Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control?

That’s the title of this op-ed by Solomon Missouri, pastor of a rural church in eastern North Carolina and an Alabama native. While he is perhaps best known for a viral Twitter thread about modern romance, he was as serious as a heart attack in his discussion of the many flaws in the concurring opinion of Chief Justice Tom Parker–both in theology and in science. Pastor Missouri concludes (and I agree) that the ruling is pro control–just like the Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court which preceded it.

This paragraph in particular calls out his home state for its hypocrisy regarding the sanctity of the lives of children:

Alabama has the highest rates of maternal mortality among Southern states. Alabama 1 in 5 children live in poverty. Alabama ranks 48th in education, and 45th in children’s overall wellbeing. In January, the state rejected $65 million in federal funds which would have been used to feed children this summer. These systemic failures do not reflect love, compassion, or even sympathy. When so many systems fail children in Alabama it speaks to an underlying apathy and resentment.

Pastor Solomon Missouri, Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control?, February 29, 2024

The whole piece is well-worth your time to read in full, and share far and wide. These questions he ends his piece with are aimed directly at Christians:

[W]hy is cruelty the singular currency of your faith? Can a Gospel that breeds such hostility and animus towards its neighbors be considered good? Is it a “faith” if the state forces you to do it? And why are people who don’t share your faith required to follow your tenets under threat of prosecution?

Pastor Solomon Missouri, Is the Alabama embryo ruling pro-life or pro control?, February 29, 2024

The very first of the freedoms enumerated in Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” Yet so-called conservatives both in state legislatures, state courts, and federal courts seem bound and determined to compel adherence to a Christianity that bears no resemblance to the example of Christ.

Woodrow Wilson Needs to Stay “Cancelled”

The Atlantic chose the second day of Black History Month to publish this piece by David Frum to advocate for the “uncanceling” of Woodrow Wilson. In this post I will reiterate and expand on remarks I’ve made on social media, as well as those of others in opposition to Frum’s insidious project.

I read [Frum’s] piece and its primary utility is making clear how fully he stocked his administration with anti-black bigots. Expanding the imperial footprint of the U.S. in Haiti while supposedly putting the Philippines on a path to independence is especially telling.

https://bsky.app/profile/genxjamerican.com/post/3kkji2lhnfc2y

Particularly given the volume with which Frum sounded the alarm regarding the dangers of Trump and Trumpism to the republic before he was elected, it is especially curious to me that he would choose this moment to advocate for the uncanceling of one of the most dedicated bigots to ever occupy the White House. This 2015 piece from Government Executive Magazine (which is worth reading in full) makes clear that in a post-Civil War United States where the racism dial went to 10, Wilson’s went to 11. Wilson resegregated a federal bureaucracy that however imperfectly, had begun to integrate–even though the city surrounding it was still very segregated. In 1901–in the very same magazine where Frum makes the case to uncancel him–Woodrow Wilson argued against suffrage for black men, prior to his tenure as president of Princeton University. Frum’s recounting of Wilson’s anti-black, while rather detailed, still fails to capture its full breadth and depth. Wilson as Princeton University president blocked black students from attending the school.

Having already elected Trump once, in spite of (or in too many cases because of) explicitly racist and xenophobic appeals, the United States could very well elect him again despite numerous criminal indictments, a finding of fact that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, and even more explicitly white nationalist appeals than those in his 2016 run. This is the context in which Frum chooses to ask this question:

But if one man is judged the preeminent villain of his era for bigotries that were common among people of his place, time, and rank, that singular fixation demands explanation. Why Wilson rather than Taft or Coolidge?

David Frum, Uncancel Wilson, The Atlantic, February 2, 2024

My initial answer was this:

Not only should Wilson stay cancelled, every president who presided over Jim Crow in the South and the conditions that triggered the Great Migration should be judged more harshly.

https://bsky.app/profile/genxjamerican.com/post/3kkjib42wrc2r

As president, Wilson did advocate for lower tariffs, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, and the League of Nations. Wilson did nominate Jewish people to serve on the state supreme court as governor of New Jersey, and the Supreme Court as president. But that does not trump all the ways in which he used the increasing power he was given over the course of his life to make life worse for the black citizens of this country in every way possible. Frum touches lightly on the ways in which Wilson’s scholarship (he was trained as an historian) reflected his personal bigotry. Wilson wrote a five-volume history textbook that adhered to the Lost Cause propaganda regarding the Civil War. Here is Wilson writing in one of those volumes, A History of the American People: Reunion and Nationalization:

The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: … There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities. Its restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance.

A History of the American People: Reunion and Nationalization, Woodrow Wilson, pp 58-59

In this brief passage, we see Wilson’s views of black citizens in their full ugliness. We see his wholehearted adoption of the pro-Confederate views of his parents, particularly his father (who served as a Confederate chaplain and preached sermons in defense of slavery). Wilson fairly explicitly argues in subsequent pages that forming the Ku Klux Klan and engaging in violent anti-black terrorism was the only resort for the white insurrectionists of the American South. It is therefore no surprise that D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation quoted Wilson’s book in its title cards. To the extent that Woodrow Wilson is judged the preeminent bigot of his day, perhaps it is because he promoted the Lost Cause in his scholarship, in his presidency of Princeton, from the White House, and in popular culture through screening and popularizing a gleefully racist film. As numerous Republican governors send National Guard contingents in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling acknowledging the primacy of the federal government in policy at the international borders of the United States, and a supposed contestant for the GOP presidential nomination advocates openly for the right of Texas to secede from the country, it is hard not to look at these words from over a century ago and not see ideological support for contemporary lawlessness.

Wilson’s early and ardently anti-black scholarship stands as a rebuke to Frum’s feeble excuse of Wilson’s 1919 stroke as the reason that black citizens were undefended by federal power during the so-called Red Summer of that same year. Per Frum’s own piece, he threw disillusioned black supporters out of his office in 1914 and never received them again. He made W.E.B. DuBois regret ever supporting him in a way paralleled decades later by Jackie Robinson’s disillusionment with Richard Nixon for the same courting of white grievance Wilson engaged in generations earlier. Frum attempts to treat the imperialist and xenophobic stances of Henry Cabot Lodge (who attempted to justify and excuse the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans in 1891) as somehow equivalent with Wilson’s anti-black bigotry. But if we’re comparing flaws, it needs to be said that nearly 3000 black citizens died at the hands of white lynch mobs during Wilson’s presidency alone. Wilson was no less an imperialist than Lodge, for while he granted greater autonomy to the Philippines (which Lodge wanted to annex), he also ordered the invasion and occupation of Haiti. Wilson’s anti-blackness was such that it did not even stop at the borders of the United States. Whatever his other shortcomings, Lodge at least saw fit to author and sponsor a House bill to protect Black voting rights in the South (a legislative effort which would not be repeated for another 70+ years). If there is anything Frum’s piece makes clear, it is that anti-blackness has never been the sole province of either the progressive or conservative movements in this country.

An actual historian would better articulate the negative consequences of Wilson’s lifelong failure to acknowledge the humanity of the black citizens of this nation. They would provide a better tribute to the Harlem Hellfighters, maligned by their white countrymen and commander-in-chief at home, disrespected by most of their military commanders abroad, more honored by the French under whom they actually fought, and feared by the Germans (who trolled them with leaflets dropped from planes for their service to a country in which they could only be second-class citizens at best). The open and unapologetic racism we see both in the political class and in the country at large is in too many ways a throwback to America of Wilson’s day. For Frum to choose this moment to advocate for Wilson to be “uncancelled” is to repudiate everything he has ever written and said about the dangers Trump posed–and still poses to the survival of multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy in this country. It should be seen as a deliberate insult to every black citizen in the present day. I wish David Frum the worst in his efforts to rehabilitate Wilson and his racism. I hope this small piece of writing encourages further scrutiny of Wilson and his contemporaries and brings them greater scorn and contempt.

Idolatry of Innovators Can Lead You to Foolish Places

Here’s an insane thing I read on social media today:

Post by @inspiringselfcompassion
View on Threads

The fellow who blocked the account above, Michael Darius, includes Apple pioneer, skeuomorph, and protégé of Steve Jobs in his Twitter bio. His actual opinion regarding taking notes during meetings is literally this:

Suffice it to say, design meetings are not a criminal conspiracy. His subsequent comment about the copious note taking that occurred after those meetings exposes the absurdity of the practice he’s touting.

I can’t recommend the practice of taking notes during meetings highly enough. Whether you’re an pen-and-paper note taker (my preference), or someone who types notes on a laptop on-the-fly, you’ll be far more likely that you’ll know not just what you need to do, but how your work connects to the work of others if you capture the right information. Depending on your role (and I’ve found this to be more and more true as I’ve gone further in management), if you distribute your notes you can become the person that doesn’t just keep track of agendas, but the person who sets and drives them as well. Depending only on your memory in a professional context is effectively trying to work with both hands tied behind your back. And that’s before you even get into meeting length, subject, or any other attributes of meetings at work.

Taking notes isn’t merely about recall, but reuse. One of the original reasons I started blogging 20 years ago was to have a public place to capture things for future use for myself. Writing blog posts about how I solved particular programming challenges over time gave me a resource that I could and did search to accelerate solving similar problems in new contexts as I moved around during the course of my career. While the earliest blog posts weren’t about meetings per se, they did ultimately lead to my taking more notes in meetings.

Being a working professional is challenging enough without having to deal with cult-like hangups regarding note taking from the Dariuses of the work world. Do what you need to do in order to put your best foot forward at work. No employer who would impose such an arbitrary, stupid, and ultimately discriminatory requirement on how you process information at work is worthy of your time.

Insurrection? What Insurrection?

