It’s the weekend, so let’s do this thing:

• The Department of Energy, Solyndra, and Steven Chu’s battle with Washington.
• Strike a Pose: Vogue, Eating Disorders, and Desire.
• The 2012 Hunger Games: Debt Peonage and Poverty in America.
• Why I Don’t Like the Phrase ‘The War on Women.’
• Tina Fey, Feminism, Slut-Shaming, and Women in Comedy: The Unfuckables.
• Shooting the Bolsheviks – the film of the execution of Latvians in 1919.
• The Gruesome History of Eating People for Medicine.
• Violence at Rikers.
• Occupy the Farm and the Conditions of Academic Freedom.
• Occupy’s Liberation from Liberalism.

There is a traditional terms of alliance between liberals and radicals in American social movements: through civil disobedience and direct action, the radicals create a fire on the liberals’ left that makes them seem relevant as a moderate alternative; the liberals keep us out of jail. In this case, the liberals spectacularly failed. Over the winter, rather than making an issue of the extraordinary illegal violence of the evictions, they chose, instead, to create an almost histrionic moral crisis over a few broken windows in Oakland months before. But when OWS re-emerged in the spring, the abandonment of the liberals, the drying-up of the money, have become an almost miraculous blessing. