It’s the weekend, you know what that means:

• Party Politics, the Post Office, and the Common Good.
• Elections Matter, on reproductive rights and voting.
• Abortion Care is a Calling.
• Eikonoklastes, on the imaginary line between speech and violence.
• The Presumption of Literacy.
• Ralph Nader and the Structure of Progressive Change:

Progressives seem to almost NEVER talk about localized politics. We complain about education reform but don’t organize to take over school boards. Conservatives outflank us in part because they seem to understand that the presidency is not all-powerful. Perhaps local offices like county clerk and elected judges are as or even more important than the presidency, at least from a long-term perspective. Too many progressives believe in Green Lantern presidencies. Elect Obama in ’08 and he can force through all the changes we want.

No. That’s not how it works.

You turn the Democratic Party into what you want it to be by controlling the mechanisms of everyday party life. By becoming a force that must be reckoned with or at least co-opted.  By becoming the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s, eventually forcing the Democratic Party off its Cleveland-era support of plutocracy and helping usher in the Progressive Era. By becoming the abolitionists in the 1850s and 1860s, whose constant moral harping gave them power within the Republican Party far outstripping the small number of fanatical followers of William Lloyd Garrison. And by becoming conservatives in the 1960s who burrow into the Republican Party structure and transform it from within.

• How to Change Academic Publishing.
• Letter to the Dismal Center.
• Death Race 2012.
• Why the Blown Call on Monday Night Football Matters.
• The Failure of Muslim Rage.
• Weddings Without the Bride and Groom.
• The War on Crime as a Conservative and Progressive Assault on Liberal Philosophy.
• Are Student Loans Immoral?

• American Saints.
• A Black Jack, on Last Resort.
• Socializing in America.
• An attempt at learning about a murdered family member.
• Romney’s “Them” Problem.
• Is the Marginal Cost of a Drone Strike Too Low?
• What Its Like to Be Hit by a Drone.
• Mogadishu: A City in Healing After Two Decades of War.
• Prospects of a Keynesian Utopia.
• Questions About Transitional Justice and the Arab Spring, Part I and Part II.

Come and get it!

• Twitterland: Four case studies from Malcolm Harris on navigating new terrain.
• A Fun Fact About Privatization.
• The Neighborhood is the New Factory.
• Weaponizing Standardized Tests: Freakonomics and Chicago.
• The Other Occupy Movement.
• Square and Circle: The Logic of Occupy:

Let’s be clear: I am not arguing that Occupy is a revolutionary movement, aimed at the total destruction of capitalism, the wage relation and the State. This is obviously untrue: for the most part, Occupy has a reform-oriented horizon that is clear to all. It is about class inequality in the US, about the distribution of wealth between the 99% and the 1%. Its implicit demand is: Fix this. Make our society more equal. But this demand remains almost impossible to voice, since there is no concrete policy to recommend and, arguably, little outside a revolutionary movement is likely to significantly impact inequality in the US anytime soon. As such, any attempt to reduce this unspoken horizon to some concrete object, whether the Citizens United ruling or full employment, remains curiously both too specific and too vague, likely to fragment the 99% into competing factions.

• Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt:

Debt, a growing number of organizers believe, has the potential to serve as a kind of connective tissue for the Occupy movement, uniting increasingly dispersed organizing efforts around a common problem (debt) as opposed to a common tactic (occupation). Already, organizers on the East and West Coasts have taken up this idea. Activists from Occupy Boston are rallying around the city’s indebted public transit system, calling attention to the way state subsidies have been replaced with profit-hungry private capital by chanting, “Our trains, our tracks—get this debt off our backs!” Occupy activists in San Francisco are planning a debt burning for September 17, one that unites foreclosure fighters, student debtors and other drowning citizens under the motto “Hell no, we won’t pay!”

