How To Heal The Left-Liberal Divide →

Incredibly thoughtful, detailed analysis of what motivates "lefties" and "liberals," and an excellent start for understanding and respecting each other's analytical strengths and weaknesses if we're going to work together and build a much larger (and vastly more effective) coalition:

A productive peace process for the intra-party war would merge these insights, advancing a practice that would help defeat the Republican Party while keeping Democratic leaders on their toes. We could call this practice “vigorous critical loyalty.” Vigorous critical loyalty would work by separating the times for vigorous party loyalty and the times for vigorous internal criticism...
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Most importantly, vigorous critical loyalty could help rebuild trust. Primary challengers that win — and even incumbents that are forced to hold back a primary challenger — become closer to the people they represent. To have an issue emerge from a trusted outside group and then have that issue enter the mainstream of the party is to build loyalists’ trust in that outside group while building populists’ trust in the party. With the periphery of the party showing loyalty in the general election and the center of the party opening up to new ideas and leaders, the distinction between the periphery and the center is blurred.
This is how two tribes could eventually merge into one without either side compromising on their ideals and loyalties. Reading Twitter today, it may seem like a longshot. But I take hope from a point Washington Post assistant editor Elizabeth Bruenig raised at a talk earlier this year: “You don’t argue with people who are nothing like you… you argue with people who are almost like you… [Arguing] is a pretty good sign of the possibility of coalition.”

The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: ‘Black Identity Extremists’ →

A lot to unpack in this worrisome report: an overly broad definition of an extremist group which seems to cover routine activism (a regular occurrence for our security state, though); echoes of the past racist history of the FBI along the same lines; a major setback for overcoming that history. And the biggie: the current political context. The Trump administration has cut funding or whole programs dedicated to tracking white supremacist and right-wing extremist movements--which account for the majority of actual politically-motivated attacks these days.

The report, dated Aug. 3 — just nine days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly — appears to be the first known reference to “black identity extremists” as a movement. But former government officials and legal experts said no such movement exists, and some expressed concern that the term is part of a politically motivated effort to find an equivalent threat to white supremacists.
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Some experts and former government officials said the FBI seemed to be trying to paint disparate groups and individuals as sharing a radical, defined ideology. And in the phrase “black identity extremist” they hear echoes of the FBI’s decades-long targeting of black activists as potential radicals, a legacy that only recently began to change.
“They are grouping together Black Panthers, black nationalists, and Washitaw Nation,” said the former homeland security official. “Imagine lumping together white nationalists, white supremacists, militias, neo-Nazis, and calling it ‘white identity extremists.’”
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Even former officials who view the government’s concerns about black separatists as legitimate balked at the term “black identity extremist,” and point out that the threat from individuals or groups who want to establish their own homeland is much less than from the far right.
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Lately, that seemed to be changing. As FBI director, James Comey famously kept a copy of the Martin Luther King Jr. wiretap order on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s past abuses and made new agents learn the history of the FBI’s pursuit of the civil rights leader.
The FBI also appeared to be focusing more attention on the threat of white supremacists. In May, the FBI warned that white supremacist violence was growing, according to a report obtained and published by FP. That same report noted that white supremacists were responsible for more attacks in the United States than any other extremist group, including Islamic extremists.
Critics, however, accuse President Donald Trump of shifting attention away from right-wing violence. This year, the Trump administration decided to focus the Department of Homeland Security’s “countering violent extremism” program on Islamic terrorism and deprioritized funding to counter white supremacist groups.

How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided a Criminal Indictment →

A great piece of investigative journalism. The criminal justice system works differently if you're rich. Also clear that Trump's children are grifters, too; hoping they'll control their dad is wishful thinking.

In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.
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In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.
Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped.
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Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case...

 

Hard stuff

Good reminder not to lose perspective of larger realities, even when fighting particular injustices:

First, a sketch, to illustrate the stakes: the United States incarcerates over 200,000 women, as many as two-thirds of whom have minors at home. When factoring in women on parole or probation, the number currently “supervised” by the criminal justice system balloons to more than a million. More than a third of American single mothers live in poverty, and according to the National Women’s Law Center, more than one in eight women are poor. In recent years, much has been made of women’s record-high college attendance, with less comment on the fact that women hold nearly 65 per cent of the nation’s student debt ($1.3 trillion at the latest tally). The US has more maternal deaths than anywhere else in the developed world, and black women are almost four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than are white women. Ninety per cent of US counties lack a clinic that provides abortion, which renders the procedure inaccessible to about 40 per cent of women who can get pregnant, and it would be a mistake to assume expense is not as daunting an obstacle as location. Meanwhile, gender violence was brought back into the headlines this summer, albeit briefly, by a report, carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), analysing murders of American women. Strangers are responsible for only 16 per cent of female homicides, which means that a woman’s killer is usually her current or former romantic partner, or else another friend or family member. In response, the CDC recommended bystander intervention training and suggested that states limit access to guns. These measures feel inadequate (and, especially in the case of guns, impracticable). How do we keep men from killing women? Or, how do we simply keep men from killing? The question is one that mainstream feminism doesn’t ask much any more, aside from periodic invocations of “toxic masculinity”.
This litany of entrenched, intentional injustices predates Donald Trump’s presidency, so professional feminists who have neglected these matters cannot excuse themselves with the claim that times abruptly changed. The fixations that have dominated middle-class feminism in recent years – assaults on campus, underwhelming (hetero)sexual encounters, the pathetic ratio of female to male CEOs, sexism in Silicon Valley – cannot speak meaningfully to many of the horrors less advantaged women face both at home and abroad: dangerous labour conditions, deportation, murder by police, imprisonment. This is not to say middle-class concerns are categorically frivolous but rather that their elevation comes at the expense of a more cogent and inclusive ideology. (Plus ça change.) We have narrowed the scope of public feminism to a pinprick, rehashing yet another Lena Dunham controversy when we should have been developing and promoting reforms that encompassed systems of exploitation not defined by gender alone – the rapid progression of mass incarceration, venal health-care systems and repeated, successful attacks on voter rights, to name some of the most glaring. This failure could perhaps have gone on unabated for the immediate future but now, without the superficial reassurance of a woman in the White House, mainstream feminism has to face up to its own deficiencies. One might begin with those evidenced by blogging pundits turned highprofile authors...
Source: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/...

