The illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own

Last week Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported on the chaos the Supreme Court created by releasing its decision that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part that bans gerrymandering based on race. In Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry postponed primary elections until after that legislature redraws maps, even though early voting begins in ten days. Mass voter confusion will result. In Alabama they’re ready to redraw maps, but their case before the Supremes back in 2023, which the state lost because of Section 2, requires them to keep their existing maps until 2030. They’re trying to get that little provision removed. I’ve heard Tennessee has passed a new map destroying black majority districts around Memphis. Emily Singer of Kos reported in Florida, which just approved new maps that give Republicans a more seats, a lawsuit has been filed saying the maps were drawn for partisan advantage, which is illegal according to a state constitution amendment passed in 2010 with 63% of the vote. We know the maps were drawn for partisan advantage because important people said exactly that. Jason Poreda, the guy who drew the new districts, admitted such during a hearing. Fox News presented the map by coloring the new districts red and blue. The new districts were drawn using the standard gerrymandering principles. Tampa was divided into three districts so that the Democrats in the city are much fewer than the Republicans in the surrounding rural areas. David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing this opinion was written by Justice Jim Crow while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson looks on. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

What the Roberts Court is making possible is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

David Shuster of Blue Amp media:

California’s billionaires are freaking out. Like most other obscenely wealthy Americans in this Trump era, the plutocrats have been bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and possess a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their own reflection. They hold to the illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million California voters have a different view and have now signed a petition pushing forward a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax. The California proposal is disarmingly simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a one-time levy of roughly 5 percent on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed largely towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization.

See below for more on taxing the rich. In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Jermaine Fowler of his “The Humanity Archive” Substack discussing the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines.

Spirit carried the people the legacy carriers did not want. Working class. Disproportionately Black, Latino, and immigrant. The fees, the seats, the mockery were the visible signs of the sorting. […] The hubs tell the story. Fort Lauderdale. San Juan. Detroit. Atlantic City. The Caribbean. Latin America. Spanish at the customer service line since 2001, the year of the San Juan route. The carrier the legacy airlines mocked was the one that flew the diaspora home. Thirty-seven percent of American households earning under fifty thousand dollars flew at all in the past five years. Seventy-three percent of households earning over fifty thousand did. Take the floor away and the slice that depended on it does not move up. It stops flying.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted David Daley and Eric J Segall of The Guardian:

The court has essentially ruled that unless a legislator records a confession of their own bigotry, the map is constitutional – making the only person allowed to define a racist act the person committing it. Congress understood the absurdity of this in 1982, which is why legislators wrote an effects-based standard into the law. Discrimination does not announce itself. The intent standard is the cloak of the coward. Roberts sealed the trap years ago: in Rucho v Common Cause, he ruled that partisan gerrymandering is beyond federal review. Now, any map that dilutes Black voting power hides behind partisan strategy, and the courts cannot touch it. The court has achieved something more perverse still: drawing districts to protect Black voters is itself the racial discrimination. Erasing them is not.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box on why the press is harder on Democrats than Republicans.

For the press, the story of Trump and his family being corrupt is old news. The New York Times and others still do deep investigative pieces uncovering the corruption, but those stories rarely make it into the daily coverage of the Trump administration. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, and other Trump surrogates are rarely pushed to answer tough questions about it, and when they are, they just feign outrage and never engage with the substance. The second reason is that the press holds Democrats to a higher standard. This has always been sort of true, but it’s been particularly true in the Trump era. Reporters think Democratic voters care about whether their leaders are corrupt and Republican voters don’t. Therefore, a Democratic scandal could have bigger political implications, while a Republican scandal dies on the vine. Third, most of the media is VERY sensitive to accusations that they are biased against Republicans. This is less true than it used to be, but most reporters are personally liberal on issues like abortion, guns, and climate. Some end up overcompensating by being tougher on Democrats.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Gaby Goldstein of Talking Points Memo discussing the ruling that did the gutting, known as Louisiana v. Callais:

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years. But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

Alphonso David of The Contrarian:

