I'm off to get jabbed! Heebie U was given some J&J doses by SadTown for its employees. So one-and-done, baby. When I got news that I'd get one, I was much more giddy and happy than I'd expected to be - I hadn't really thought I'd had lowgrade anxiety at this point about Covid, but I guess I do.
I really really wish it were universal already. I'm highly aware of feeling like I'm crossing sides from Unvaxxed to Vaxxed.
Also: this is the last day before spring break. It feels hugely symmetric and symbolic to get vaccinated on the anniversary of the last day before the spring break that we never returned from.
So why are Americans suddenly saying "jab"? Didn't that used to be a Britishism? (Not limited to heebie.)
1 reflects my attitude, and as one of the Vaxxed, I particularly identify with this:
I was much more giddy and happy than I'd expected to be
In a sort-of-related segue, I think I understood how miserable I was about Trump and knew how relieved I'd be with him out of the picture, but the shape of my happiness has surprised me sometimes. I was really psyched watching Joe Biden's speech last night. Objectively, it was a good speech, but it probably wasn't that good.
I'll have to try again this afternoon. I'm guaranteed a shot, but it's drop-in, and the line was too long for me to get back for class.
Glad that vaccinations are moving faster. I caught Newsom's state of the state in between grocery shopping on Tuesday and thought that it was generally good; I missed Biden last night, but am glad that he set an eligibility date for everyone and gave us something concrete to look forward to.
Tonight is movies over the phone with Dallas friends, one of the highlights of pandemic times. Hopefully we'll cling to it even after Friday nights out are an option again.
Everything you wanted to know about BrE->AmE "jab" but were too afraid to ask
my bf got her first dose this a.m.! 🎉🎉🎉 & yesterday i had appx 6.7 lbs. hair cut off ( outdoors, all parties masked) & it is fucking glorious.
2: There's a great YouTube video by 2 British girls (Marsh family) called "Have the new jab"
2: We might be a bit touchier about "shot", as in by a gun, these days, and seeking out alternatives.
11: I'm getting a haircut tomorrow. I've had one since COVID. My salon was pretty careful. Large HEPA filters, excellent distancing, masks and eye protection for staff plus open windows. I haven't been in the winter.
Vaccinations are slow here. Still mostly 80+ but a few of the less-effective for older folks one for 63 and 64 year olds. We might all get vaccinated by July? Maybe when the entire US is done?
Under 30 cases though. I wonder when the border will open again. I would guess that we can't open the US border until ON, AB, and QC get it under control, even though a ton of our tourists are from the US
Post-jab. Sitting in the observation-warehouse in SadTown, listening to Sad Country Songs, feeling like a huge army of people operated in such amazing concert to get slowly each person to the other side of this Vax thing, one by one. Like the world's worst ropes course. Kind of emotional to contemplate the scale. At least they switched from the saddest country song ("He stopped loving her today") to just regular George Strait.
OK I need some advice.
M has a big birthday coming up. M and his sister, L, are pretty close. She called him up to ask whether he was going to have a big blowout party for his birthday. M said no, a party would have to wait until everyone was vaccinated. L was very insistent that he have a party this year, because in her view, the pandemic would all be over by next month. M ended the conversation because, in his words, he wanted to "strangle" her.
L then texted me to say that, since we weren't having a party, wouldn't it be nice if we went to dinner and L surprised him by flying to LA and showing up. I said yes, because I actually think this would be nice and that M would be delighted.
(A few months ago, L flew to LA and we met her for dinner. (It is still the only time we've been to a restaurant with a person outside our household since the pandemic began.) We ate outside, and L kicked up a little fuss because M would not hug her, and because he insisted that we sit at opposite ends of a very long table, but other than that it was great. So, I was thinking that our surprise dinner would be like that, and since that dinner went fine, this one would too.)
Today it was announced that LA is about to open up for indoor dining. I definitely don't feel comfortable with indoor dining yet, and I'm sure M won't either. I'm also about 98% sure that L will want to go to some fancy restaurant that has a beautiful instagrammable interior and won't want to sit outside shivering under heatlamps.
L is a lovely, charming, and very nice person, and I like her a lot. (From the above it kind of sounds like she's a COVID denier, but she's not. She's just someone who prioritizes her here-and-now to the point that it's hard for her to see the bigger picture sometimes.) No conflict has materialized as of yet. But if we do have a disagreement about the venue of the dinner, I don't know how to handle it. She can be overwhelmingly insistent and I don't actually know her that well, and I really, really don't want to get into an argument with her.