It is January 6, 2023 and in an even more depressing turn than I could have imagined, numerous so-called liberals joined the crowd of conservatives calling for Colorado’s Supreme Court ruling disqualifying Trump from the ballot on the basis of the 14th Amendment to be overturned. Governor Gavin Newsom is on record as disagreeing with any efforts to keep Trump off of California’s ballot. Lawrence Lessig has also added his name to the list of those for whom the plain text of the 14th Amendment is merely a suggestion. Jonathan Chait’s argument in favor of ignoring section 3 of the 14th Amendment is rightfully skewered by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

When even conservative law professors who are active with the Federalist Society conclude that Trump engaged in insurrection (as indicated in a law-review article Serwer links in his piece, and reported by the New York Times months before the Colorado Supreme Court ruling), it is difficult for me to conclude that anything other than cowardice motivates the opposition from certain professional liberal (and centrist) members of the chattering class. If Mitch McConnell can call January 6th an insurrection, then it was. Serwer describes January 6th this way:

The mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6 was the culmination of a series of efforts to overturn the election results, which included not merely legal appeals or extreme rhetoric—both of which are constitutionally permitted—but the use of the authority of the presidency to pressure state legislators to unlawfully overturn the elections in their state, to coerce the Department of Justice to provide a false pretext for overturning said results, and to intimidate then–Vice President Mike Pence into using authority he did not have to do the same, a request he nearly tried to fulfill. The failure of all of these schemes rested not on a lack of intent, but on not having consolidated federal power in a way Trump and his advisers are openly planning to do in a second term should he prevail in November.

Adam Serwer, Who’s Afraid of Calling Donald Trump an Insurrectionist?, The Atlantic, January 5, 2024

In this description, Serwer reminds us that Pence actually tried to fulfill Donald Trump’s wishes, contrary to the narrative of personal integrity and heroism he crafted for himself. It was former vice president Dan Quayle telling Pence he lacked the power to do what he was contemplating that ultimately tipped the balance.

This line from the last graf of Serwer’s piece is perhaps its most incisive:

If the Constitution’s provisions apply only when they are popular, then the Constitution is meaningless.

Adam Serwer, Who’s Afraid of Calling Donald Trump an Insurrectionist?, The Atlantic, January 5, 2024

This line is especially important because the Reconstruction Amendments which intended to give full citizenship to the formerly enslaved while ratified, were not broadly popular. President Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before even the first of the 3 amendments was ratified. States in the former Confederacy enacted Black Codes to circumvent the 13th Amendment. The 14th Amendment was necessary in order to kill the black codes because Andrew Johnson (who became president as a result of Lincoln’s assassination) used the office of president to oppose the full citizenship of formerly-enslaved black people. Reconstruction (which we too often fail to study) was ultimately abandoned by the federal government in the interests of a false and hollow unity. The Jim Crow laws that arose in the aftermath of Reconstruction’s abandonment did so in direct defiance of the Reconstruction Amendments. For black citizens living in southern states, the Constitution was meaningless. The Great Migration of this country’s black citizens out of the south to points north, midwest, and west was their response to the federal government’s abdication of its responsibility to provide them equal protection under the law.

Professional opinion-havers calling on the Supreme Court to overturn what Colorado and Maine have done have decided that the full citizenship of black people in this country should again be subject to the popular will. History tells us what happened the last time the country made this decision. But far more people than just black people will be harmed if the whims of whoever holds power decide what parts of the Constitution apply and what parts don’t.

The American Dream is Still Achievable–But Far from Easy

One of my mutuals on social media takes special glee in puncturing strongly-held beliefs. His latest target: the belief in America’s upward mobility relative to other countries:

A social media mutual shooting down an assertion regarding upward mobility in the U.S.

With the full awareness that some people will oppose what you say regardless, I’ll share information I’ve come across before in previous iterations of this same debate.

Key Statistics

Per this article from the World Economic Forum, the top 10 countries in their Global Social Mobility Index (as of 2020) are as follows:

  1. Denmark
  2. Norway
  3. Finland
  4. Sweden
  5. Iceland
  6. Netherlands
  7. Switzerland
  8. Austria
  9. Belgium
  10. Luxembourg

Canada, Japan, and Australia rank 14th, 15th, and 16th per the same index, with Britain ranking 21st and the U.S. a disappointing 27th. The full report weighs in at a stout 218 pages. While I won’t be doing a “I read this so you don’t have to” in this post, I will zoom into a couple of areas that highlight the challenges well.

One of the more interesting questions posed recently was how long it takes to get from the bottom economically to the middle class in reference to an NPR piece from 2014 indicating that economic mobility in the U.S. was worse than that of other wealthy countries.

As it turns out, part of the answer to Mr. Wilson’s question is in the following figure from page 10 of the same report.

Per the figure, a family in the US that started at the bottom of the income distribution could approach the mean income level in 5 generations–slower than in most of the countries ranked ahead of the U.S. in socioeconomic mobility, and on par with countries with global social mobility index scores similar to or slightly lower than the U.S.