“Debt is the tie that binds the 99 percent,” Occupy organizer Yates McKee has written: from the underwater and foreclosed-upon homeowners who were first pummeled by the economic crisis, to the millions of debt-strapped students who are in default or on the brink, to all those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, to workers everywhere who have been forced to compensate for more than thirty years of stagnating wages with credit card debt, to the firefighters and teachers who have had to accept pay cuts because their cities are broke, to the citizens of countries where schools and hospitals are being closed to pay back foreign bondholders. Given the way debt operates at the municipal and national levels, the issue affects us all—even those who are fortunate enough to be debt-free, as well as those so poor they don’t have access to credit. Debt is one of the ways we all feel Wall Street’s influence most intimately, whether it’s because of a ballooning mortgage payment or a subway fare hike or a shuttered clinic.

• Behind the Scenes of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Politics.
• The Geopolitics of Refugee Crises.
• Mapping Liberty Plaza.
• The Real Birthplace of OWS.
• A 13-Year-Old Hazara Boy is Killed, Only to Become a Statistic.
• Hipstamatic Revolution: Photos on Everyday Africa.
• The Natural and the Naturalized:

In an anguished essay in The New Yorker about the recent, racially motivated, killings of Sikhs at a gurudwara in the American state of Wisconsin, Naunihal Singh draws attention to their exclusion from mainstream American life. Both the political campaigns and the media, Singh notes, treated the killings “as a tragedy for Sikhs in America rather than a tragedy for all Americans.” Singh argues that this mean-spirited, blinkered reaction represents a bigger tragedy than the shootings themselves. The historian Gyanendra Pandey, in his book Routine Violence, describes a hierarchy of citizenship practiced by all nation-states, which is manifest in a distinction between its unmarked, seemingly “axiomatic” or “natural” inhabitants and its marked, “hyphenated” minorities. Extending Pandey’s insight, one might note that even as minorities are conspicuously visible and marked because of their difference, they remain paradoxically invisible as citizens (and some more so than others). They are condemned to invisibility because their very presence — as citizens — threatens to challenge the collective amnesia about histories of exclusion on which nations are founded.

• Women Speak Drastically Less When They’re Surrounded by Dudes.
• Your Gender Bias is Showing.
• A Round on the World’s Most Dangerous Golf Course.
• Where are the First Ladies of Africa?
• Four Histories of the Right’s 47% Theory.
• Mitt Romney Versus the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Repetition Without Difference.
• To the Trickster, Go the Spoils: The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Revised.
• The Art of Unfriending and Unfollowing People.
• The White Man Comment.
• Why Presidents Love Foreign Affairs.
• The Invisible Island.
• The Messiness of History.
• Somali Guerilla Artists Dare to Paint Reality.
• Black Mom-in-Chief: What White Feminists Get Wrong About Michelle Obama.
• God and White Men at Yale.

This week’s got a few themed sections, so take your pick and have at it:

On Education, Strikes, and the Chicago Teachers Union Strike:

• A thorough report on what’s happening, from Reuters.
• Chicago Teachers Go On Strike: A Background.
• How Michelle Rhee is Taking Over the Democratic Party.
• The History of Chicago Work Stoppages in Schools.
• The Hard Facts Behind the Dispute.
• Making a Job Worse is a Brilliant Strategy for Attracting Better Talent.
• Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.
• Why Do So Many Liberals Hate Teachers Unions?
• Who’s Hurting the Children?
• How Much Do Teacher Strikes Affect Students?
• Strike for America.
• There’s a Simple Solution to the Public Schools Crisis: Ban Private Schools.
• Nick Kristof Doesn’t Like Unions, Whether Teacher or News Paper.
• Can the Chicago Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform?
• So What if Teachers are in It for the Money?

On Higher Education:

• The Rise and Demise of the Neoliberal University.
• CUNY Administration Declares War on Rebel Faculty.
• Race and Gender in Higher Education – Who Gets Degrees?
• The Combustible Campus.
• Prison.edu: The Most Effective, Underfunded College System in the U.S.
• Against Humanities: The Self-Consciousness of the Corporate University.

