This week I found so much interesting stuff written by other people that I put my own article off to next week. I am going to separate off a post on food safety, but even that is based on a much longer Bloomberg News article. It’s basically a short note that mushroomed.
As we move towards the election, that’s increasingly dominating the news. This week we had the VP debate, which pundits immediately declared a draw, but which in hindsight looks more and more like a Biden win. We also saw the polls tighten, producing some white knuckles among Obama supporters. Meanwhile, Democrats seem likely to hold the Senate and Republicans to retain the House.
But fortunately, there was some fascinating stuff that had nothing to do with the election. Let me tell you about the fastest-growing major religion in America, about the toilet of the future, and about marshmallows …
I’m still in the Midwest, putting the Sift together at a Panera rather than at home in my office. That adds an element of unpredictability to the day (plus an hour of time change), so if the Sift isn’t showing up as quickly as you expect, have patience.
The big news this week, of course, was the presidential debate. Why was Obama so listless? Were any of the charges and counter-charges true? How has Romney’s good showing affected the race? And so on. I’m trying not to get completely absorbed by the hype, but there is also some actual newsworthiness in there.
The weekly summary will be called “The West Wing and other fantasies”, after something Joy Reid said Saturday on Up with Chris Hayes. The short notes include some fascinating stuff about how the public discussion of global warming has changed, new data on how effective free contraception can be at reducing the abortion rate, the battle within newsrooms about whether immigrants are “illegal” or “undocumented”, and more.
The only separate article will address the question: What do we really know about Mitt Romney’s tax and budget proposals?
Previous teasers have told you the reason I’ve been in the Midwest: my father’s health. He died last Monday night and the funeral was Saturday. I’ll be going back home tomorrow, so I expect the Sift to return to normal next week. Life, I suppose, will find a new normal.
I’m still in the Midwest and working out of coffee shops, so the Sift may come out a little slowly this week.
I’m following up last week’s Obama’s Positive Case with Sorry Jill, I’m Not Voting Green. When I do the “I Side With” quiz, it matches me with Green candidate Jill Stein. But as much as I appreciate the positions Stein takes on the issues — single-payer health care, no drone strikes unless we’re at war — I still tremble at the spectre of Bush vs. Gore.
That’s the article that’s closest to finished right now, so it should go up first.
The other article this week will be The Romney Pre-mortems. I have to laugh at the general impatience of our age; we can’t even wait for a guy to lose before we start analyzing why he lost. But once that game gets started, it is strangely irresistible, and I end up playing it too.
I haven’t figured out whether it needs its own article or will fit in the weekly summary, but there are a bunch of fairly simple why-questions about the campaign that aren’t getting the simple answers they deserve: Why (other than the fact that Romney’s losing) do Republicans say the polls are skewed? Why does Obama say Romney will raise middle-class taxes and Romney deny it? And so on.
This week’s quote, about the shrinking efficacy of American politics, is from Rachel Maddow, who has been on a tear lately about all the issues that aren’t getting debated in the campaign.
Welcome to the new readers the Weekly Sift picked up from the popularity of The Distress of the Privileged. I hope you’ll appreciate this week’s Sift enough to bookmark the Sift and come back every Monday.
This week will have two main articles, which I’ll try to get out before noon. (I’m running a little late today because I’m still in the Central Time Zone*. Like the main character in Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE, I’m getting my Internet from a HyVee packed with retirees.) In the first, I’ll anticipate the Obama campaign finishing on a high note with Obama’s Positive Case. In the second, I give my answer to Waiting for Superman in Education Reform: I’m Still Not Convinced.
The weekly summary will be called Bedrock, after an insightful thing Chris Hayes said Saturday on Up. What everybody has been talking about this week, naturally, is the sad state of the Romney campaign.
* Dad is hanging on, but things don’t look good. Thanks for asking.
As much as I would love to capitalize on all the new readers who found the blog last week*, it’s not going to happen.
I’ve spent most of this week hovering over the hospital bed of my 90-year-old father, trying to figure out whether or not this is his final health crisis.
The whole point of the Sift is that I scour the internet looking for the stories you ought to be reading, I check the facts and the framing of the stories the mainstream media is covering, and I try to provide the kind of perspective and background that intelligent readers are looking for.
There’s no way any of that was going to happen this week. I could probably go through my files of half-written articles and throw some stuff together, but that would be no service to my regular readers and give new readers a poor introduction to what I’m trying to do here.
Maybe next week.
* Last week was the second-most-popular week in weeklysift.com history, with 38,000 views. Most of them were for The Distress of the Privileged.
