Today, Joe Biden should do the same." Sure, there's something to be said here, if you can figure out how to say it. But Trump's going to be pushing the opposite spin, in many cases on the same set of facts, all the while pointing out the extraordinary efforts his/your enemies took to hobnob his administration and persecute him since he was pushed out of office. He's just as likely to embrace the Left's notion of him as their worst nightmare. Note that page includes a link to a 2020 article, which also cites Reagan: Nancy LeTourneau: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

  • John E Schwarz: [03-01] Democratic presidents have better economic performances than Republican ones.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols: [03-01] Diplomacy Watch: Russia could be invited to Ukraine-led peace talks. I don't really buy that "Ukraine's shift is a sign of just how dire the situation is becoming for its armed forces," but I do believe that Russia can more/less hold its position indefinitely, that it can continue to exact high (and eventually crippling) costs from Ukraine indefinitely, and that it can survive the sanctions regime (which the US is unlikely to loosen even in an armistice. All of this suggests to me that Zelensky needs to approach some realistic terms for ending the war, then sell them as hard to his "allies" as to Putin, and to the rest of the world.

  • Anatol Lieven/George Beebe: [02-28] Europeans' last ditch clutch at Ukrainian victory: "France's Macron raised the idea of Western troops entering the fray, others want to send longer range missiles."

  • Olena Melnyhk/Sera Koulabdara: [02-29] Ukraine's vaunted 'bread basket' soil is now toxic: "Two years of war has left roughly one-third of its territory polluted, with dire potential consequences for the world's food supply."

  • Will Porter: [02-28] Russia claims first Abrams tank kill in Ukraine.

  • Ted Snider: [03-01] How the West provoked an unprovoked war in Ukraine. The ironies in the title at least merit quotes around "unprovoked." The important part of the story is the relatively underreported period from March, 2021 when Biden added $125 million of "defensive lethal weapons" on top of $150 million previously allocated under Trump, up to the eve of the March 2022 invasion, when "Putin called Ukraine 'a knife to the throat of Russia' and worried that 'Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead' for a pre-emptive US strike against Russia." It is unlikely the US would ever launch such a strike, but Ukraine had by then given up on the Minsk accords and was preparing to take back Donbas. Had they succeeded, Crimea would be next, and that (plus excessive confidence in his own military) was enough for Putin to launch his own pre-emptive attack.

  • Marcus Stanley: [02-28] Biden officials want Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine war: "Not only will this prolong the conflict, but rock confidence in the Western-led world economic system."

  • Ishaan Tharoor: [02-28] Foreign troops in Ukraine? They're already there.

  • Ezra Klein:

  • [2022-03-01] Can the West stop Russia by strangling its economy? Transcript of an interview with Adam Tooze, doesn't really answer the title question but does provide a pretty deep survey of Russia's economy at the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. One minor note: I think Tooze said "Kremlinologists" where you read "the criminologists of the modern day have five, six, seven, eight different groups now that they see operating around Putin."

    PS: Unrelated to Russia, but for another Klein interview with Tooze, see: [2022-10-07] How the Fed is "shaking the entire system".

Around the world:


Other stories:

Lori Aratani: [03-01] Boeing in talks to reacquire key 737 Max supplier Spirit AeroSystems: Boeing spun the company off in 2005, including the Wichita factory my father and brother worked at for decades.

Marina Bolotnikova/Kenny Torrella: [02-26] 9 charts that show US factory farming is even bigger than you realize: "Factory farms are now so big that we need a new word for them." Related here:

Rosa Brooks: [02-20] One hundred years of dictatorship worship: A review of a new book by Jacob Heilbrunn: America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators [note: cover has it "America First" in large white type, then overprints "Last" in blockier red].

Daniel Denvir: [02-28] The libertarians who dream of a world without democracy: Interview with Quinn Slobodian, who wrote the 2018 book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and most recently, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

Adam Gopnik: [02-19] Did the year 2020 change us forever? "The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear." A review, which I haven't finished (and may never) of the emerging, evolving literature on 2020.