But there is also a simpler economic truth: voter suppression has a price. When districts are manipulated and voting becomes harder, people pay by driving farther and spending more on gas or transit to vote. For working people, especially hourly workers and parents without flexible schedules or support systems, voter suppression leads to increased childcare costs or missing a shift to vote. The cruelty of it all is that voters are being asked to absorb those costs when they’re already living paycheck to paycheck in a system attempting to further dilute their political power. That is the math of modern voter suppression: make voting more expensive while making each vote feel less powerful. ... A 2019 study on Black disenfranchisement and taxation in the South found that after literacy-test requirements were introduced, counties with larger Black populations saw a nearly 5.4% decline in real per-person tax receipts. Put simply, when Black people were pushed out of the electorate, local governments collected and invested less money to serve Black communities. That meant fewer resources for schools, weaker public services, and less support for the very communities whose political power had been stripped away. The result is a double economic penalty: you make less money, and then your community gets less support from the government meant to serve you.

Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine hosts an Ask Bolts column where readers can ask a question and a couple experts will answer them. The column for May 5 was about the Calais decision with Kareem Crayton and Justin Levitt providing the answers. I didn’t read the whole article, jumping to the section on what are possible remedies. Here are part of the answers. Crayton noted we haven’t explored all of the 14th Amendment. The second provision is the Penalty Clause, which says that if a state denies or curtails voting rights Congress can penalize it with a reduction of Congressional representation. It has never been used. Crayton also said, “We’re not going to get better from this court, I don’t think. I think they’ve shown us who they are.” Levitt discussed what Congress can do. It still has some things it can do.

There are ways to insulate congressional bills from judicial review. There are ways to insulate current bills from review by the Supreme Court. There are ways to craft remedies that rely on things like the 14th Amendment’s second section or on the Guarantee Clause (which guarantees “a republican form of government” for all states in the union). There are ways to craft remedies that do things other than what the court has forbidden in Callais, including relaxing the assumption that the remedy has to be single-member districts. By the way, other remedies are already available under the VRA: There was a Federal Voting Rights Act claim resolved using proportional representation in Eastpointe, Michigan. But I’ll say it’s going to take a really strong push by the public to get a Congress that’s willing to reform voting rights in this way. And while we’re there, there’s an awful lot that could be done on court reform. If there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change Congress’s orientation, that means there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change the court’s orientation.

Crayton again:

Our mission is to do the “citizen work” (organizing, speaking up, and voting) without distractions. What are the distractions? They include the voices that say you must accept second class citizenship when the constitution guarantees you first-class. And it also means ignoring and sometimes pushing back on friendly voices stuck on dismay and disorder. Things are bad, but they don’t have to be if we use the power we each have to demand change.

Kevin Hardy, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the growing effort to tax the rich. Maine recently passed a bill to add a 2% tax to those with an income more than $1 million a year. Maine joins Washsington, New Jersey, and Massachusetts that have passed such laws. A dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia have proposed new taxes. In California advocates gathered enough signatures to put a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. Proponents say these bills make the tax structure, already tilted against the poor, more fair. Opponents fear taxes on business owners will dissuade starting new companies (yep, again trotting out the smallest companies to protect the greediness of the biggest). There is also the claim that taxing the rich more will prompt them to move to a state with lower taxes. But data doesn’t show that happening. Taxing the rich in liberal states comes as conservative states are making their tax systems more regressive, placing more tax burdens on the poor. Both efforts come as the wealth gap has been getting wider for decades and made worse by last summer’s Big Brutal Bill.

The gap between the rich and poor has been widening for decades. Wealth for the bottom fifth of American households has barely moved in recent decades, while the top 0.1% have seen their wealth increase by nearly $40 million each, according to an analysis by the anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam America. Between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to the top 1% doubled, while the share going to the bottom 50% fell by a third, Oxfam reported.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit started a post with:

Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Hartmann listed several ways that this is happening. The nasty guy announced pulling 5,000 troops from Germany, harming NATO. He ended sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin billions in revenue. Robert Kennedy is undermining trust in vaccines and disease prevention, making us more vulnerable. Pete Hegseth is purging senior career leadership of the military. DOGE hollowed out federal institutional expertise. Musk ended USAID, allowing China and Russia to secure natural resources and military outposts. Voice of America broadcasts propaganda, weakening America’s advocacy of democracy. ICE and Stephen Miller are gutting the asylum system, straining courts, devastating tourism, and destroying our reputation. Russel Vought concentrated the budget in the nasty guy’s hands, overriding Congress. The FBI has been weaponized and purged, as has the Department of Justice. The Department of Education is being vandalized, cutting school and student protections. A climate denier runs the Department of Energy and another runs the National Park Service. The Transportation Department is loosening safety regulations The Treasury Department pushes for financial concentration and deregulation. The Commerce Department is pushing tariffs and trade decisions, straining trade relationships and exploding inflation. Witkoff and Kushner have screwed up negotiations with Iran. The Department of Agriculture favors agribusiness over family farms while stripping food stamps and school meals. The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back regulations for Big Oil billionaires. Housing and Urban Development is dropping programs for poor families. The intelligence agencies have politicized their analysis and sidelined career analysts. The State Department has hollowed out diplomatic staff, allowing Russia and China to set the agenda.

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot: — Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work, — Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars, — Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned, — Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America, — Defund the agencies Congress created, — Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously, — Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and — Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps. Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend. ... [Khrushchev] may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

This will end with “ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.”

Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s rightwing billionaires don’t either.

Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series of Explaining the Right, discussed the conservative media bubble.

The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders, both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces. ... But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.

To that last point note since Fox News launched in 1996 Democrats won presidential elections in 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 and won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016. There have also been several times Democrats held majorities in at least one house of Congress. Which is the reason for the current gerrymandering drive. That conservative media bubble is vulnerable when voters can see for themselves there is a disconnect, which can prompt voters to vote for Democrats.

Why do we need to know the gender of another person?

My Sunday movie was Dear Ex on Netflix. From the start the Chinese characters show it is set in Asia, though it took a while to confirm it is Taipei. The names are hard for me to spell, so I’ll use relationships. The story opens with Mother and Son at Lover’s apartment complaining that Lover has stolen the life insurance money that was to pay for Son’s college (preferably in Canada, a long way from Mother). It’s all complicated because this is the gay Lover. Mother is quite the shrew and quite manipulative so Son leaves home and, lacking anywhere else to go, wants to stay with Lover. But isn’t he supposed to be the enemy? Son keeps saying that to himself but doesn’t quite believe it. Along the way we see how Father and Mother met and how Father and Lover met. Father declares he must have a wife and child, then realizes being gay means that won’t work. We see Lover taking care of Father during the final illness. And we understand why Father made Lover his life insurance beneficiary. The story is told quite well, with fine acting all around. I enjoyed it. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. The peaks in new cases per day for the last few weeks are 681, 852, 807, 717. The low plateau continues. The low level of deaths per day also continues. D’Anne Witkowski wrote for Between the Lines about the web comic Assigned Male (and I think also book or book series) and talked to the author Sophie Labelle. She is trans and the book is a series of comic panels about being trans and the situations they have to deal with. Labelle describes the book as “the adventures of a bunch of sarcastic trans and queer teenagers.” Which sounds like fun. The article describes a recent comic (which I found online):

A recent comic depicts an adult and two kids in a park, an older kid babysitting a younger kid. The adult asks if the younger child is a boy or a girl. The sitter responds, “We don’t know yet, they haven’t told us.” The adult, distressed, responds that this will surely confuse the child. The sitter responds, “The most confusing part of it is actually the amount of strangers who feel entitled to ask what’s in that kid’s pants.” This shuts the adult right up.

I add: Why do we need to know the gender of another person? It shouldn’t make any difference in how we treat them. Alas, since we live in a society soaked in patriarchy the gender of the other person matters a great deal in how we treat them. Here’s the text of the comic she posted after the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs:

No matter how isolated a perpetrator of violence against our community is, they are never acting alone. They are emboldened by a society that allows our existence to be debated and questioned and by fanatics who see sexual and gender diversity as perverse and dangerous. Today we mourn. Tomorrow we shine the brightest and loudest we can.