More miscellaneous readings:

• Charles Tegart and the Forts That Tower Over Israel.
• Denied Entry.
• On Depression and Getting Help.
• An Open Letter to Wikipedia.
• We’re Not the Entitlement Generation.
• The Standardized No. 2 Pencil Test, on measuring beauty.
• Terry Jones and U.S. Foreign Policy.
• Benghazi was a Battle.
• Looks Like the U.S. Knew About the Katyn Massacre All Along.
• “Was the Arab Spring Really Worth It?” The Arrogance of Power.
• Fear of a Black President.
• Barack Obama: Jackie Robinson of Presidents.

Have at it, people:

• The Other U.S. Educational Crisis.
• Pell Grant Outlays are Down, but There’s a Silver Lining.
• Why Scotland’s Approach to Publically Funded Education Works.
• Rules of Engagement, on political activism at American universities’ international campuses.
• A Short History of Enclosure in Britain.
• Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights:

In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before the invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied weapons. Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S. military aid and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese. (The figures and the designation of “genocide” come from a UN-formed investigative body.) This whole bloody business gets exactly one sentence in Power’s book.

What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemala—another decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a military dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at Fort Benning, and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter genocide and set the death toll at approximately 200,000. But apparently this isn’t a problem from hell.

• The End of South African Exceptionalism.
• Why are Some Founders Forgotten?
• Strange Bedfellows, on using the word ‘ally.’
• The NYPD in Israel: Hannah Arendt on the Best Police Department in the World.
• At The Elite Colleges – Dim White Kids:

What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

• Why Nathan Harden has Yale and Sex All Wrong.
• The Next Digital Innovation in Education? Grading.
• Can D.C. Lead the Way to a 21st Century Waterfront?
• An Abbreviated History of New Orleans Levees.
• Four Surprising Ways the South’s New Political Landscape is Upending National Politics.
• The Myth of an Affirmative Action President:

But there’s also something else — the frame of skepticism is, as always, framed around Obama, not around Romney. No one wonders what advantages accrued to Mitt Romney, a man who spent his early life ensconced in the preserve of malignant and absolutist affirmative action that was metropolitan Detroit. Romney’s Detroit (like most of the country) prohibited black people from the best jobs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and the best of everything else. The exclusive Detroit Golf Club, a short walk from one of Romney’s childhood homes, didn’t integrate until 1986. No one is skeptical of Mitt Romney because of the broader systemic advantages he enjoyed, advantages erected largely to ensure that this country would ever be run by men who looked like him.

• DNC Delegate Leaves Party, Joins Occupy, after “God” and Jerusalem planks reinserted.
• Work Isn’t Working.
• “OSU Haters” Tumblr Puts Ohio State’s Racist Tweets on Blast.
• Porn Star Says Harassment at Conventions is Nothing Compared to Everyday Public Harassment.
• In a Mass Knife-Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?
• Sanctions on Iran Hit World of Warcraft Players.
• Burkina Faso: How Much Longer Can Compaoré’s Rule Last?
• Chicago Teachers Take On 1% Mayor and Labor Establishment to Boot.

and some old links I dug up:

• The Stunning Geography of Incarceration.
• The Way It Was, on getting an abortion in the 60s.
• The Legacy of Sabra and Shatila: Amnesia and Impunity.
• Larry Summers is Wrong About Language.
• The Problem of Radical Heroism.

