Friday Readings: November 25, 2016
I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.
Amber Frost and Freddie DeBoer discuss the future of the left under Trump at The Towner. It’s a good discussion — the two dissect the Democratic Party’s failure to win the election and look forward. DeBoer is hopeful that Trump will collapse under his broken promises.
Donald Trump is going to be unable to fulfill the promises he made. He’s not going to be able or willing to actually give anybody anything. He’s not going to help people who are suffering under globalization. He’s not going to take on Wall Street. He’s not going to get us out of our foreign entanglements. His cabinet is filled with the same old Republican guard who fucked us all over on those fronts in the past. So I think it’s going to be easy to demonstrate his promises are fraudulent.
VICE reports that a Silicon Valley startup is growing celebrity salami. Seriously.
“The product is indeed salami,” Kevin says. “Each salami will have roughly 30% celebrity meat and 40% lab-grown animal meats (we’re currently looking into ostrich and venison but it pork and beef are more popular in our early research). The rest will consist of fats and spices. This break-down comes from consultation with expert food designers and chefs.”
WTF.
Matt Peppe argues at Counterpunch that the presidency deserves no respect. In fact, Peppe says, the presidency has become dictatorial.
Can there be anything more dictatorial than the power of a single individual to kill and make war at will? While American presidents thankfully do not have the power to unilaterally impose taxes, pass legislation, or incarcerate without charges inside U.S. borders, the illegitimate authority they do possess to carry out unrestrained violence across the world is unquestionably a dictatorial feature.
In Israel, Haaretz reports the family of a Dutch man who saved Jews from the Holocaust want a plaque with his name removed from a monument built on the remains of a Palestinian village that was destroyed during the Nakba. Consistent resistance.
Erik Ader, a former ambassador of the Netherlands to Norway, said he “cannot ask his father,” who was executed by the Nazis in 1944, “what he thinks of how his name is connected to this injustice but it’s not difficult to guess, knowing what he stood for.”
And Adam Johnson writes about the normalization of Richard Spencer in the media since Trump’s victory.
The Nazi Dork’s goal was to exploit and feed off the Trump campaign and subsequent victory, and he did it with tremendous success, thanks in part to a shiny-object obsessed media.
The balance between covering hate and promoting it is a difficult one, and one that we shouldn’t dismiss out of hand. But after a week of wall-to-wall coverage, most of which one could imagine the Nazi Dork and his Nazi friends reading and posting to Facebook with a smirk, the balance has come down heavily on the side of fascist agitprop.
Finally, Erin Gloria Ryan of The Daily Beast joined CTH this week for an amusing discussion. One warning — Bill O’Reilly reading an erotic portion of one of his fiction books is in here, and it’s as bad as you think.
See y’all Saturday.