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has abolished the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. This subcommittee used to focus on the stuff in its name, plus voting rights and criminal justice reform. Oversight committee chair Rep. James Comer insists that the parent group is still able to address all those issues. But they appear much more interested in Hunter Biden. Rebekah Sager of Kos that several House Republicans were seen wearing new lapel pins. The American flag has been replaced with a tiny AR-15 gun profile. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida is one of those seen with the pin. When asked a spokesperson for Luna says it “is about sponsoring a gun bill” though noticeably absent from that phrase is what kind of gun bill. Will it be one to add to or subtract from those already on the street? Strange that the only ones actually sponsoring gun bills are Democrats. We can tell what kind of bill they want to sponsor because the pins are being handed out by Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who owns a gun store. These pins are a way to own the libs. Annoyingly, these pins are showing up during National Gun Violence Survivor’s Week. Back in 2014 Justice John Paul Stevens proposed a new version of the Second Amendment. His version would say:

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio lost her daughter Lexi in the Uvalde shooting. She said, “Why we would choose guns over children is not something I can comprehend.” In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer:

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported on a case of a man who had stalked and assaulted his ex-girlfriend and their child. In February 2020 she got a protective order against him and he was banned from owning a gun. Less than a year later he was involved in five shootings. He was indicted for violating his gun ban. The case went before the Fifth Circuit Court (the most conservative of the circuit courts) who said the law used to ban the man from owning a gun was unconstitutional. Huh? Wrote Clawson:

Following the logic of Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2022 opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a federal law banning the sale of guns to people subject to restraining orders in domestic violence cases. In striking down a New York law requiring proper cause for concealed handgun permits, Thomas explained that the law was illegitimate because it was not “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In other words, if there was no such law in 1791, it’s unconstitutional now.

Of course, in 1791 there was no law against wife-beating. The first laws banning it were in Alabama and Massachusetts in 1871. There were no bans in 1791 because women were considered the property of their husbands. This case of banning guns of wife-beaters will likely go before the Supremes. What they will do with it no one is guessing. I had written that several participants in the Capitol attack had expressed regret for that participation when the judge was ready for sentencing. I wrote, as others noted, that they were acting like spoiled children and their only regret was they got caught. An Associates Press story posted on Kos, confirms that by noting several of these defendants, now safely outside the courtroom, have declared themselves to be a “J6 Patriot” and making statements “inconsistent with contrition.” That might make judges less likely to believe statements of remorse for those attackers whose trials are still ongoing. Kerry Eleveld of Kos looked at some of the recent Civiqs polling. Some of the things they looked at in the early part of this year was opinions on pro-science, pro-democracy, and pro-reality issues. It doesn’t look so good. Here are some of the poll results. Only 51% agree the vaccine actually worked. 45%, a plurality, believe Dr. Fauci lied to Congress about the origins of the pandemic. 45%, a plurality, believe the US might be corruptly funding Ukraine and should be audited. 47%, plurality, believe the Biden Justice Department has not been unfairly targeting conservatives. 51% believe Congress should investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop. Eleveld concluded:

If this poll accurately reflects voters' basic mindset on matters of science, sovereignty, and justice, then Democrats have a lot of truth-telling to do over the next year in preparation for the ‘24 presidential contest.

The Marketplace Morning Report for today discussed the book The Capital Order by Clara Mattei. The book is about how austerity is designed as a way to silence the working class because workers become too focused on simply living. Mussolini was at first praised because he used austerity to silence workers. Politicians can get away with enforcing austerity because it is seen as an economic issue, not a political one. From a report a few weeks ago Clawson told the story of Butch Marion, age 82, was able to retire from Walmart after TikTok donations raised over $108,000. Yeah, that sentence should make you think there are several kinds of wrong. These sorts of “inspirational” stories have been around for a while. Marion is just one of several who retired from Walmart this way. There have been stories of people walking long distances to work and being given a car, of kids paying off school lunch debt, and many more. Yes, it is great friends and colleagues, even strangers, are coming to their aid.