Sean Illing: [03-03] Are we in the middle of an extinction panic? "How doomsday proclamations about AI echo existential anxieties of the past." Interview with Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote about this in the New York Times: The 100-year extinction panic is back, right on schedule. I could write a lot more on this, especially if I referred back to the extinction controversies paleontologists have been debating all along, but suffice it to say:

  • Short of the Sun exploding, there is zero chance of humans going extinct in the foreseeable future. People are too numerous, widespread, and flexible for anything to get all of us. (Side note: the effective altruist focus on preventing extinction events is misguided.)
  • Human population is, however, precariously balanced on a mix of technological, economic, political, and cultural factors which are increasingly fragile, and as such subject to sabotage and other disruptions (not least because they are often poorly understood). Any major breakdown could be catastrophic on a level that affects millions (though probably not billions) of people.
  • Catastrophes produce psychological shocks that can compound the damage. By far the greatest risk here is war, not just for its immediate destruction but because it makes recovery more difficult.
  • People are not very good at evaluating these risks, erring often both in exaggeration and denial.

The Times piece led to some others of interest here:

Chris Lehman: [03-01] Border hysteria is a bipartisan delusion: "Yesterday, both President Biden and Donald Trump visited Texas to promise harsher immigration policies."

Andrea Mazzarino: [02-27] War's cost is unfathomable. I mentioned this in an update last week, but it's worth mentioning again. She starts by referring to "The October 7th America has forgotten," which was 2001, when the US first bombed Afghanistan, following the Al-Qaeda attacks of that September 11. In 2010, Mazzarino founded the Cost of War Project, which, as economists are wont to do, started adding up whatever they could of the quantifiable costs of America's Global War on Terror and its spawn. Still, their figures (at least $8 trillion and counting, and with debt compounding) miss much of the real human (and environmental) costs, especially those that are primarily psychic.

For instance, would we have the gun problem that we have had we not been continuously at war for over two decades? Would our politics have turned so desperately war-like? Certainly, there would have been much less pressure to immigrate, given that war is the leading producer of refugees. Without constant jostling for military leverage, might we not have made more progress in dealing with problems like climate change? The list only grows from there.

One constant theme of every Speaking of Which is the need to put aside the pursuit of power over and against others and find mutual grounds that will allow us to work together cooperatively to deal with pressing problems. There are lots of reasons why this is true, starting with the basic fact that we could not exist in such numbers if not for a level of technology that is complex beyond most of our understandings and fragile, especially vulnerable to the people who feel most unjustly treated. Our very lives depend on experts who can be trusted, and their ability to work free of sabotage. You can derive all the politics you need from this insight.

Michelle Orange: [03-01] How the Village Voice met its moment: A review of Tricia Romano's The Freaks Came Out to Write, a new "oral history" (i.e., history presented in interview quotes). I rushed out and bought a copy, and should probably write my own review, even if only because she left me out. More:

Rick Perlstein: [02-28] Kissinger revisited: "The former secretary of state is responsible for virtually every American geopolitical disaster of the past half-century."

Deanne Stillman: [02-21] Mothers, sons, and guns: Author wrote a book about Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother, recounted here, in light of high school shooter Ethan Crumbley and his mother, Jennifer Crumbley, who was convicted for her role leading up to the shootings.

David Zipper: [03-01] Driving at ridiculous speeds should be physically impossible: As someone who grew up with a great love of auto racing, I'd argue that driving at ridiculous speeds has always been physically impossible, even as limits have expanded with better technology. Of course, "ridiculous" can mean many different things, but I'd say that's a reason not to try to legislate it. I've long thought that the 55 mph speed limit was the biggest political blunder the Democrats made, at least in my lifetime. (Aside from Vietnam.) Not only did it impose on personal freedom -- in a way that, say, European levels of gasoline taxes wouldn't have done -- but it induced some kind of brain rot in American auto engineering, from which Detroit may never have recovered. (I can't really say. After several bad experiences, I stopped buying their wares.)

Ironically, this political push for mandating "speed limiters" (even more euphemistically, "Intelligent Speed Assistance") on new cars is coming from tech businesses, who see surveillance of driving as a growth area for revenue. This fits in with much broader plans to increase surveillance -- mostly government, but it doesn't end there -- over every aspect of our lives. Supposedly, this will save lives, although the relationship between speeding and auto carnage has never been straightforward, and much more plausible arguments (e.g., on guns) go nowhere. My great fear here is that Democrats will rally to this as a public health and safety measure, inviting a backlash we can ill afford (as with the 55 mph speed limit, which helped elect Reagan).


Feb 2024