Global Social Mobility Index Framework and Thoughts on Its Pillars

Figure 5 from page 14 of the World Economic Forum's Global Social Mobility Report from 2020.  It shows a boxes and arrows diagram for a virtuous cycle of more social mobility and a vicious cycle of less social mobility connected to 10 pillars comprising the Global Social Mobility Index Framework

The diagram above does a nice job of depicting what makes up their social mobility index. The 10 pillars of the index provide some clues as to why the U.S. might rank where it does when you think of local and national policy decisions. The Health pillar reminds me of the debates around the Affordable Care Act, successful attempts to undermine it in key respects, and continuing efforts to repeal it entirely through the federal judiciary. Due only in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. has been trending downward. The U.S. also has maternal mortality rates far higher than most peer countries in the OECD (and non-OECD countries like Romania and Croatia). Maternal mortality rates seem primed to worsen due to the impacts of the Dobb’s decision on access to abortion, since states where abortion access is most restricted already have worse rates of maternal mortality than states where the procedure isn’t banned. Infant mortality rates are also higher than that of most of our peer countries in the OECD as well.

The Efficient and Inclusive Institutions pillar includes the courts and public services (the robustness of which vary widely depending on which state in the country you’re talking about). When it comes to the education and learning pillars, the mobility framework focuses much more on very early childhood education, vocational training, and other primary and secondary education factors. When I think of education, I think of how much more constrained it has become at the post-secondary level over the past 20 years due to significant increases in tuition. During the same time multiple states (including my home state of Maryland) drastically reduced the level of subsidies that had made in-state tuition a bargain and a no-brainer for students who were bright and ambitious but lacked the funds for truly elite education.

Technology Access as a pillar of social mobility is near and dear to my heart, given my career and past experiences from childhood and adulthood with dial-up internet at home. I seriously doubt I could have built the middle-class lifestyle I enjoy (and that I have provided to my wife and children over the past dozen years) without the education access, quality, equity (and affordability) and technology access I’ve been given going back decades. Access to high speed internet (at home, school, and/or public libraries), affordability of home and/or school access, accessibility in rural areas, monopolies on broadband provision, and electricity availability in rural areas have probably combined to make this access very unevenly distributed across the country. The shorthand for this in numerous news articles and other reports is “the digital divide”. There appears to be a growing body of scholarship around inequality in remote learning quality during COVID-19 subsequent to this social mobility report that should shed more light regarding the impacts of insufficient technology access internationally.

Pillars 6-8 cover work opportunities, fair wages, and working conditions. The Working Conditions pillar in particular uses the following benchmarks “the level of workers’ rights, collective bargaining coverage, meritocracy at work, labour-employer, cooperation, as well as the percentage of workers working longer than 48 hours per week” (page 17 of the full report). Here in the U.S. we have right-to-work states, a very low federal minimum wage, and unions which had been steadily eroded in strength up until very recently. All those factors before even talking about the ways in which certain employers have used illegal/undocumented workers–including migrant children, and the downward pressure undocumented labor puts on wages.

Last but not least, the pillars touching on the relative strength social safety net in each country measured. Compared to other wealthy nations, our social safety net is weak. How we handle unemployment (and unemployment benefits), job transitions, etc are just a few areas of consideration. One area where this is the most obvious might be maternity leave and paternity leave. An ex-pat friend of mine who lives and works in Berlin described a much more generous and family-centric system when it came to the experience of his wife having their son there than my own experience with my wife having twins here in the U.S.

Why Do So Many Immigrants Still Come Here?

This is one question usually posed in response to the sort of data and statistics I’ve shared earlier. But the same data statistics also answer this question. If you look toward the bottom of the global social mobility index rankings, here are some of the countries we find there:

  • Honduras (73rd out of 82)
  • Guatemala (75th out of 82)
  • India (76th out of 82)
  • Senegal (80th out of 82)
  • Cameroon (81st out of 82)
  • Côte d’Ivoire (82nd out of 82)

Further from the bottom but still in the second half of the index are countries like China (45th), Vietnam (50th), Thailand (55th), Mexico (58th), Brazil (60th), Philippines (61st), El Salvador (68th), and Ghana (70th). Even at 27th, the United States still offers far more social mobility to ambitious immigrants from these countries. The United States is also the third-largest country by population on Earth, behind only China and India. The ethnic diversity of the United States might also be attractive to immigrants because it increases their likelihood of finding community in an otherwise-new place. While it was a much earlier era for my parents and their family and friends coming here from the Caribbean in the 1960s, they built new community here and had more educational and economic opportunities here than they had at home in places like Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad.

Whether the United States remains the destination of choice for most immigrants is an open question. Much depends on the results of the 2024 presidential election. Even if the nominees are as expected (Trump for the GOP and Biden for the Democrats) and Biden manages to win re-election, Biden has retained certain Trump-era policies around immigration in his first term. A second Trump term would certainly bring an even harsher version of the immigration regime initial championed by Jeff Sessions as attorney general and by Stephen Miller, and include attacks on birthright citizenship despite it being part of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

What’s the Bottom Line on the American Dream?

There is no shortage of anecdotes from people coming to the U.S. and achieving great success. My parents and many of their friends achieved much greater success for themselves and their children here than they would have had in their own country. That success was by no means easy. Both of my parents earned all of their degrees (undergraduate and masters’) in night school. My sister and I were latchkey kids as a result. Success anecdotes aren’t the only data points though. The results of emigrating from one’s country of origin do not fall neatly into a binary of “success” or “failure”. For every story like that of my parents, there are probably others of people who have achieved less than my parents and would still count coming to America as a success. There may be others who achieved more than my parents but would still judge their emigration experience a failure.