But celebrating those isolated events misses the point that 82-year-olds shouldn’t be on their feet eight hours a day working at Walmart because it’s their only financial option. People shouldn’t be walking more than 10 miles to then work all day and walk back home because they can’t afford a car and there’s no reliable public transit. These are signs of a broken system and reminders of how many people are not getting that successful crowdfunding campaign, not joyous occasions to be celebrated. ... Our seniors should be able to retire with dignity. Our workers should have access to reliable public transit or the money to live within actual walking distance of their jobs or buy a reliable car. Our children should be fed. The moments when these things happen shouldn’t be headlines and hashtags.

Turtle on roller skates

This is post 5000! In the last fifteen years I’ve put up five thousand posts to this blog. I’ve written about a wide variety of topics over those 5000 posts, though there is one overarching theme. I call the blog Gay Crows Nest and say I’m looking at the culture from the gay perspective. However, the major theme is now about various groups and individuals who try to assert they are superior to others, causing oppression to those others, and the many ways the oppressed resist and build community instead. I poked at my calculator and see since I started blogging there have been about 5,500 days. That does not mean there were only 500 days in 15 years I did not blog – this year I’ll blog only 215 of 365 days, though that’s almost 6 Mb of writing. What it means is before the pandemic I tended to break up a day’s writing by major topic into separate posts with minor topics in one “tidbits” post – I don’t think I’ve used the “tidbits” flag since 2019. In 2009 I posted 459 times, a record I’ll probably never match. Since the pandemic started – and that first year I posted nearly every day (I didn’t have much else to do) – I changed my method, posting only once a day no matter how many topics were in the one post. And 2020 remains my year with the most writing, about 12.7 Mb in 333 posts. Today I went down to the Detroit Institute of Arts to see a couple of their temporary exhibits, then attend the Detroit Film Theater showing of the 2021-22 winners of the British Arrows. Yes, that means I spent money to sit through 75 minutes of the best British TV commercials. I watch very little American TV and I always mute the commercials. The winners of the Arrows are enjoyable because the British sense of humor is so different from ours and many of these little scenes are wildly imaginative. Many don’t give an indication of the corporate name or the product until the end. Some of them are for charities rather than companies. The Arrows have, of course, a website of the winners and I see the presentation in the theater didn’t include all of them. My favorites: A turtle roller skating through traffic turns out to be an advertisement for train travel. In the middle of a Medieval battle sequence and death scene is a guy in a bathrobe with an ironing board who keeps asking the scene to be replayed – an ad for the replay feature for Alexa/Amazon streaming. Four people surf the wind, gliding over the fields and through the forests, in an ad for Burberry. In a Starbucks commercial Gemma claims his real name of James. Sometime in the 9th Century a bunch of Danes ready to invade England are held up because their leader refuses to wear a helmet. Volvo said the ultimate safety test isn’t dropping their car from 100 feet, it’s transitioning to all electric as a response to climate change. Disabled athletes show how much determination they have to get into the Paralympics – they should have sports available to them because they are 15% of the world population, which is 1 billion people. Yesterday I wrote that I had read 45 books this year. Make it 46. I had started one with 230 pages that I thought would take a few days and into the new year. But this one is a graphic story, pages of cartoon style pictures and few words, and I finished in a day – not even staying up late. It is Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir. Maia was born female but definitely doesn’t feel female, yet doesn’t feel quite male either. Maia doesn’t like the nonbinary they/them pronouns so settled on e/em/eir – if e could work up the nerve to insist people actually use them. E took quite a while to figure out what eir identity is. As for orientation e settled on bisexual, though better yet, just leave sex out if it. It is quite a journey of self discovery. Yes, this is one of the books Republicans love to ban. In this case I see their point – a tiny bit. Kobabe includes images of menstrual blood (which for er includes a great deal more discomfort than the usual female), a dildo in a harness, and fantasies of two naked men. However, the need for this sort of book to be available to queer kids and the need for cisgender kids to understand what some of their peers are going through far outweighs any squeamishness some adults might have. I’m sure the kids are puzzled – you’re upset about images of that? Yeah, I know the real purpose of banning the book isn’t because of a few uncomfortable images, but to deny queer kids the understanding that what they are experiencing is just a small piece of the vast panoply of normal ways of being human, and thus oppressing them. Maia struggles for so long because e doesn’t know there are words for transgender and nonbinary, that such things exist. So buy the book, read it, and give it to the youth in your life. The news has been full of the big snowstorm that arrived just before Christmas and fouled air travel with thousands of flights canceled per day. Yes, the storm also snarled train, bus, and car travel (with dozens dying in Buffalo), but with a lot less consequence. In air travel, the worst is definitely Southwest Airlines who, a week later, is still stumbling around and canceling flights. There are now reports explaining why Southwest canceled nearly 16,000 flights over the week and will likely pass 18,000 flight before they’re back close to normal. Hunter of Daily Kos explained some of their problem is they don’t use the hub system of other airlines, instead they use a system with a web of routes and shorter flights. That means their planes and crew have a greater number of airports where they might be stuck. But the majority of the problem is that Southwest uses a scheduling system that’s 20 years old and crashed when overloaded. Wrote Hunter:

