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Via Squee, h/t commentor PeakVT.
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What’s on the agenda for this interstitial Tuesday of the not-quite-holiday week?
Open Thread
Figure things have been politics free (or close to it here), so I figured you all needed a place to vent your spleen before you explode. What have we missed?
Luis Suarez
There is little question that race is a complicated issue in Latin America and there is little question that racism is a problem in football (aka soccer). I do not know the specifics of the accusations against Luis Suarez, the Uruguayan forward for Liverpool. I have heard rumours such as that he called Patrice Evra “negrito”, which is a common expression in Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America.
I have also read that this provides much of the basis for Suarez’s defense: that this is not an insult and the issue speaks more to cultural differences than racism. I find this explanation alternately understandable and perplexing. Several years ago, I was having lunch with some friends at their apartment in Brasilia. They are attorneys who are politically center-left, who came from humble beginnings and, I believe, like many Brazilians who can trace their lineage many generations back in Brazil, very likely have Afro-Brazilian ancestors.
Yet they called their housekeeper/cook “Neguinha,” i.e., “Blackie.” They explained that this was common. I was tempted to ask them how many whites were called “Branquelo”, i.e., “Whitey” by Afro-Brazilians.
This is one place where Suarez’s argument falls apart for me. I have no data to back this up, but I would find it difficult to believe that there are lots of Afro-Uruguayans who refer to whites they know as “Blanquito.”
But beyond that, I find this argument compelling:
Also, people are making out that Suarez has an ignorance of how one is supposed to behave in Northern Europe, like he’s just come off the boat or something. He hasn’t — he spent five years in Holland (which, the last time I looked, is pretty well developed), including a season playing alongside Edgar Davids at Ajax.
Would he speak to Davids that way? Or Clarence Seedorf? Or any black Dutch player? I doubt it somehow, particularly given how annoyed a lot of Holland’s black players have been in the past about perceived racial bias, let alone overt comments.
I do not know what Luis Suarez’s intent was, if any. I have no interest in getting inside his head. I just wish that this was not an issue for this sport – or for the world.
But you never see the lies that you believe
There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here’s one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you’re gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you’re gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can’t bear to tell themselves isn’t real. It’s the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
Meanwhile, the Times reports:
Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.
Go figure.
A huge part of the conservative/establishment media project will be devoted to explaining the collapse of the middle-class is a good thing — it’s the Bell Curve-style IQ stratification that maximizes efficiency, all the awesome modern conveniences like Facebook an flatscreens make up for it, etc.
But you never see the lies that you believePost + Comments (56)
It’s a learning process, sure, but they’re going backward
Really great news for voting enthusiasts last week:
The U.S. Department of Justice will block the voter ID provisions of an election law passed in South Carolina earlier this year because the state’s own statistics demonstrated that the photo identification requirement would have a much greater impact on non-white residents, DOJ said in a letter to the state on Friday.
Officials in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division found a significant racial disparity in the data provided by South Carolina, which must have changes to its election laws precleared under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because of past history of discrimination. The data demonstrated that registered non-white voters were 20 percent more likely than white voters to lack the specific type of photo identification required to exercise their constitutional rights, according to a letter sent to South Carolina and obtained by TPM.
Perez wrote that the number of minority citizens whose exercise of the francise could be adversely affected by the proposed requirements “runs in the tens of thousands.” He wrote that the state had “failed entirely to address the disparity between the proportions of white and non-white registered voters who lack DMV-issued identification.”
“data provided by South Carolina”
“the state’s own statistics”
The governor of South Carolina and the conservatives in the state legislature are (apparently) absolutely clueless about the people who live in South Carolina. Conservative leaders might want to get out more. Fewer think-tank funded roundtables and appearances with Fox News personalities, more hands-on work.
It was – assuming good faith – news to Haley and South Carolina conservative representatives that certain parts of South Carolina are poor and rural. They didn’t even have to read the information they submitted to the DOJ. They could have asked this guy:
But having no birth certificate, or having one where the name conflicts with other legal documents, can cause problems today proving one’s identification — and getting the photo ID required to get a job, travel, go into public buildings and, in a recent and controversial change in South Carolina, register to vote.
In some cases, people who have never had a problem before must now go to family court to authenticate the names they have used all their lives.
Joseph Williams, a physician who sees mostly elderly patients in Sumter, guessed as many as 20 percent of his 3,000 to 4,000 regular patients have problems with identification. Some only know the year they were born.
“It’s extremely common for people who are over 50,” said Williams, who is 60. “Record-keeping was poor in our age group.”
Wouldn’t it be great to be a conservative and live your life entirely removed from the gritty, day to day reality the rest of us have to grapple with? Record keeping was poor in rural South Carolina back in the day. Who knew? Not the governor or the conservatives in the state legislature, apparently. Poor, rural South Carolinians have to appear in family court before they may vote? No burden there!
Here is Governor Haley’s response to the DOJ, on Facebook:
“The President and his bullish administration are fighting us every step of the way,” Haley wrote. “It is outrageous, and we plan to look at every possible option to get this clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process and our 10th amendment rights.”
Wow. “Our Tenth Amendment rights”?
Can someone ask Governor Haley why she believes “our Tenth Amendment rights” trump federal civil rights legislation that was reauthorized by a huge Congressional majority as recently as 2006? Can someone ask Governor Haley if she knows that former President Reagan said this when he signed the 1982 reauthorization of the portions of the Voting Rights Act that she objects to on “states’ rights” grounds?
On signing the 1982 extension of the Act, which passed the House by a vote of 389 to 24 and the Senate by a vote of 95-9, President Reagan called the right to vote the ‘crown jewel of American liberties.’
What happened? We went from the “crown jewel of American liberties” when Reagan was smiling for the cameras to a Facebook post babbling something about the Tenth Amendment?
It’s a learning process, sure, but they’re going backwardPost + Comments (64)
Open thread
A few days ago, in Lisbon, in the Terreiro do Paço.
Talk amongst yourselves.
The lady’s not for spurning
Nooners has been hitting the turps again.
The left in America has largely thrown in the towel on Ronald Reagan, but in Britain Thatcher-hatred remains fresh. Why?
Because she was a woman. Because women in politics are always by definition seen as presumptuous: They presume to lead men. When they are as bright as the men they’re disliked by the men, and when they’re brighter and more serious they’re hated. Mrs. Thatcher’s very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left’s insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for. On the other hand, some of the Tory men around her had been smacked on the head by her purse often enough to wish for revenge. What better revenge than to fail to fully stand up for her to posterity?
And so her difficult position. But one senses that is changing.
Of course, it has nothing to do with the Poll Tax riots, her opposition to sanctions against South Africa, the closure of 150 coal mines and the resulting devastation of mining communities and mining unions, the abolition of school meals, Section 28, the massive long-term unemployment and hardship she inflicted on communities (particularly in the North) from which many have still not recovered, the slashing of higher education funding, the privatisation and deregulation of everything possible, or the fact that Margaret Thatcher was an evil, rabid, vicious, mean-sprited, homophobic, Reagan-snuggling, Pinochet-loving old trout.
No. It’s all because she’s a woman.