The immigrant experience of America is definitely not the only one that matters when it comes to how people regard the American Dream, and whether it can realistically achieved. People born and raised here, with parents, grandparents, and other prior generations born here have had a different experience and a different set of expectations. Some people have cynically used (and continue to use) the success of my parents and their generation (and their children) as a way to blame black people with many generations of American heritage for their relative lack of achievement. The white grievance politics ascendant on the political right these days has found a ready audience among those who resent that the days of households where dad worked, mom stayed home with the children, and a high school education was enough for steady employment, a middle-class lifestyle, and being able to send those children to college are long gone. It is easier to blame immigrants, “wokeness”, and foreign aid for that changing than it is to acknowledge the reality that by both inertia and conscious policy choices, government and corporations both undermined each of the ten pillars the social mobility index framework is built upon. That’s why the American Dream–while still achievable–is harder.

Rhymes with 9/11

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes

Mark Twain

I could not have anticipated that what I wrote on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks regarding how this country really treated its Muslim population (residents and citizens alike) would be relevant again so soon. I won’t claim any special insight into the Middle East, or the latest war between Hamas and Israel–but the response of the U.S. government, U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle, U.S.-based mainstream media, and everyday citizens looks more and more familiar with each passing day.

Balbir Singh Sodhi (a Sikh, not even a Muslim) was murdered 4 days after 9/11. His killer proceeded from there on a non-fatal shooting spree against a gas station clerk (a Lebanese-American) and at his former home (previously purchased by an Afghan family local to Mesa, Arizona). Little more than a week after Hamas’ attacks on Israel, a Chicago landlord stabbed two of his Muslim tenants repeatedly, killing 6-year-old Wade Al-Fayoume.

As recounted in Spencer Ackerman’s Return to Little Pakistan, Muslims in Brooklyn began receiving business cards from agents of the FBI and INS, and NYPD officers asking to be called as soon as possible to answer questions. We would later learn that the NYPD would illegal surveil Muslims both inside and outside New York City for over a decade after 9/11, not generating a single lead that exposed any terrorists or prevented any attacks in all that time. The LAPD tried and failed to follow New York’s lead in 2007. Just one day after the Biden administration announced plans for the DOJ and DHS to partner with campus police to track hate-related threats, Ackerman reports that the ADL is urging college and university administrators to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”–without providing any evidence of such support from any chapter of this organization. The same organization whose Center on Extremism claims to “strategically monitor, expose and disrupt extremist threats” removed the notorious Libs of TikTok account (and Chaya Raichik, the woman behind it) from their extremism list after she threatened a lawsuit. This isn’t even the first retreat of October 2023 for the ADL, having resumed advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk threatened to sue them for defamation the month before.

To oppose the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force that would enable military operations in no less than 22 countries (including the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and war in Iraq, and detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) was a lonely endeavor that came with death threats, insults, and hate mail. While there is almost certainly more (and growing) opposition to the IDF bombing campaign in Gaza than there was to the US invading Iraq, any sympathy at all for unarmed Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas (or any other militant group) has come with consequences like firing from jobs, revocation of job offers, threats of deportation from Donald Trump, and a Senate resolution condemning specific campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (per Ackerman’s reporting).

Our country treated the 9/11 attacks as an existential threat–a thing that could cause the U.S. to cease to exist. That mindset regarding the threat of terrorism rationalized not only the bipartisan sacrifice of civil liberties named the Patriot Act within our borders, but “a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation”, ultimately resulting in the death of innocents as explored in documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. As of May 2023, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay still holds 30 detainees–some still await trial, some being held indefinitely facing no charges and without recommendation for release.

The threat to Jews both worldwide and within Israel itself is very real. Anti-semitism–whether here in the U.S. or abroad–is never far beneath the surface. Not much time has passed since the former president defended neo-Nazis and others protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue as “very fine people”, or since the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killed 11 and wounded 6 worshippers–including Holocaust survivors. As with the U.S. and the countries we attacked with military force in response to 9/11 however, the difference in military power between Israel and those who threaten it is substantial. Depending on which reports you read, between 5000 and 10,000 Palestinians have died in airstrikes from Israel’s military–the vast majority of those women and children. This death toll–the vast majority of them civilians–will only grow. The civilian death toll during the so-called Global War on Terror is orders of magnitude larger. Prior to the latest attacks by Hamas, Israel was holding over 1200 people in detention (virtually all Palestinians) without charges or trial. Per AP’s reporting, Israel’s military justice system is what Palestinians are subject to, not unlike the military tribunals used at the Guantanamo Bay prison to try terrorism suspects.

Unlike the U.S. military, Israel can’t leave where it is. It can change its policies and its leaders, but not its neighbors. I have no idea what the answer is to whether or not Israel and the Palestinians will ever be able to co-exist in a status other than “cold” war or hot war. But the ways Israel’s response to October 7 rhymes with the US response to September 11 probably mean we’ll be asking that question for a long time.