Mineshaft, may I just ruin the surprise and tell M so I can head off this potential conflict (i.e., dump the conflict in his lap)?
You'd think that people would've had enough of Sad Country Songs
But I look around SadTown and see that it isn't so
15: Do you think there's any hope for letting people in who are vaccinated and get a test? Tim's Mom is selling his childhood home, and he would like to help her. He'll probably be eligible for a first shot in a couple of weeks, since he is in the medical supply chain so could be fully protected by mid May.
Yeah Ontario is vaccinating 60-64 with the Astra Zeneca.
16: J and J one and done?
1: Do you have it in you to be a slightly manipulative generous person and get reservations somewhere outside but Instagrammable? With a, dunno, special pretty dessert ordered ahead? Much festive and special for L, not nervewracking for you and M?
I am not getting L at all, so this might miss the point.
17: what if you text her and say "I don't feel comfortable surprising M w/ an indoor restaurant. So either let's plan on outdoors, or let's skip the surprise part. Either's good w me! your preference?"
17: what if you text her and say "I don't feel comfortable surprising M w/ an indoor restaurant. So either let's plan on outdoors, or let's skip the surprise part. Either's good w me! your preference?"
20 and 21/22 are so sensible that I'm embarrassed about my level of consternation. Of course these are the answer. (I did think of 20, and my worry is that when L comes to LA, she always has a specific list of restaurants that she wants to visit (and photograph). But I can just insist that M particularly wants to go to [insert random restaurant that M doesn't actually care about but which has a safe-looking patio].)
Say what you want, but we all hate L now. (Not you, L., we still love you.)
16: "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is a hell of a choice to play at a vaccination clinic.
I was back in the office for the longest time I've been there since last year, almost a full day. I've been back pretty regularly since June, but often only a half day once or twice a week. If my day is five hours of Zoom meetings plus email, it generally doesn't make sense to go in. And more recently when I've been in I've been alone, not working with others in my department or installation or whatever. It was exhausting and I can't believe I used to do that all the time and with a lot of face-to-face interaction.
I have an appointment for the J and J vaccine on Sunday afternoon. My city has opened vaccinations to people over 50 and will be lowering the age limit rapidly. Unfortunately this is because we've had some of the highest rates of infection throughout and the state is looking to drive that down. Happy to take it, though. I called my photographer, who's in the museum every day and lives near me, to tell him the news, as he's eligible too. He also got an appointment and is overjoyed. I mostly haven't told my older colleagues, who tend to live in the fancy part of the neighboring city, that I'm getting vaccinated, as they're not eligible yet. Living in a hotspot is paying dividends at last.
"He Stopped Loving Her Today" is a hell of a choice to play at a vaccination clinic.
It's usually the clinic where they treat social diseases.
I'm waiting for a socially distant fish sandwich that is delayed because I guess everyone else had the same idea.
Why do you care if your fish was an outcast?
I got a first shot on Wednesday and my arm still really hurts and also I feel extremely weird about everything because I have preexisting hermitlike tendencies and I've been in my house since July 2019 and now I have Stockholm Syndrome.
19: I'm guessing no because of our latent, rarely enacted socialist bent? If you're not going to let everyone in, no one gets in. That said, immediate family can currently get in if they quarantine so it might be with the vaccine you get to skip the quarantine. But I'm guessing the general border opening will occur when case rates go down in the US as a whole.
Hydrobatibae's (too cute?) parents got theirs in the last week or so (meanwhile my parents haven't even had a chance to book and they're 10+ years older (though no other health risks)) so fingers crossed they can meet their grandson before he turns 2.
Heebie, congrats on your J&J jab!
I can't even talk about the vaccine rollout in Ontario without feeling a surge of anger in the blood. I'm not talking about the Canadian federal govt (Liberal) here; I'm talking about the Ontario provincial (Conservative) clown show (so much is in the hands of the provincial governments...and this pandemic has really exposed some of the weaknesses of Canadian federalism...). Ugh.
Quite apart from their lack of a plan (because people who don't believe in government don't know how to govern: who knew?! ...), they have been playing all sorts of irresponsible, indeed toxic, blame games to deflect criticism away from their obvious and manifest incompetence.
