Monday, December 1, 2025
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Re: certain photographs which may portray unwanted intimacy
Re: certain photographs that may convey unwanted intimacy, unearned familiarity, which may then normalize those behaviors in a wider context in tango/social dance/milongas...Emilia raises a good point...click through to the commentary on the original post...
Emilia Kumpulainen
"I should have been clearer in my original post that I’m not blaming photographers for anything. I’m simply noticing that neck-grabbing seems to be socially accepted (tango photography being the proof), even though most leaders seem to dislike it.
I’m trying to understand this mismatch. Do I just have limited information within my own bubble, or is there simply a lack of conversation about it?"
Emilia Kumpulainen
Simon Kozma "Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was genuinely curious about how a wider audience feels about this, and my intention was not to judge this gesture as something “inappropriate.” I certainly am in a tango 'bubble' of a younger generation, and I see that many of us (myself included) think, question, and challenge things differently - especially when it comes to personal boundaries and being more reactive to unwanted touch.
I can see that tango will change through this generation, hopefully in the direction of more sensitive verbal and non-verbal communication, rather than killing the emotion and passion of tango 
I also believe that intimacy in tango is something that develops slowly over time, through shared tandas and deepening trust. I imagine that the unpleasant experiences related to neck-grabbing often come from misjudging the level of connection - and for me and many others in my 'bubble', interpreting that kind of touch as something more sexual or suggestive."
Martin Ambaum
"May I answer from a male leader perspective?
I love that this comes from a women. Yea, I think that this is a bit like lowering your hand on the back of the women after the dance. The lingered embrace that comes from a great dance. The moment you just cannot let go to fast. A shared moment that turns into just a little bit of more at that moment. And if that is felt equally by both partners it feels ok, like belonging to that moment.
Problem arises in that a tango dancer can do at lot to let the other feel they are great, while having to work on that feeling for the dance partner. Especially the leader that can even tailer the step, better the whole movement/lead, to the follower. It the can feel heaven for one, but not for the other. Then this lingering, the extended intimacy feels natural for one and out of place for the other.
Then there is a different hand on the neck feeling. A feeling more like an intimate invitation for more. This one is like all relational flirting and treated like that.
And there is also another which is the equivalent of greeting a lot of good dancers when you arrive at the event: show me doing this. I can do this with this great dancer, we are so familiar. That is one that feels like a no, when it is not the case for me. Same for the men that great me clapping on my shoulder, where we hardly know each other.
But thanks for bringing this up. We be nice to make this here into a long list and for both men and women behavior!?
I kick off with:
-hand to high up the neck or even head.
-hand to low on the back almost or actually on the butt.
-to intimate into the others neck, some even resulting on lipstick on the collar. Or with a nose in your ear.
-caressing with the hand on the back.
-cat-like nesting into the embrace.
-putting arm to much around while almost touching breast...as a tall guy and the often slenderness of women in tango, that one leads to 'other arm/hand positions than optimal.
-singing so close to my ear.
So anything that isn't real harassment, but close to it and is something that you like or dislike depending on the person and moment."
Matthew Seneca
"Tango photography has too strong a grip on tango culture today, imo. Maybe festivals should have two dance floors: the “Instagram Floor” where a dozen photographers are stationed at every corner, and the “What Happens In Vegas Stays In Vegas Floor,” with no photographers allowed - this is where you would find me the whole night."
Veselinka Georgievska
"My 2 cents: if you are bothered how other people dance, look, feel while dancing tango, you're missing the whole point of tango.
Maybe I'm wrong, but only a beginner would care how she/he looks in front of the photographer (as you ate assuming people are acting).
I dance tango to get transported in another world when I close my eyes (in a close embrace) I surrender to the music, the partner and the moment. I'm not aware if my face is visible to photographer, if I leave a stain on his shirt ...I want to make myself and the embrace comfortable and (if the "click" happenes, the rest is history....And this may look terribly intimate from the outside (and it is , as giving trust to someone can be), but at the end of the tanda, I have no issue to wake up and disconnect from the partner . The good feeling mat last but that has nothing to do with sex, "other agenda" or anything similar.
Yes this is possible.
Do not try to understand others, try to understand what tango means for you as tango is what we make of it."
Sunday, October 26, 2025
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Thom Hartmann: The “Both Sides” Scam: How False Balance Fuels Extremism
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-both-sides-scam-how-false-balance-4ac
As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn't have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.
That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that's the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than "we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides."
As if there were two sides here.
Here's the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing "both sides" punditry won't say out loud: calling for Democrats to "tone it down" has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.
That an alleged leftie shot Kirk is the exception that proves the rule.
If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn't start with Democrats, and it doesn't continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we're facing. The political research is clear.