GOP state officials threaten legal action over company diversity policies

A group of Republican U.S. state attorneys general on Thursday warned the country’s largest companies that certain workforce diversity policies could be illegal in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision effectively striking down affirmative action in higher education.
— Read on www.reuters.com/world/us/republican-state-officials-threaten-legal-action-over-company-diversity-policies-2023-07-13/

Not even a full month after this post suggested affirmative action in employment would be the next thing the Supreme Court majority would rule unconstitutional, GOP state attorneys generals have threatened to sue companies they assert (without evidence) have used race-based practices in hiring. Notable among the companies these attorneys general have singled out are Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Uber. The tech industry is an interesting target for these state attorneys general given it’s historically-poor track record on diversity across any number of metrics.

A brief look at Apple’s inclusion and diversity results show a workforce that is still 2/3rds men over the 7 years (2014-2021) for which they’ve provided data. Asian representation in their workforce has grown the most significantly over the same period, from 15% to 27.9%, while the percentage of black and Hispanic employees have grown by much smaller rates. Of the remaining highlighted companies, only Uber employs a workforce fewer than 60% male, and their ethnic diversity numbers have actually gotten worse in some respects (over 10% of their workforce was Black or African-American in 2021, while barely 9% of the workforce is as of the latest metrics published this year). But in the post-affirmative action American landscape, we can now expect even the good-faith efforts of companies to diversify their workforces to be challenged in court and for those workforces to be less-diverse as a result. We will learn the hard way that diversity isn’t just a “nice-to-have”; the increasing lack of diversity will result in worse products from companies.

Murder on the F Train: Vigilantism is America’s New Normal

On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely breathed his last breath on the floor of the F train after another passenger, Daniel Penny, held him in a chokehold for approximately 15 minutes (a few of which were recorded by a freelance journalist named Juan Alberto Vazquez). As is seemingly always the case when a black man dies a violent death in this country, we very quickly learned every possible negative thing there was to learn about Jordan Neely: his mental illness, his dozens of arrests, time spent in prison, previous violent assaults, even a verbal attack on the LGBT community. Even learning Penny’s name took quite a bit longer to learn than the entirety of Neely’s life story, despite his being questioned by police and released without charges.

Despite Neely’s past (none of which Penny could have known before he murdered Neely), the most physically-aggressive action he reportedly engaged in during this encounter was throwing trash at other passengers and throwing his own jacket on the ground. Beyond that, he yelled about being hungry and thirsty and verbally threatened to hurt anyone on the train. And for this–not even a wound to another passenger–Penny attacked Neely from behind and strangled him to death while other passengers watched and two reportedly helped Penny hold Neely down, ultimately leaving him to die on the train floor in his own waste as he’d involuntarily soiled himself as he died.

As I write this on May 8, social media continues to be filled with ex post facto rationalizations of Neely’s murder. The volume and frequency of these pro-vigilante, pro-murder takes was such that it brought to mind a literal, Biblical description of the degree of wickedness that prevailed in the world before the flood:

Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, Listen to my voice, you wives of Lamech, Pay attention to my words, For I have killed a man for wounding me; And a boy for striking me!”

Genesis 4:23, NASB

An uncomfortably close parallel to the words of Lamech in Genesis might be those of Filemon Baltazar, who Neely assaulted in 2019.

Everyone in different situations has reasons for what they do. The Marine shouldn’t be punished. Who knows what that guy might have done to other people,” Balthazar said of Neely, who he insisted “should have been in some rehab center.”

Alec Schemmel, The National Desk, May 5, 2023, CBS 6 Albany News

At least he suggests that Neely should have been in a rehab center. Others lack even that modicum of sympathy.

Here’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor with Newsweek:

Note the complete absence of any connection between what actually happened, and the hypothetical she’s spinning. Note also the shot at men who “just sit there and pretend it’s not happening.” For Ungar-Sargon, what happened to Neely doesn’t happen enough.

This execrable New York Post opinion piece leads off by saying Neely’s murder followed “a struggle with other passengers” and uses his death to advocate for involuntary commitment, despite the decades-ago push for deinstitutionalization of the mentally-ill led by Ronald Reagan as governor of California, and again by Reagan as president at the federal level. Reagan signed a bill repealing the vast majority of The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, signed into law by Jimmy Carter. This legislation would be the only attempt at the federal level to improve mental healthcare in this country for the next 30 years.

Beyond the usual bots and low follower count trolls on Twitter amplifying longstanding political, racial, and other divides the country has, two commentators stand head-and-shoulders among the chattering class in their response to this murder: Thomas Chatterton Williams and Conor Friedersdorf. Both have displayed over the course of days levels of ignorance, cynicism, and moral bankruptcy I still find shocking despite their previous displays of most of these same qualities in different circumstances.