Most recently, Ontario's premier, Buck-a-Beer Dougie, accused Indigenous MPP Sol Mamakwa (NDP) of vaccine queue-jumping. The accusation is outrageous and wrong on its face (Mamakwa did not jump the queue, he was already in line for the vaccine, but responded to the call of a chief from a neighbouring band, to make his vaccination public, in order to address the problem of vaccine hesitancy). And it's obviously just a bunch of racist dog-whistling (why are these damn people getting the jab ahead of my mother? and etc.) UGH.
Second Moderna now scheduled for Tuesday. Wife a year too young so still in the Bardo.
My FIL will be flying back to town at the end of this month. He is fully vacced, and didn't really follow rules even when he wasn't (ate out, had friends over without masks, ignored quarantine after traveling.) Wife will be getting second shot right around then. I probably won't have anything yet and kids definitely won't. FIL is going to want to get together with our family, see our kids, etc.
What is it reasonable to ask him to follow? Everyone still wears masks? Only meet outdoors? He's going to want to have an indoor (at home) dinner with everyone. Youngest kid has medical history that may or may not be risky- if she got the child inflammation thing it's more likely to be fatal but there's no evidence that kids with her condition are more likely to get it, just that if they do it's very bad.
I recommend making your wife deal with it.
I put us on all possible waitlists in all relevant counties. Someone at work told me a rumor going around that a local-to-work pharmacy got a batch of vaccines intended for employees, sent a notification to the appropriate contact at our site, and said contact forwarded it to their friends rather than the preauthorized list (management had to set business priorities based on time on site and how critical an employee's work was to the team). He said his wife got word because it's their normal pharmacy, and he showed up and ran into a ton of other staff, got his, and felt guilty about the whole thing. He promised to contact me if he heard about another opportunity. I guess as these things go, there are people who need this more than I, but I am more than ready to return to seeing friends!
34: Have you looked at the early data about transmissibility? Assessing your risk tolerance is up to you, but I think the data suggest the risk of having a vaccinated person get you sick is fairly low.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/pfizer-vaccine-shows-94-effectiveness-asymptomatic-transmission-covid/story?id=76389615
Follow-up: If you're disappointed that he was an irresponsible and antisocial ass and are still bitter and upset, which I get, that's really a different question than "is this safe?"
We're in the Airbnb! Still not 100% out of the old house yet but should finish tomorrow. The twins are spending the night with their grandparents so it's just the two of us in the new space tonight. It's a nice place, nicer than we were expecting actually. The listing didn't do it justice.
Also Amadea got her second shot today. I still have to wait a week or so for mine.
I'm never going to get a shot, and a girl in my daughter's class came down with COVID. I hate you all. Europe was a mistake. It should be blown up.
Enlightened Topless Europe, now just another victim of COVID-19.
I have an eye appointment on Thursday and They had just opened appointments in the tent at the hospital next door, but I just can't do it, because I feel guilty about the shitty vaccination rates in the hardest hit communities.
So did Alaska get a lot more allocation compared to population or something?
||
I know Heebie has posted about families just abandoning schooling and what Jammies reports on nonparticipation rates in Heebieville. This arrived from the teacher of Son#1's music appreciation (virtual) teacher in an email yesterday: "As of this morning, we currently have 57 out of 117 people in this class that are failing. I just don't get it." These are high school seniors in a school that serves largely middle class to UMC type locals, but with a mix also of hispanic neighborhoods. So...same here as in Texas, I guess. If not for (very rare) leaks like this I would have no idea how bad it was.
|>
IHS has a separate vaccine allocation, so small states with large Native populations are vaccinating faster. I'm not sure if all of Alaska's speed is explained by that, but if you look at the list of states there's a really clear pattern of small states with large Native populations being ahead.
Holy shit, I started feeling awful overnight. Fever, muscles extremely achey and restless, eyes hurting to look at a screen. I'm on tylenol/ibuprofen now and feeling marginally more human.
I've always wondered if I would have been hit hard or not by Covid. I don't know if one's response to the vaccine correlates in any way with how they would have responded to the disease itself, but yikes.
I'm on tylenol/ibuprofen now
I don't know about the J&J vax but I think you're supposed to avoid taking those as they may reduce the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines.
I've read that younger people tend to get worse reactions to the vaccine, so that might be it.
My brother in law, an overweight 67 year old retired tax lawyer in Saarland, thinks he'll get a shot in the fall. I just don't understand this at all. Skiing yesterday, I ran into a friend who knows people who've gotten the shot by just arriving at the fairgrounds at the end of the three day vaccination run. I got mine at the fairgrounds too, delivered by a firefighter. Last week our former LtGov, who should been elected Gov last fall, tweeted that he was going to get his socialist vaccine at the socialist fairgrounds. You'd think that if there was a way that Europe would have us beat, this would be it.