It's the central theme of capitalism, pandemic-era or not; if you design systems meant to squeeze maximum efficiency while spending the minimum possible on robustness, those systems will fail during unexpected stresses because that's what they're built to do.

The system is 20 years old because the board spent the money instead on paying shareholders. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos reported the company spent $6 billion on stock buyback – and the only reason to do that is to boost stock price as a favor to investors. And that $6 billion did not go to upgrading the computer systems. Southwest gambled that they could get away with it, but lost the bet. Though maybe the company leadership will get away with it. Pennyfarthing quoted journalist Adam Johnson, writing on Stubstack, who wrote:

All of this is a toxic brew of mutual antagonism. “Customer satisfaction” is at a 17-year low, and the only human face people can take their frustration out on is a low-wage worker. Obviously there’s never an excuse to yell at anyone in customer service. The point is not a moral one—it’s that it's by design. Indeed, corporate executives very much want you to vent your frustration on their low-wage workers. This way you get the vague feeling of agency and control in a system designed to remove any and all forms of it. Southwest Airlines ticketing agents, cashiers at Nando’s Chicken, low-wage call center workers for Verizon overseas, become corporate sin eaters, absorbing all the frustration and anger brought about by our greasy, cost-cutting executives. Add to this the severe mental and physical harms—and death—laid at the feet of low wage workers during the pandemic, and our built-in system of mutual antagonism compounds dozens of other stressors. We are conditioned to get mad at the human face we see before us, the “representative” of the company who personally profits nothing from our purchase. We are conditioned to get mad at the waiter when our food is late (and penalize this “bad service” with a bad tip) when the vast majority of the time it’s due to understaffing by a cheapskate boss. We are conditioned to get upset with the enforcer of arbitrary rules at a hotel checkout, despite it not being their rule at all. We are conditioned to be hostile to the very people we should have the most solidarity with.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and a few Democratic members of Congress are investigating the situation and intend to force Southwest management to compensate stranded travelers for the useless tickets plus the meals and hotel stays customers had to pay for. I hope they can make it happen. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about Republican hypocrisy. She listed several examples, such as Sen. Lindsay Graham saying abortion law should be left to the states and then later proposed a federal abortion ban. And of Republicans yelling about voter fraud while they’re the ones indicted for voter fraud. Clawson wrote:

If you think that consistency within any specific issue is desirable, or that doing a turnabout on one thing represents hypocrisy, all of these things look ragingly hypocritical. But that’s misunderstanding how the right-wing thinks. It’s actually really simple: The right-wing belief system is that if it benefits them, it’s good. If they want it, it’s right. If it helps them gain power, it’s proper. ... So rather than talking about these turnabouts as hypocrisy, we should be talking about how they show that Republicans don’t believe the rules should ever apply to them. How they’re rejecting any accountability for the powerful even as they insist on the most brutal forms of punishment for people without power. How all they care about is themselves and what benefits them right now, without any thought to anyone else or a future past their own most immediate ambitions.

Note: If it benefits them right now it is good, even if it contradicts what they said at any time before. That is similar to a way I wrote about before – the conservative position can be summarized: “I can tell you what to do. You can’t tell me what to do.” And all of that is about someone trying to justify why they should be above us in the social hierarchy and oppressing us as part of their justification.