Politics & Rule
- "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
- "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
- "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
- "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
- "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
As we near the election, I’m sleeping about as well as I did in the early months of the pandemic. 😱
Given how much JD Vance lies, I don’t see why we should believe any of his denials about having a weird couch fetish. 😉
Russia Wants to Muzzle Childless Cat Ladies
The Russian parliament is discussing a law to ban so-called “propaganda of childlessness” with fines up to $4,300 for individuals. Will that help to solve the country’s demographic crisis?
“What’s behind Russia’s plan to ban ‘child-free’ ideology?,” DW, Sept. 28, 2024.
It’s almost as if they were pandering to Vance – or drinking from the same batch of Kool-Aid.
The contrast between VP Harris’s performance in this NABJ interview and the other guy’s is stark. The first part, on economic issues, is familiar. Then the tough questions begin, and the VP has a lot to say, getting more eloquent when pressed. https://www.youtube.com/live/I3ZV5Ea3xro
With his abysmal debate performance last night, the rotten orange shit accomplished the one thing that gives him and his acolytes the oxygen they need: Everyone’s talking about him again. We need that as much as we need bleach in our veins.
Here’s another bit of decor that I added to the car last week.
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/166262/2024/img-0244.jpeg" width=“600” height=“310” alt=“Bumper sticker with Ukrainian flag colors and an overlay text telling Putin to go fuck himself: “Путін іди нахуй”">
I decorated the car today. 🏳️⚧️
These days, I take a somewhat inconsistent view of polls. In general, I choose not to trust them. (Who answers pollsters' calls anymore?) But I say to myself that maybe the direction of change in such polls is of value.
An old problem explained with a new metaphor: “Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse” by Aaron Ross Powell.
With its massive air attack today, Russia offers still more convincing arguments for lifting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-provided missiles. It’s high time we attended to Russia’s actions instead of its bluster.
I can’t remember a campaign in which the biographies and values of the candidates have mattered as much as they do now. The Harris–Walz team has done a superb job of linking upbringings, public service, and foreign policy to the family and community values that most of us at least try to live by.
It’s hard to imagine biographies better suited to the present moment than those of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40
I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.
Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.
Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.
These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.
My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.
I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.
This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.
Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.
I’m enjoying the DNC’s ceremonial roll call unmediated by television pundits. I did the same with a few speeches yesterday.
Biden gave one helluva good speech last night.
Maybe right-wingers are up in arms about tampons because they saw the IT Crowd episode “Aunt Irma’s Visiting” and didn’t realize it was a comedy. That might also explain their warped reverence for 1950s heteronormative masculinity.
In This is Not Propaganda (end of part 2), Peter Pomerantsev writes of his Russian family, based in Kyiv, becoming stateless in the late 1970s. The KGB had accused his father, Igor, of “circulating defamatory fabrications, regular listening to hostile broadcasts and contacts with foreigners.” They recommended he emigrate.
In many ways Igor was lucky. He had the semblance of choice. The [KGB] major had made it clear that if he stayed, he would have the full seven years in prison and five exiled in the Soviet provinces to face. If he had been a Ukrainian-language poet, [Pomerantsev continues, Igor] would have been locked up immediately. Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outside the cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
Fairness and Dignity
Lawrence O’Donnell had some tough words for his media colleagues yesterday on MSNBC. Journalists pretended to ask questions at a supposed news conference, broadcast live, while Trump pretended he was answering them. Throughout the charade, they gave him and his torrent of semi-coherent lies a pass, like they always do, most fatefully in 2016. Then O’Donnell showed a longer segment by the one candidate who actually had something to say yesterday, but whose talk had not been deemed worthy of a live broadcast on any network: Kamala Harris.
The vice president spoke to the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Her message was not a simple repeat of her Philadelphia speech the day before. In this smaller, more focused setting, she talked about the importance of collective bargaining for achieving a fair result. What’s more, she tied the term “collective” as used in an organized labour context to the community theme that figured so prominently in her Philadelphia speech. She linked the hard work of collective bargaining and of organizing politically to love of country, and she spoke of the dignity of labor.
Fairness and dignity. That’s a message Americans need to hear about. What they got, instead, was an impotent rehash of the same old resentments, lies, and insecurities. I’m not much for television news and opinion, but this 25-minute video (available on YouTube) is important. Broadcast and print media, take note. Your country deserves better.
Negotiating One's Own Murder (Satire)
Here is some satire from Ukraine on a certain 🍊 candidate’s nonsense: “Shot of Peace” (cartoon in Ukrainian with English subtitles by Фріоніс), https://youtu.be/… #СлаваУкраїні #НахуйПутіна #НахуйТрампа