It's truly shocking how bad the EU is doing, Germany especially. I haven't seen a really compelling explanation of what's happened.
47: The woman giving the jab said to use them if needed? I could google.
What I'm seeing is that you're supposed to avoid ibuprofen/acetaminophen before the vaccine. After is okay.
No one mentioned anything about that, though!
44: Jammies had to email parents yesterday if their kid was failing his class. All but five are failing.
Is Saarland still a French protectorate?
According to wikipedia, that ended in 1957. So, it's probably not because some French guy decided Germans are less important
People here can't believe how far the EU is behind the US. It really messes with your self-image. One of my colleagues was wistfully talking about some stadium in New York or something where they were vaccinating people 24/7.
It's a weird way for the Trump/Brexit era to end, for sure.
To be fair, that was 24 days a month, seven hours a day.
19: Is Tim a citizen? The border is open to citizens. He'd have to quarantine, though, even with the negative test and vaccine. In fact, you need proof of a negative test just to enter the country, and if you arrive by air you need to take a second test and quarantine in a hotel until you get the results.
There's a really nice hotel behind the really big, fancy church in Montreal. I can look up the name.
Holy shit, I started feeling awful overnight.
I had over a day of full on flu like symptoms after my second shot (Moderna). So did my brother, and my wife to a lesser extent. Seems like a reaction in the under 50 crowd is pretty common.
Rather unexpectedly got the Moderna shot yesterday. My sister and I volunteered at a vax site. We thought there was a very small chance we'd get offered the vaccine because we were working the morning shift, so they wouldn't know if there were going to be extra doses, but they offered it to all volunteers right off the bat.
Turns out I would be eligible next week anyway because Texas is dropping the age requirement to 50 (stupidly, as far as I'm concerned; they should be focusing on in-person workers rather than age). It means M/tch will be eligible, so we may be fully vaccinated in our multiple-household family soon (adults, anyway).
Yay for everyone getting vaccinated!
I don't think anybody should feel guilty about getting it -- particularly at this point when it seems like production and distribution are speeding up and it is rapidly becoming more widely available.
58: Canadian citizen, yes. About to apply for US citizenship too. It's really not feasible for him to quarantine even with a test and then come back. Without a vaccine, he would have to get a test to return to work in MA. His company's policy is to stay out of work after returning from. International travel, so you are looking at at least 2-3 weeks of quarantine time, and he can't really afford to take a month off of work, assuming a 1-week visit.
62: Baker is giving the teachers a hard time for wanting it before they are pushed back into the classrooms. Meanwhile, grocery workers who have been exposed throughout the lpandemi are unprotected. I think our state has gotten more shots out but is not doing a good enough job getting them to the people who need them the most.
45: I also heard that of those unvaccinated less than 50% in Alaska want it. Vermont is beating us, but 67% of the unvaccinated in MA *definitely* want to be vaccinated.
47: Our pharmacy team said not to take an antipyretic prophylactically before, but afterwards was ok. I'm thinking of taking the day off afterwards.
64: I think it's worth being conscious of the equity concerns. I don't want to dismiss them. I also think that vaccination rates have increased enough that it isn't worth feeling guilty, at this point. But, maybe I'm wrong.
49-50: They collectively and individually just totally took their eye off the ball is all that I can figure. Over the course of the last month, Germany has gone from an average of 100K daily doses administered to 300K. That means the time to vaccinating the population has gone from 800-1000 days down to 250 days or thereabouts, depending on how many need two doses and whether to count the under-18s and such. It's still not nearly fast enough, but it is ramping up.
I think they have authorized AstraZeneca for people over 65, but for a while there was a big vaccine center at the former airport at Tegel that was going 95% unused because it only had AZ and thus wasn't taking people over 65, while for all intents and purposes the city was not sending invitations (without which you cannot get a vacc appointment) to anyone under 65. It was a fustercluck nonpareil.
It's been obvious (to me at least) for at least a month that vaccination rates are the only thing that matter now. With the more infectious variants, even Germany is not going to get its contagion rates down below 35/100,000, which is what they were saying for better opening. We will be very lucky to keep bouncing right around the current 50/100,000.
As Dolly says, "Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine."
54/55 -- My wife, her brother, their father, and his father were all born in the same house. In four different countries.