As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.
And this isn't new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn't even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon's Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into "abstract" appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.
Ronald Reagan elevated the "welfare queen" trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and "Revolving Door" spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign's core strategy.
Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a "culture war" against Democrats and anyone who didn't fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like "corrupt," "sick," and "traitors" while reserving terms like "freedom" and "strength" for themselves.
This wasn't an internet rumor, it was the Republican party's official training literature.
When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents "jack-booted thugs," former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.
Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn't slow.
Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats "socialists" or "communists" as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn't a fringe habit, it's a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.
The "Second Amendment" wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn't new either; Sharron Angle campaigned on "Second Amendment remedies" in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the "Second Amendment people" might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.
With Trump's 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to "knock the crap out of" protesters, then later told police "please don't be too nice" to suspects during a Long Island speech.
Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how "we the people" could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn't go the way Republicans wanted.
Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Biden, which isn't normal in an advanced democracy; nonetheless all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.
The GOP's information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama's citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump's core brand.
Then the "Great Replacement" narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country's most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for "bringing invaders" here.
After Florida's Parental Rights in Education law, the "groomer" slur against queer people exploded by more than 400% because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.
Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals "genital mutilation," a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that's been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.
This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," and a January 6th rally where he urged supporters to "fight like hell." The RNC later tried to rebrand the attack as "legitimate political discourse," which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.
The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died as a result): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today's GOP.
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump's lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.
When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren't making it up for cable hits. Trump created "Schedule F" by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants; President Biden revoked it, but now it's back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that's now hunting and purging "lefties" the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.
Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated "terminating" parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party's elected officials.
And, as Jessica Valenti points out:
"[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that's political violence. It's political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them 'baby-killers' is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people's lives."
And now, in the wake of Kirk's murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric. Laura Loomer just posted, "More people will be murdered if the Left isn't crushed with the power of the state." Trump referenced "radical left political violence" as if that's the only source of it.
Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote, "When Democrats lose elections they couldn't steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat." Fox Host Jesse Waters said, "Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us." Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.
Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi's near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy; that thug is now governor of Montana.
And let's not forget Charlie Kirk's hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third; Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.
Violence is their brand.
And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.
Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.
I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.
After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, Trump refused to even call Governor Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who'd lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.
While the GOP's brand is "We're victims!!!," Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they're pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.
On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Joe Biden's 2020 speech spelling out that "rioting is not protesting" to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.
So when commentators ask both parties to "lower the temperature," we should be honest about what that means in practice.
Too often, it's a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.
It is a call to pretend that saying "you're child-abusing communists who hate America" versus "you're undermining democracy and endangering people with lies" are mirror images.
They are not.
One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.
None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.
Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. He posted:
"They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook."
Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk's killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.
These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.
If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.
— Stop labeling mainstream opponents as "communists" and "groomers."
— Stop flirting with "Second Amendment remedies."
— Stop normalizing threats against election workers.
— Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.
When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.
Until then, asking Democrats to "watch their tone" is not a plan for peace: it's a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.
Our media must call the problem what it is, or we'll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.
This work depends on readers like you. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop or become a paid subscriber to power the fight for democracy.
Sent from my iPad
As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn't have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.
That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that's the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than "we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides."
As if there were two sides here.
Here's the hard truth that the bullshit-embracing "both sides" punditry won't say out loud: calling for Democrats to "tone it down" has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.
That an alleged leftie shot Kirk is the exception that proves the rule.
If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn't start with Democrats, and it doesn't continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we're facing. The political research is clear.
As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.
And this isn't new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn't even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon's Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into "abstract" appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.
Ronald Reagan elevated the "welfare queen" trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and "Revolving Door" spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign's core strategy.
Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a "culture war" against Democrats and anyone who didn't fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like "corrupt," "sick," and "traitors" while reserving terms like "freedom" and "strength" for themselves.
This wasn't an internet rumor, it was the Republican party's official training literature.
When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents "jack-booted thugs," former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.
Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn't slow.
Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats "socialists" or "communists" as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn't a fringe habit, it's a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.
The "Second Amendment" wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn't new either; Sharron Angle campaigned on "Second Amendment remedies" in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the "Second Amendment people" might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.
With Trump's 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to "knock the crap out of" protesters, then later told police "please don't be too nice" to suspects during a Long Island speech.
Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how "we the people" could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn't go the way Republicans wanted.
Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Biden, which isn't normal in an advanced democracy; nonetheless all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.
The GOP's information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama's citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump's core brand.
Then the "Great Replacement" narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country's most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for "bringing invaders" here.
After Florida's Parental Rights in Education law, the "groomer" slur against queer people exploded by more than 400% because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.
Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals "genital mutilation," a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that's been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.
This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," and a January 6th rally where he urged supporters to "fight like hell." The RNC later tried to rebrand the attack as "legitimate political discourse," which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.
The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died as a result): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today's GOP.
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump's lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.
When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren't making it up for cable hits. Trump created "Schedule F" by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants; President Biden revoked it, but now it's back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that's now hunting and purging "lefties" the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.
Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated "terminating" parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party's elected officials.
And, as Jessica Valenti points out:
"[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that's political violence. It's political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them 'baby-killers' is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people's lives."
And now, in the wake of Kirk's murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric. Laura Loomer just posted, "More people will be murdered if the Left isn't crushed with the power of the state." Trump referenced "radical left political violence" as if that's the only source of it.
Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote, "When Democrats lose elections they couldn't steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat." Fox Host Jesse Waters said, "Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us." Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.
Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi's near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy; that thug is now governor of Montana.
And let's not forget Charlie Kirk's hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third; Trump invited him to Mar-a-Largo to congratulate him.
Violence is their brand.
And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.
Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.
I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account.
After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, Trump refused to even call Governor Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who'd lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.
While the GOP's brand is "We're victims!!!," Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they're pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.
On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Joe Biden's 2020 speech spelling out that "rioting is not protesting" to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.
So when commentators ask both parties to "lower the temperature," we should be honest about what that means in practice.
Too often, it's a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.
It is a call to pretend that saying "you're child-abusing communists who hate America" versus "you're undermining democracy and endangering people with lies" are mirror images.
They are not.
One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.
None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.
Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. He posted:
"They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook."
Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk's killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.
These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.
If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.
— Stop labeling mainstream opponents as "communists" and "groomers."
— Stop flirting with "Second Amendment remedies."
— Stop normalizing threats against election workers.
— Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.
When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.
Until then, asking Democrats to "watch their tone" is not a plan for peace: it's a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.
Our media must call the problem what it is, or we'll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.
This work depends on readers like you. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop or become a paid subscriber to power the fight for democracy.
Sent from my iPad
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
The unfathomable ignorance
 | |
It takes the courage of a Canadian Journalist to really tell it like it is. Apparently, no journalist in the U.S. has the courage to say these things this clearly: I don't think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail.
>>Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.
The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.
There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.
The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.
At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.
At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.
The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.
Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won't replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.
Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.
We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing "tough things" to "restore order?"
Some won't, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.
All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.
All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.<<
Sent from my iPhone
Sunday, August 10, 2025
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
James Greenberg
The MAGA movement isn't just about Trump. It's about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there's another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there's a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.
This didn't just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you've been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That's the soil MAGA grew in.
This pattern isn't new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don't listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don't comply, the system blames them.
Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn't feel common at all.
You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.
In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who've never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.
In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren't always for them—they're signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn't benign when it's followed by eviction notices.
These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it's called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.
And there's a deeper issue at work. It's not just a failure to listen—it's a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger's seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother's knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker's observations of soil change—none of these pass as "data." But that doesn't make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.
This isn't just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They're implementation targets.
The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn't invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn't just cultural. It's rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.
And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?
What we found wasn't deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student's father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family's knowledge wasn't a supplement. It became the curriculum.
This wasn't charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.
That kind of work isn't limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people's lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Because when people are excluded, they don't forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, "They've lied to you, ignored you, used you," that story lands. Even when it's false, it lands.
This is the part many progressives still miss. You can't counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can't fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.
Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don't believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.
We're not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we'll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.
Endnotes
[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. "Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy." In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Sent from my iPad
The MAGA movement isn't just about Trump. It's about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there's another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.
What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?
Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there's a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.
This didn't just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you've been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That's the soil MAGA grew in.
This pattern isn't new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don't listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don't comply, the system blames them.
Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn't feel common at all.
You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.
In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who've never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.
In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren't always for them—they're signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn't benign when it's followed by eviction notices.
These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it's called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.
And there's a deeper issue at work. It's not just a failure to listen—it's a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger's seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother's knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker's observations of soil change—none of these pass as "data." But that doesn't make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.
This isn't just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They're implementation targets.
The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn't invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn't just cultural. It's rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.
And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?
What we found wasn't deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student's father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family's knowledge wasn't a supplement. It became the curriculum.
This wasn't charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.
That kind of work isn't limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people's lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.
Because when people are excluded, they don't forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, "They've lied to you, ignored you, used you," that story lands. Even when it's false, it lands.
This is the part many progressives still miss. You can't counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can't fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.
Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don't believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.
We're not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we'll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.
Endnotes
[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. "Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy." In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.
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