• A Not-Very-Truthful Speech in a Not-Very-Truthful Campaign.
• We’re Going to Tax Their Asses Off.
• Flag-Waving and Drowning: On the New Branding Policy of UKaid.
• Why We Need to Keep Abortion in the Healthcare Conversation.
• If You Build It They Will Come.
• Back to School… If They Need You.
• The Thin Blue Line:

The job of any investigator is to figure out who’s lying. NYPD officers lied constantly, but complainants lied all the time too. They denied behavior that justified police action, claimed beatings so severe that the mere fact of their living to tell the tale was evidence against them. But there is a fundamental difference between a lying civilian and a lying police officer. When cops lie, they are part of a system of language that is integral to the state’s monopoly on violence. I quickly came to realize that many officer interviews followed one of a handful of scripts, with troves of phrases to express and explain suspicion (“high-crime area,” “furtive movements,” “erratic behavior”), to justify an escalation of force (the “demeanor” of a “defendant” was “agitated,” “belligerent,” or “highly uncooperative;” people “resisted” by “flailing” their arms), and to establish probable cause for an arrest (“small objects” were “exchanged for U.S. currency” in a “hand-to-hand transaction”).

In cases without objective evidence like medical records or video, it was easier for investigators to accept an officer’s account of an incident because the cop’s language was far more likely to be consistent. Civilians were asked to provide multiple statements throughout an investigation (on the phone and in person), and inconsistencies between those statements were often used to discredit their claims. Meanwhile, cops were prepared immediately before their interviews by union attorneys, who remained present during the statement lest officers stray too far from the official line. If language is a weapon, cops were equipped with firepower and the training to use it, just as they were with actual guns. Meanwhile ­complainants—civilians whose circumstances put them in frequent contact with police—have been denied mastery of the official language.

• The U.S. and the ICC: Why a Closer Relationship Isn’t Necessarily a Good Thing.
• Confessions of a Seventh-Grade Texas History Teacher.
• Nice Book Reviews.
• Dad Protects Son from Bullies by Wearing Skirt.
• Enough with the Rape Gaffes.
• Fairer Sex.
• China in Revolt:

Today, the Chinese working class is fighting. More than thirty years into the Communist Party’s project of market reform, China is undeniably the epicenter of global labor unrest. While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China. So on a typical day anywhere from half a dozen to several dozen strikes are likely taking place.

• Sarah Lawrence, with Guns, on teaching literature at West Point.
• The War of Northern Aggression.
• American Jacobins, on America’s radical social revolts:

In the American system, no political party can durably exist without the ability to win at least half the vote in a meaningful number of elections, yet almost by definition, no truly radical program can ever quickly gain such broad assent.

In the mid nineteenth century, a faction of abolitionists understood this dilemma. Figures such as Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, Joshua Giddings, and John P. Hale, rejecting the heavily prefigurative and antipolitical style of activism practiced by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, saw that a strategic approach to abolition was required, one in which the “cause of the slave” would be harnessed to a wider set of appeals.

At each stage of their project, from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party and finally the Republican Party, progressively broader coalitions were formed around an emerging ideology of free labor that merged antislavery principles with the economic interests of ordinary Northern whites.

• British Propaganda: The Napoleon Myth.
• Revolt of the Rich.
• Gabby Douglas Speaks Out, Gets Smacked Down.
• Author of No Easy Day Admits to Committing a War Crime.
• Blind Spot.
• Abraham Lincoln and the Embalmer.

Boom, weekend reading strikes again:

• How the American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps.
• Corporations are Trying to Kill Community Colleges.
• Prosecuting Crimes Against Cultural Property in Northern Mali: Why It Matters.
• On Privacy, a history of the right to privacy.
• Student Debt, Gender, and Class.
• Obama Channels Reagan on Welfare:

On a Tuesday afternoon conference call, the campaign again hit Romney for having been wobbly on time limits, which deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter called “the core of the bipartisan welfare reform.”  (Hence politicians’ insistence on measuring the policy’s success by how many people ceased getting benefits, and their refusal to even track what happened after that.)  Campaign Policy Director James Kvaal fleshed out the free car attack in near-pornographic detail: Romney’s program “paid for the cost of their insurance, deductions, tax, title, registration, repairs, even their Triple A membership. And if the people who transitioned to work later lost their jobs and went back on welfare, they were allowed to keep their free cars.  In one year alone, Romney’s Wheels for Welfare program cost Massachusetts tax-payers 400,000 dollars.”