70: German Empire, Territory of the Saar Basin (i.e., League of Nations Mandate), Saarland, and West Germany?
Yep.
You have to skip a couple of generation back to have some ancestors living in Lorraine and some in Nassau-Usingen, just 2 km away. An ancestor of my wife was mayor of their town during part of the time that the area was annexed to France under Napoleon.
They just announced that they are going to have little league this spring and tryouts are early April. My kid's coach is named Phil Rizzuto. Holy cow!
That's great because ghosts can't spread covid.
As Dolly says, "Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine."
Wait, but Ladyhawke said you will be my vaccine.
||I saw this at the other place, reposted from someone named S/ai Gr/undy:
" On Feb 24 I was slated to moderate a conversation with Isabel Wilkerson on her book, Caste, for the Boston Museum of Science. Her team asked that i send questions ahead of time, which we did, 3 days before the event.
Wilkerson apparently never read them even though her agent signed off on them. at 6:57 PM, 3 MINUTES before the event was to begin, she looked at the questions and *removed me from the program* and refused to take any questions from the audience as well. The Museum of Science staff was profusely apologetic about a change of program that was not their fault.
I'm a Black sociologist and this book is based on a concept that Black sociologists predominate and have widely debunked for being inapplicable for explaining the US color line and its basis in racial capitalism. The concepts that she chose to draw from were interrogated by our field and I feel that she gravely misrepresented them. Furthermore the book is a grave injury to the public's understanding of race and racism that no scholar of any merit should be silent about.
these were the questions:
1. Early in the text you define caste as a "system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places (17). I was struck by this definition because it's functionally interchangeable with the sociological definition of race, and yet you go to great lengths in the text to distinguish caste from race. On (70) you follow up by explaining "What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism." (70) Why do you think it's so important for your readers to understand the distinction between the two, and given this second definition, what in particular do you feel caste allows us to observe and account for analytically, politically, sociologically etc that structural and systemic (not just interpersonal) racism would not?
2. How do you reconcile your argument about racial purity and "untouchables" with what many Black feminist scholars the likes of Angela Davis, Saadiyah Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, Tera Hunter, and the late Toni Morrison (and really dozens of others) have pointed out about the schizophrenia of white racism. You compare African Americans to untouchables thru a litany of examples of Black people being humiliated by extreme tactics of segregation in White spaces, and in the following chapter on mud sills you describe how caste determines divisions of labor. But how would you explain to your readers how Black women were and have always been integral to the most intimate spaces of white domestic life? How do you reconcile Black "untouchables" and "mud sills" when enslaved Black women suckled their masters' babies, bathed slaved mistresses, and Black domestics raised white children up until... well up until immigration shifts supplied cheaper forms of Latina domestic labor. You note later (130) that "This was a sacred prohibition, and it was said that, into the 1970s, the majority of whites in the South had not so much as shaken the hands of a black person."(130)-- and yet every white family who could afford it had a Black domestic. What do you think that examples like Black women domestics and enslaved laborers-- a particularly gendered exampled in which Black help was requisite for portraying the idyllic white family -- tell us about the "glitches in the matrix" of US casteism? Does it tell us anything about how its renegotiated across different spaces, contexts, and labor demands? Had those same women been in a pool the pool would have been drained, but they were bathing and feeding white children every day.
3. Central to Caste is your comparison of the US casteism to societies in different times and geographies: Nazi Germany and, to a greater extent to Indian casteism. If slavery sourced American casteism, then what can we learn from comparisons of the American South to the other 4 slave societies--those being Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome (perhaps anachronistic for our discussion), the Caribbean and Brazil by the 18th centuries. In Colonial America, the slave society didn't morph until the 19th century although slavery was practiced throughout most of the 17th century
Historian David Blight didn't coin the term but he does explain that the 5 slave societies had distinct properties: 1) a proportion of enslaved people that was ¼ to ½ (or more), where "the whole social structure of those societies was rooted in slavery" (Blight 2006); 2) slavery went from cradle to grave (and in race-based transatlantic slavery would become an inheritable trait); 3) and where slavery defined the political and economic way of life. You don't use the other modern slave societies as examples of caste, but both Brazil and the Caribbean have interwoven race/caste interactions that have been renegotiated and recalibrated throughout their post-emancipatory histories. Both use anti-black forms of racial subjugation, and both are demographically multi-racial with historic tides of large immigrant and emigrant populations. What do you think including an examination/consideration of slave societies in the scope of your book would have taught your readers or challenged about your assessment of caste?