This week the focus shifted to the Democratic Convention, where Bill Clinton came through big for President Obama, and Obama and Biden did well for themselves. (The pundit class, though, didn’t give Obama much credit, their commentary more-or-less amounting to: “The buildings he leaps at a single bound used to be taller.”)
This week’s Sift will review where the race stands, though I haven’t decided whether that will get its own article or happen in the weekly summary.
I’m trying not to get completely absorbed in the election, so this week’s longest article will step back and look at a larger-scale issue that I’m calling “The Genuine Distress of the Privileged”. What do you do with people who feel persecuted because they are losing their dominance? Whites, men, Christians, English-speakers, heterosexuals … it genuinely stings to be told that there’s something wrong with the attitude you were brought up to have. They don’t think of themselves as hate-filled bigots, so why do people keep calling them that?
The question is: How can we acknowledge their distress without de-railing efforts to deal with the far more serious problems of groups that really are persecuted?
Like last week, this week’s Sift will have only one main article. The rise of Paul Ryan is making me revisit my misspent Objectivist youth in “Ayn, Paul, and Me”.
In the weekly summary, everybody was talking about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair. They were also talking about where Eastwood debated the chair — apparently at some kind of Republican get-together in Tampa. I must have missed it.
Oh yeah — it was the Republican National Convention, where we found out that George W. Bush is an un-person. Eight years of recent American history disappeared down the memory hole. Maybe the Democrats will figure out how to dredge them up this week.
Also, the convention raised the stakes in a brewing conflict between the press and the Romney campaign. Politicians have never been known as truth-tellers, but Romney is lying in a no-apologies fact-check-this way that threatens the foundations of political journalism. Journalists are starting to strike back, but it might be too late.
This week’s Sift will have only one main article, plus the usual collection of short notes. The article is “Five Pretty Lies and the Ugly Truths They Hide”. It’s a little long, but each lie is its own digestible chunk, so I hope it won’t be hard to get through.
“Pretty Lies” is my attempt to learn something from the Todd Akin debacle. When you boil it down, here’s what Akin did: He offered a pretty lie — that “legitimate” rape victims don’t get pregnant — to cover up the ugliness of his policies: He wants the government to force raped women to bear children for their rapists.
Once you have that pattern in mind, you see it all over the conservative movement. Fundamentally, conservative policies are cruel, but conservatives want to think of themselves as nice people. The only way to square that circle is with a lie. So pretty lies pop up whenever conservatives gather together: the uninsured can get health care in the ER, racism ended decades ago, tax cuts pay for themselves, and so on.
When you hear stuff like this, it’s easy to get diverted into an argument about facts. But exposing the lie is only half the battle. You also need to understand why the lie is necessary, so that you can shine a light on the ugly truth it’s hiding.
This week everybody was still talking about Paul Ryan, and the Romney campaign tried to muddy the waters by arguing that President Obama — and not Paul Ryan — is the real threat to Medicare.
If you’re not plugged in to the world of untraceable viral emails and fake people calling in to talk-radio shows, you might not realize just how involved the Romney Medicare deception is or how effective it could be. It’s a real lesson in propaganda that I’ll try to unravel in “How Lies Work”.
This week’s other main article is a follow-up to last week’s I Read Everything About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To, which became the second most popular Sift post of 2012. In capturing the buzz about Ryan, I followed the mainstream pundits into a trap: I ignored Ryan’s record as a radical culture warrior.
That’s the mistake the public made with the Tea Party in 2010; we bought their “Taxed Enough Already” schtick and were surprised when their vision of “small government” included forced transvaginal ultrasounds. So like The Who, I’m praying we don’t get fooled again. That’s why this week’s other main article is “Paul Ryan: Veteran of the War on Women”.
The Ryan article should be up in a few minutes, but “How Lies Work” will take a little bit longer.
This weekend, every pundit in the world wrote about Paul Ryan. A lot of it was repetitive and some was drivel, but I sifted through it to pull out ten points you need to understand. That article, “I Read About Paul Ryan So You Don’t Have To”, takes up most of this week’s Sift.
A shorter second article looks at a subtle way racism and religious prejudice seep into news coverage: The more we learn more about the guy who murdered six people at the Sikh Temple, the more tangled up he is in white supremacism. And yet the media rarely describes him as a “terrorist”, much less a “white terrorist” or a “Christian terrorist”. But it’s hard to imagine that if a dark-skinned Muslim had shot up a Christian church, he would be portrayed as a “troubled young man”. His connection to radical groups and movements would be central to the story, not symptoms of some underlying mental disorder.
I’m pretty much on schedule this morning, so I hope to get everything posted by noon.
The Weekly Sift 