Delay?

Not a surprise from Dear Leader:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Fortunately, he doesn't have the power to change the election or his term in office. As Josh Douglas notes "[even] martial law does not suspend the Constitution". And David Rothkopf expresses concern:

This is [Fuckface's] most dangerous Tweet ever. And I know that is saying something. It is not within his power to change the date of the election. But that he wants to try should set off alarms everywhere. He is publicly contemplating a dangerous, authoritarian power grab.

Even Fox News knows that "a person who is in a strong position would never, never make a suggestion like that". So weak.

Self described supporter Steven Calabresi writes:

I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that [Manbaby] is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

Update (August 1):  Cody Fenwick points out the troublesome tweet following the suggestion of a delay:

Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!

Dear Leader knows he can benefit from as much chaos as possible.

It’s not clear the president has thought all this through and gamed out a complete strategy. He’s not much of a planner. But he clearly knows the polls are not looking good for him, and it’s undeniable that — as he did in 2016 — he’s laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the election. The terrifying thing is that it could work.

Update (August 5):  Martin Longman ponders whether von Clownstick is a would-be dictator, a gangster or mainly careless. None of the choices bodes well.

[Dear Leader] doesn’t know what is and isn’t constitutional, or who has the power to delay an election and who doesn’t. But simply through his own carelessness, he will do great damage to the integrity of our electoral process. He will undermine faith in the result and prevent the country from uniting, however briefly, around his replacement. He could even inspire violence, especially if it takes a week or more to declare a winner, or he gets it in his head that no one can force him to leave office.

Our republic depends on the consent of the governed, and a president who works overtime to prevent that consent is tearing at the fabric of our constitutional system. We’ll be lucky if all [Fuckface] leaves us with is a mess to be cleaned up.

Embracing Uncertainty

We all would like to know what to expect for our future. And science is a tool used to forecast possibilities. If we get the science right, we hope, we are in better position to make decisions and anticipate results. But, of course, there are no guarantees. The science may be complicated and the debate ensues.

Robert Hunziker points to a lengthy critique of Jem Bendell's work called "The Faulty Science, Doomism, And Flawed Conclusions Of Deep Adaptation" by Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, and Colleen Schmidt. Bendell is not the only person to discuss the potential collapse of civilization. Bendell also has a response to the critique.

Possibly assuming good intentions all around, Hunziker doesn't seem to come down on one side or the other in the debate.

Still and all, according to [the three authors], the sky is not falling… just not yet!

Meanwhile, kudos to Jem Bendell for bringing to the surface issues that haunt many followers of the planet’s very, very rambunctious, and unpredictable, changing climate. He’s opened the door to solid debate and criticism and an awareness of two important viewpoints that otherwise would not be so readily available in a public forum.

On the other hand, Chris Smaje condemns "business as usual porn" and says it is useful for society to discuss collapse. Modern life makes it too easy to assume our technology will simply protect us from the "malign contingencies of the world" and that most of us couldn't provide for basic needs without a highly specialized division of labor. Maybe the scientific debate over the timing and meaning of collapse doesn't address the loss of a mentality held by other cultures.

In his lovely book about foraging and hunting peoples, Hugh Brody describes a very different situation among the Inuit hunters with whom he lived. Every journey across the ice was rimed with potential danger, which was freely acknowledged. The Inuit were well aware of the malign contingencies of the world over which they had little ultimate control – a situation that made them neither fearful, nor selfish, nor angry, nor sad, but in some sense alive within a culture that had to deal with it. And they had many skills for dealing with what came their way, as hunters, builders, navigators, craftspeople and so on. My sense is that they didn’t spend much time debating whether they were optimistic or pessimistic about their uncertain future, nor in honouring leaders who cheekily mocked 'project fear' and lambasted 'doomsters and gloomsters'. Instead, they carefully assessed the dangers ahead that they perceived, prepared themselves as best they could to mitigate them, but were open to the inscrutable workings of uncontrollable contingency.

Systemic Racism

Cody Johnston takes on the right wing argument that institutional racism doesn't exist. While it may be true (although weakened or unenforced) that discriminatory laws don't exist as they used to, history matters. White people were given specific advantages to build wealth. Without those same advantages, black people were segregated into impoverished areas with greater pollution thus reduced property values thus less money for education thus more concentrated poverty thus greater police presence thus mass incareration from discriminatory drug sentencing laws thus the loss of political power to make any changes.

So how are vast racial inequalities explained without a systemic reason? We left with the characteristics or culture of the group in question. But if "race" is a social rather than biological construct, on what basis are distinctions made? Hmmm . . .

Update (August 3):  David Barber argues that a focus on "white priviledge" overlooks vast class differences among white people.

Privilege is the bribe our elite white rulers have offered us, historically and in the present, in return for our silent assent to their rule, rule over black people, and rule over own selves.

If my life, as hard as it is, is easier than black people’s lives (and in the end, that’s all that white privilege is, that our lives are not so difficult as are the lives of black people) – then living here as I do, without any vision outside of this dog-eat-dog society, I’m going to defend that privilege. But if we understand privilege as a bribe to keep poor and working-class white people passive in the face of their own oppression, if we are able to articulate for them the vision of a just social and economic order, I think we are better able to take up the task that the young people in SNCC and the Panthers long ago asked of us: to challenge and transform our own white communities.