Kurdistan and Catalonia are voting on independence. Welcome to the age of secession. →

A lot happening in the world around us, even as it's hard to keep up with everything at home.

Controversial referendums on independence are scheduled in Iraqi Kurdistan on Sept. 25 and the Spanish region of Catalonia on Oct. 1. Both referendums place these secessionist regions on a collision course with their central governments and the international community, increasing the probability of conflict...
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A secessionist movement can take two approaches to achieving independence. The first is to target their central government, the chief obstacle to any movement for achieving independence. If the government permits the independence, as Serbia did for Montenegro in 2006, then the path to sovereign statehood is almost certainly guaranteed.
The second approach is essentially an end-run. Here, the movement goes around the central government to bring the international community into the game. As in South Sudan, the international community can either pressure the central government to permit the independence or, as in Kosovo, it can bypass the central government entirely to recognize the secessionist region. Most secessionist movements use both approaches...

SCOTUS Is Hearing a Case on “Partisan Gerrymandering.” What Is That and Why Should You Care? →

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on whether state legislatures can purposefully divide up legislative districts so that they benefit one political party or disadvantage others. This practice — called “partisan gerrymandering” — is all too common across our country and can block communities from fairly electing leaders who represent their values and the issues important to them.
Every decade after the national census, states draw new electoral districts, which are areas with equal populations that determine who gets to vote for each seat in the state legislature and in Congress. Ideally, districts should allow the voters who live in them to elect a range of legislators who represent the diverse political views of people across the state...
“Gerrymandering” occurs when state legislatures purposefully draw district boundaries so that they give an advantage to a particular group or party — or put an opposing party or group at a disadvantage. This is primarily accomplished using two different methods: cracking and packing.
Cracking is the spreading of similar voters — voters of the same party, race, economic background, etc. — across multiple districts to weaken their voting power in each one. This denies the particular group fair representation in multiple districts. Packing is the concentration of similar voters together in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts. This gives the group representation in a single district while denying them representation across other districts.
The effects of gerrymandering are widespread:
  • Political monopolies: Not only is gerrymandering used to protect politicians already in power by making their districts less competitive, but once redistricting happens, it can take up to 10 years before lines can be drawn again. This leads to monopolies of power.
  • Underrepresentation: Poor communities and communities of color are most frequently the targets of cracking and packing, and as a result, their political power is diluted.
  • Heavy Partisan Manipulation: Gerrymandering has much to do with why politics are so partisan today. When districts are gerrymandered to be less competitive between multiple view-points, representatives do not have to compromise on hard line stances in order to win seats. This partisanship goes on to effect everything, from funding, to school districts, to you name it. Change and progress comes from a healthy push-and-pull that isn’t present in gerrymandered districts.
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For example: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan are purple states in terms of party affiliation and all voted for former President Obama in 2008 and 2012, then President Trump in 2016. You would probably expect them to send about 50 percent Democrats and 50 percent Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead, 34 of their total 48 House representatives (71 percent) are Republican, largely because of partisan gerrymandering.This type of manipulation of the redistricting process undermines the very spirit of our democracy and fair elections. Still, gerrymandering remains a staple of partisan politics at their worst, and shameless legislators continue to use it despite the harm it does to fair representation for our communities.

The secrets to our universe might lie in this abandoned coal mine in South Dakota →

In an abandoned gold mine close to Deadwood, South Dakota, construction has started on what is arguably the world’s largest science experiment. I’m part of an international team of around 1,000 scientists assembled to design and run this project – the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) – in order to study the most abundant yet elusive matter particle in the universe.
In doing so, we may move a step closer to understanding the origins of matter and to completing science’s model of how the universe works...
Particle physicists like me are fascinated by neutrinos because of their unusual properties, which may be directly linked to phenomena that could explain the structure of the universe. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that can’t be broken down into anything else. They are everywhere but are enormously difficult to catch as they have very nearly no mass, are not charged and rarely interact with other particles.
About 100 billion of them travel through our fingertips every second but almost all of them go through the Earth without leaving any trace. Most of these neutrinos originate from nuclear reactions powering the sun. Neutrinos also come from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, or exploding stars. They were also abundantly produced just after the birth of the universe...