The Obama campaign didn’t explicitly state its opposition to “Wheels for Welfare,” (a follow-up e-mail went unanswered), but its words suggested as much.  Worse, they suggested that the campaign saw the program as inherently self-refuting, as if the perversity of taxpayers subsidizing drivers on the dole was just self-evident.  Never mindthat the cars were donated by non-profits, or that what the government paid for was contingent on submitting pay stubs, or that the beneficiaries had to be parents, with clean driving records, with the prospect of work somewhere unreachable by public transit.

• Explicit Violence, on growing up with male violence.
• Rape and Rhetoric.
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape.
• Rape, Abortion, and the Privilege of Magical Thinking.
• Men Explain Things to Me:

The out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

• Scholars, Spies, and Global Studies.
• Transparency Advocates Want White House Beer Recipe.
• Downsizing Supersize in New York.
• Life Expectancy, the Anti-Vaccine Movement, and How Individuals Started to Take Credit for Growing Old.
• The Myth of “The Social Issues:” The Politics of Abortion and the Politics of Gay Rights are Different.
• Why Don’t American Students Strike?
• Surveillance and the City:

We have a summer camp. In 2010 we had a camp celebration, a party for families. This cute kid, just graduated 5th grade, going to middle school, randomly asks me, “Do I tell them I’m Muslim?” I totally didn’t get it. I was like, “Well, if someone asks you, of course.” And he says, “What if they hurt me?” And I’m like, “Why would they hurt you? You don’t have to worry about that.” And he says, “Didn’t someone just stab that guy in that cab? He told a white man he was Muslim and the man stabbed him.” I’m thinking, you’re 10 years old and you know that story? I told him at school there would be security guards and teachers and not to worry. All of sudden, all these kids had all these examples like, “Oh, remember your brother was on the train and these kids beat him up and called him a terrorist?” And I just sat back and was like, wow. We’re talking about eight-, nine-, 10-year-old kids.

• How Non-Profits Spend Millions on Elections and Call It Social Welfare.
• Gay and Proud in Uganda.
• Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay.
• Translating the Assembly.
• Before the Fall: Possible Future for Anti-Austerity Movements:

That we may have another year without undergraduate fee hikes in the UCs, and without cuts to schools and colleges, should be understood as an effect of recent rounds of uncompromising student protest, including the cascading strikes and encampments that shook California’s universities last fall. These protests demonstrated to the state and to the UC Regents that further fee increases would come with a cost, and helped build support for the original Millionaires’ Tax, of which the current tax initiative – formed out of a compromise between the governor and the president of the California Federation of Teachers – is a pale copy.

While we might be inclined to consider the possibility of a year without cuts to public education as a victory, albeit an uncertain one, there are other political dynamics shaping the current situation that make for a murkier picture. Governor Jerry Brown, in tying the fate of students to his tax initiative, is working to co-opt and neutralize student movements – movements that otherwise could further delegitimate state institutions enacting and enforcing austerity, and even potentially set off, as in Quebec, a period of generalized social unrest. This fall, it will be incredibly difficult for those active on campuses to resist pressures to put our energies into campaigning for the tax initiative, despite the fact that relatively little of the revenue would go to education (much is slated to “pay down the deficit”); that the initiative includes a temporary, regressive sales tax; and that electoral campaigns force us to engage on a terrain and in a mode of struggle that work to our disadvantage, in comparison to campus-based direct action and mass organizing. As we recently saw in Wisconsin, social movements that allow themselves to be entirely diverted into electoral politics risk massive demoralization, defeat in both electoral and non-electoral domains, and the fraying of bonds forged through collective struggle.

• Crossing Sixth Avenue.
• On Atlantic Yards.
• When Europeans Were Refugees in Africa.
• How Not to Do Things with Words.
• No More Ron Paul Revolutions.
• The Importance of Voting as Activism.