4. The commonality you draw across Nazi germany, India and the US is this brutal form of oppression that subjugates one marginalized group. I wonder if you can tell us why just these three when so many other global examples seem to fit the definition of Caste. 19th and 20th century Australia, for example, and their jim crow system against Aborigines. Apartheid South Africa, and forms of settler colonialism that have created racialized indigenous populations and used settler-colonial violence as their all-encompassing state policy against racial minorities within their borders. It seems like those 8 pillars would apply to some very pertinent examples that suggests how caste is dynamic-- it can be invented, dismantled, resisted, etc with resistance movements that force changes to state policy.
5. Oliver Cromwell Cox was particularly critical of "the caste school" of social theory because he saw its reliance on beliefs, attitudes and perceptions as undermining the role of class exploitation and imperialism. But you decouple Cox from that critique and replant him into one emphasizes his conclusion that Indian caste and US race were dissimilar because Dalits don't resist subordination and African Americans do. In fact you call this claim "bafflingly misguided" because Dalits were actively engaged in social protest at the time. But Cox's central critique of caste was not incongruity between the politics of African Americans and Dalits, it was that caste cannot account for world systems theory--the central theory of the racial derivatives of capitalism and imperialism.
In Caste, Class and Race, Cox thoroughly explained how early capitalist societies (and subsequent ones modeled after them), protracted those capitalist markets through imperialism. Capitalism --and I am referencing political theorist Charisse Burden Stelly here-- thus necessitates imperialism because capitalism metabolizes expansion. iIs not that imperialism/colonialism is the highest stage of capitalism but rather that they are constitutive of capitalism itself because the ways that an entity becomes dominant in a system is by dominating foreign exchange and markets, which necessitates dominating foreign populations. Capitalism is thus fundamentally rooted in domination, and it is that foreign domination that requires racism, and thus requires an artificial racial classification system-- not only among nations but within nations. Racial logic, therefore, developed in tandem with emergence of capitalist systems of colonialism and imperialism. Can you tell us more about your decision to sort of gloss over Black scholarly critiques of the "caste school" of social science, and how your assessment of caste might be different if you chose to engage their theories of racial capitalism.
6. One of the critiques of your work by scholars is that you position Indian caste merely as a backdrop for centralizing US casteism, and thus Indian society is at times reduced to a foil to tell an American story instead affording marginalized Indians the space in your narrative that you provide for anecdotes and analogies about US caste experiences. Gaiutra Bahudar wrote in The New Republic that " Caste also bends in other ways that Wilkerson doesn't convey. Many people in contemporary India don't perform the traditional occupations expected of their caste. Historically, groups of people have moved from one part of India to another and reinvented themselves, maneuvering themselves up the rungs. And migration out of India has also challenged the way caste works." You make the claim that race is fluid and caste is fixed, but what do you think the changes in Indian caste that have been driven by migration, globalization, technology, and new enterprise mean for considering how caste may be fluid as well?
******
YOU SHOULD NOT READ ANY BOOK ON RACE BY AN AUTHOR WHO RUNS FROM QUESTIONS OF SUBSTANCE FROM EXPERTS ON RACE, THE BLACK PUBLIC, OR ANYBODY WHO ASKED THEM TO RESPOND TO CRITIQUE"
Wow. That is... I'm not surprised that as a journalist, she didn't want to go toe-to-toe with academics? At the same time, it sounds like she did not handle that well.
shorter 78: "We meticulous scholars do NOT appreciate your breezy mainstream cliff notes!"
Well, they did give her three whole days to think about these questions.
78: well, THAT'S depressing. I'd want Question 2 in particular to be asked live in its entirety, just to see the facial expressions of the questioner. "And really dozens of others..."
Ugh. The timing makes Wilkerson look bad -- three days to approve the questions, initial approval, and then last minute disapproval. But wow are those questions hostile in a way that seems extraordinarily difficult to deal with in an extemporaneous context -- they're largely sweeping appeals to authority. "People who have done serious work in the field think your arguments are trash. How do you respond?"
I am surprised if the asker thought the questions were likely to be approved in that form.
Yeah, the tone of that is why everyone hates academics.
I thought it was because medical schools didn't pay me as much as private industry does.
Now two people in my daughter's class have COVID. It's like living in a zombie movie. I can hear the zombie shuffling slowly behind me, but I can't get away.
I remember daycare was like a zombie movie in the there was lots of unstable walking and occasional biting.