LARPing is “live-action roleplaying”–Williams is accusing people protesting Neely’s murder of pretending to be concerned. He goes on to blame “the state” for Neely’s death (instead of Penny, who actually murdered him). Friedersdorf goes on to display an ignorance of the impacts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott so profound, so fundamental, that I actually felt despair that someone so illiterate in this country’s history continues to have the platform he does to shape the viewpoints of people who actually hold power in this country.

Conor Friedersdorf being clueless about the impacts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Today, Williams exceeded his previous heights in advocacy for vigilantism with this gem:

When I read this, I was reminded of Tucker Carlson’s defense of Kyle Rittenhouse’s vigilantism in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Like Ungar-Sargon, he refers to Neely’s past actions–which no one on the train could have known about beforehand. Williams projects these past actions forward as a justification for Neely’s murder. Instead of seeing Minority Report as a cautionary tale, he sees it as an affirmative path to take only worse–because civilians should feel justified in using deadly force against someone who *might* do something.

Thankfully, Janelle Bouie pointed to Williams’ admitted violent past to highlight the manifold flaws in his hypothetical.

William’s response is not merely inadequate, it fails to even acknowledge the numerous examples of youth not being a defense when you are black and male. Trayvon Martin was just 2 years older than Williams (and hadn’t assaulted a girl in front of multiple witnesses) when George Zimmerman decided to follow him (and ultimately kill him). Ahmaud Arbery was just 25 years old when he was lynched by 3 men attempting to “detain” him for a crime they believed he’d committed.

In my view, Neely’s murder, the recent wave of shootings of people who accidentally went to the wrong house (or car, or driveway), or were playing hide-and-seek too close to the wrong home, and a recent attempted vehicular homicide against homeless people are all connected. So is the militia movement that has taken it upon itself to “police” the southern border, and those who volunteer to “protect businesses from rioters”. More and more often, these vigilantes are aided and abetted by officials elected to maintain law-and-order and/or paid and trained to do so (such as the police). NYPD tacitly endorsed Daniel Penny’s vigilantism by not taking him into custody. Governor Hochul’s comments effectively blamed Neely for his own death. Hochul does not share a political party with Greg Abbott, but her comments about Neely are no less dehumanizing than his regarding the victims of a recent mass shooting. He called them “illegal immigrants”, completely ignoring the fact that they were victims of murder in the state he is governor of. The proliferation of so-called “stand your ground” laws not only remove any requirement for those who own guns to demonstrate competence in their use, they eliminate prosecution and penalties for incompetent use–even if it results in the death of innocents. Despite the strong correlation between weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun violence and gun death, states controlled by the GOP continue to weaken the laws further.

Despite the high-minded talk of those who claim to value life, all the available evidence points to life being even cheaper than ever. The backlash against the “racial reckoning” that some thought would happen in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police has proven so strong that we’ve retreated to the point where a black man like Thomas Chatterton Williams is loudly advocating in favor of a vigilantism that has often claimed black men as victims not just in this country’s long-ago history but in its recent past and present.

Reading The South Through the Lens of Caste

I recently finished reading Adolph L. Reed, Jr’s memoir of life in the Jim Crow South and afterwards.  Having read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste just before (and The Warmth of Other Suns years earlier), I went into Reed’s slim volume looking for points of agreement and points of conflict  between it and Wilkerson’s previous works.

I hadn’t read any of Reed’s book-length work prior to The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, but from a few of his articles I understand him to be a left-wing critic of anti-racism and identity politics.  The memoir focuses far more on the way Jim Crow functioned in practice than on criticism of anti-racism and identity politics in the present.  Like Wilkerson’s previous works, Reed’s memoir highlights the arbitrary nature of the penalties to blacks people for challenging the social and legal structures of Jim Crow.  The capriciousness of enforcement is heightened by Reed’s stories of travel from points north to places where Jim Crow governed expectations of behavior even after it was officially repudiated.  As depicted by Reed, the level of effort black people had to go through to comply with the strictures of Jim Crow was substantial, and a thing he only realized in retrospect. 

Reed doesn’t soft pedal the apartheid system Jim Crow was in the least, nor the nature of the chattel slavery system that preceded it. He quotes at length from the infamous Cornerstone Speech, references other ordinances of secession from southern states,  and makes clear that the South shot first with the aim of preserving slavery.  White supremacy clearly undergirds both slavery and Jim Crow in Reed’s telling.  But ultimately, Reed’s memoir reinforces his “class-first” worldview and that of others on the left (including his preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders). 

Reed’s account of life under Jim Crow and afterwards is very enlightening. His lived experiences across decades and regions of the United States are both broad and deep, including New York City, DC, and parts of Louisiana (including New Orleans), Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Georgia. That said, I think there are limits to the power of the Jim Crow experience to explain the present. Reed’s book was published just last year, in the wake of a Trump presidency (a direct repudiation of the nation’s only black president) Trump’s role in encouraging an insurrection to remain in power, and the continuing engagement in overt appeals to white nationalism by numerous GOP pols and those in their orbit. I find it difficult to square these facts with assertions that “race essentialism” on the part of black folks is the real problem.