Question 5.2 in 78 interests me, and this critical review's discussion of Caste and Cox crystallizes the bit that I'm having trouble getting:
Cox believed U.S. race relations were more fundamentally labor relations, despite the mainstream misunderstanding of racism as psychological.
Why can't it be both? I'm not sure I understand the work the word "fundamentally" does in this sentence. Is racism largely mitigated in multicultural, non-capitalist societies? (Is there such a society?)
Capitalist exploitation of racism is obvious enough; capitalism's aggravation of racism seems clear; but did capitalism, in effect, create racism?
83: It seems to me that the author is bending over backwards to provide substance rather than just saying "I refer you to x, y, z for details," though. Question 3 is pretty tendentious ("can you speculate on how I'm right that you seriously fucked up?"), but the others, I think, you could take and run with. Question 5 asks her to reconsider an author she herself apparently cites, so it seems fair to assume some familiarity. And I guess I'm a (former) academic, but I wouldn't feel disrespected by these questions. I'd give them a fair shot, and it doesn't seem that hard to make this guy look like an axe-grinding prick. But I have the great unearned defensive confidence of the high-caste woman, I suppose.
83 I was thinking more "This is more a comment than a question, but your book sucks, and I'm now going to go into humiliating depth on how badly it sucks. . . ."
Which, sure, fine, but that's really going to depend on who the audience is and what level of engagement they're looking for.
On the other hand, I can totally get the frustration on the part of people who've spent years doing battle with an obviously incorrect frame, only to see someone, again, ride that frame to fame and fortune.
83 I also wonder what "approved" really means in this episode. Did the agent understand her/himself to be committing IW to answer these questions as submitted? Was the agent more likely acknowledging receipt? I don't know enough about these things to even speculate, but the tone of the questions is so confrontational that the possibility that the agent didn't read them either seems to be within the realm.
On the one hand, they look like substantively valid questions. On the other, they don't look phrased conducively to actual dialogue.
These questions are tendentious, yes--but the asker is not wrong that Wilkerson's book ignores really basic arguments in the history and sociology of race. The untouchability stuff is frankly embarrassing, given how central these discussions have been to work on Af-Am women's history over the last few decades. "Literally dozens" is not an exaggeration here.
The force of the pushback is in large part because Wilkerson has stepped into a very tense debate about racial capitalism that she seems to be only vaguely aware of. And it's coming on the heels of the 1619 project, which lots of leftist scholars (including black radicals) are pissed about for similar reasons: eliding capitalism, presupposing race rather than interrogating the process of race-making. I can see why she might not be prepared for the level of criticism she's getting from the left.
But also, she's wrong.
To get a flavor of the 1619 Project pushback: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/31/ahrr-j31.html
94:
The 1619 Project is, first of all, intended to bolster the Democratic Party's efforts to utilize racial identity, and the concept that blacks and whites have historically opposed interests, as a central electoral strategy. Ironically, this is a reworking of the political method that was employed by white supremacists in the South to maintain the dominance of the Democratic Party well into the 1960s, and which was later taken over by the Republicans in Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy."
We're back to where I was in 88. I can't work out any way to take this sort of argument seriously.
Why can't it be both?
Of course it's both. The Laws of Historiography just require a few generations of absolutist warfare before the obvious can be recognized. Anyway, this thing is super validating. I just carelessly judged the book to be trash based on style alone, and hey presto it turns out to be trash.
Also, when did teo have twins? Quick work and congrats I guess.
Also, when did teo have twins? Quick work and congrats I guess.
A little over a month ago. (They're Amadea's younger brothers whose home situation with their mom, never great, finally got intolerable and we took them in.) It's been a busy few weeks around here.
Rescue twins are the most heartwarming twins. But IME they'll grab the steak off your plate if you aren't watching.
My local area has opened up vaccination to the over 50s, although I don't think the news has fully propagated out, as the active requests from GPs are lagging behind the self-booking process. So quite a few of my friends have it booked now for the upcoming week or two. I'm 49, though. So, I expect it'll be a while yet, as there must be a pretty big "hump" of 50-60 year olds to get through.
In Alaska, they still eat of trenchers.
Apparently the big antivax talking point today spread by fuckhead Berenson is that polyethylene glycol is the same as antifreeze and I'm ready to break things. (He then tried to walk it back after getting flagged for misinformation by saying that PEG "involves ethylene glycol" to scare people without saying it's the same thing."
A lot of the questions in 78 strike me as typical of specialist rage when a popular writer dares to intrude on their domain. And then there's the historiographical disputes over questions that can never be resolved, and are mostly just arguments about contemporary politics anyway.
However, I am reading Caste now and, sadly, Mossy is right. It's a lousy book.
To be consistent, antivaxxers should avoid bacon, as it contains glycerine. (See also.)
103: Huh. Surely there must be a debate about in this involving Jewish dietary rules, but the top Google results suggest that the rabbinical advice on vaccination is more along the lines of: Don't be an asshole. Get vaccinated.
Why not let people be assholes, but in other ways?
101 -- I'm not going to look, but what is that guy's deal? I saw him arguing last summer about stats, and he seemed to more or less be a bone-headed contrarian. This is way out beyond that.
104: Jewish law is generally quite clear that the requirement to save human lives overrides almost any other requirement. The main exceptions are idolatry, blasphemy, and a few sex acts. See wikipedia.
Indeed, abortion to save the life of the mother isn't just permitted but arguably required.
Berenson is just a contrarian grifter who has a step up on other grifters because he can say he worked for the NYT so every single introduction is "eventheliberalNYTreporter Alex Berenson here to tell you why Joe Biden is actually trying to sterilize us all with PEG." He has literally argued both that getting COVID is no big deal and that the vaccines aren't good enough at preventing it.
If you can travel back in time, can you kill baby-Hitler or do you have to take the chance that fostering him to less shitty parents might work?
If you read the right random sequence of letters in the Torah it proves that time travel is impossible and therefore the question is moot.
109: Youthful Bonhoeffer needs to engage in some ecumenical dialogue.
Give him a history book, a half hour, and a piece of rope.
Now three kids in my daughter's class have it. My doom shuffles forth.
Makes you wonder if exposed breasts shoot virus.
Anyway, my mom's home is not allowing visits because a staff member got covid. I'm pretty sure that means the staff person refused a vaccine.
If everyone, staff and residents, had the chance to get vaccinated and they are holding to no visits to protect the voluntarily vulnerable, I think they are going to have a revolt.
114: She got tested yesterday. We should hear today or tomorrow.
I watched The Night Stalker on Netflix. RR figured very prominently in my childhood - we lived in a yellow house near the freeway in suburban LA, and given that my parents were recent immigrants, the terror of that period had a permanent effect on how they perceived threat in this country (they still keep all their doors locked, all the time, and don't like to leave an open window unattended). I remember when RR was first called the "walk-in killer" and how references later solidified around "the night stalker." (I feel like there was another nickname too, but I can't remember it now.)
RR was important to me for another reason: when I was in high school our district was in the midst of a culture war, and our principal got fired for being too progressive (supporting gay kids, encouraging the introduction of multicultural literature into the curriculum, etc.). The key villain in this story was our racist, homophobic school board president. Shortly after I graduated from high school, her identical twin sister married RR! She was one of those crazy people who saw him on tv and sent love letters to his prison cell. I remember reading the news from my dorm lounge and being so gleefully disgusted.
Other thoughts on the series:
- Seeing 1980s LA in moving color really hit me in the feels.
- I didn't know that so many of RR's victims were Asian American.
- I also didn't know about the child molestation. My parents would terrify me with stories of the murders, in order to sear into my brain the importance of keeping all the doors locked, but I guess they felt like child molestation stories were too much. Good parenting, Mom and Pop MS!
- I was shocked at how open the cops were about police brutality. Not that it happened, but that the cops felt it was fine to talk (brag?) about in 2020. The one SF cop straight up says that he detained a guy who wasn't suspected of any crime (but who was believed to know RR personally), and then beat him up until he gave up RR's name. And then the sheriff's' department says how they posted LAPD around the Greyhound bus station because they knew that if RR made a run for it, LAPD would probably just shoot him dead. Wow wtf.
- And then after all that, RR was just caught by regular people in a Latino neighborhood in East LA! I had forgotten (or didn't know) that detail. Yay mobs!
- (I wouldn't actually recommend this series to anyone who isn't already interested in RR or in watching footage of 1980s Los Angeles.)
122: The CBS show Interrogation is also 1980s LA true crime. Also not highly recommended.
122: Thanks. We bought and moved into our first house-- a yellow house in Orange County not right by the freeway, but not too far either--right at the time he was active.
We're up to 5 kids in my daughter's class who tested positive. But my daughter's test just came back and she's negative. Maybe they were having secret make-out parties and my daughter wasn't invited?
The class has two spoons and she only used the good one.