Wilkerson’s Caste, published in the summer of 2020, does a better job of capturing the subtleties and nuances of how we engage with each other by broadening our vision beyond race (race and class, instead of race or class). I still remember her interview with Terry Gross, and being initially skeptical of the book because of her response to the question of why the apartheid system in South Africa was not included in the book.

My response on Twitter in a thread with Thomas Chatterton Williams regarding Wilkerson’s Caste

Actually reading the book revealed not only a larger number of commonalities between the way race and class interact in the U.S. and the way caste works in India than I realized, but a wealth of research in the U.S. during Jim Crow which studied it from the inside and called it a caste system. Some of the takeaways on Caste I took note of separately (so as to keep the copy I borrowed from the public library as pristine as possible):

  • Dalits had an equivalent to the sharecropping system some black farmers endured
  • W.E.B. DuBois and Bhimrao Ambedkar corresponded at least once regarding the similarity of the position of their people in their respective countries
  • Madison Grant (a popular eugenicist of the early 20th century) saw India’s caste system as a model to be emulated
  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was seen by Indian untouchables as an American untouchable
  • Among the earliest of the people to use the term “caste” to describe segregated schools in Boston was abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner.
  • Gunnar Myrdal (Swedish social economist) and Ashley Montagu (British-American anthropologist) used the term “caste” to describe the the way black people (and others) were treated in the U.S.

While I have seen pushback elsewhere regarding aspects of Wilkerson’s book (mainly people attributing causes other than racism to the personal experiences she recounts in the book), the only place I really disagreed with Wilkerson’s book was the suggestion that the indigenous people of America were exiled from the caste system. From reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle, I learned (among other things) that the Five Civilized Tribes fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War and owned black people as slaves.

Wilkerson’s book is a lot longer than Reed’s, but no less valuable to the reader attempting to increase their understanding of the American experience for black people. Reading them close together in time provoked thoughts and revealed insights I suspect I would not otherwise have had.

From “Quiet Quitting” to Loud Layoffs

One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is the term “quiet quitting”. Ed Zitron is far more eloquent than I in expressing his fury regarding the term. But here is my own response to an article about a CEO complaining about the backlash he received to a LinkedIn post about firing 2 engineers who were working multiple full-time jobs:

“The Business Insider piece is kinda trash because they let the CEO posture and moralize. There’s an obvious double standard for what CEOs are allowed to do versus regular workers and they didn’t interrogate that at all. Perhaps some people work parallel jobs to make ends meet, but there are definitely folks taking advantage as well. The collusion of the press with business to invent this concept of “quiet quitting” still makes me angry. Having seen and been subject to layoffs [myself], stingy benefits, and being underpaid relative to my experience and skillset for a good chunk of my career, it’s laughable to me that these companies expect loyalty for how little they offer in return. Even though I wouldn’t do the parallel jobs thing myself, I can see how people rationalize it. They’re just being as transactional with employers as employers have been with workers for decades now.

me in an online chat with friends from October 2022

Fast-forward to today and the news is filled with layoff announcements. PagerDuty literally quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as part of a blog post laying off some 7% of their workforce. Friends of mine at 2 other companies regularly in the news are now out of work. My own employer laid off a little over 2% of the workforce. While I am still employed, a number of people I’ve done great work with over the past 5 years are now out of jobs. As far as I can see, these layoffs do not have a thing to do with performance. And given the profit numbers some of the most prominent companies in layoff news have posted over the past couple of years, these are not cuts needed to ensure the survival of these companies.

Ed Zitron’s take on what should happen to the CEOs laying off all these people seems extreme at first, but is it really? Microsoft posted record results for fiscal 2022, but they’re still laying off thousands. Is it really the fault of all those workers Google, Facebook, and others hired during the depths of the pandemic (as if consumer habits were going to remain that way forever) that the pandemic loosened its grip and consumer behavior moved back toward pre-pandemic norms? Perhaps we aren’t being skeptical enough, or critical enough of cuts of this size and scale. As often as we’ve heard about and/or read about “the business cycle”, CEOs who make the kind of money they do ought to know better than to assume that

I survived more than a few layoffs back when the internet bubble burst (leaving an internet consulting firm for a new role just months before it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy). The company I joined, a telecom equipment manufacturer, turned out to be at the height of its headcount. Over the 4 years I was there, they shed well over half their workforce (even as they acquired failing competitors). The friends of mine at those companies that lost jobs never seemed to lose them because of performance. The RIFs I would be on the wrong side of in later years never seemed to be either. In a world of work that long ago replaced pensions with 401(k)s, we are just numbers when push comes to shove.

Not every company is as honest as Netflix in modeling themselves after a professional sports team, and all that entails about the short shelf life of the average player. I’ve been working more than long enough to know that any company that refers to itself as a “family” is a company not to be trusted. This season of layoffs is just the latest reminder that what matters most in life are the people who matter to you and the people who treat you like you matter in return–regardless of the work you do for a living, be they family or friends. When it comes to work, we should enjoy it and do it well, but not at the expense of what matters most. If we’re going to give loyalty, let it be to people who have earned it and reciprocate it, not to institutions.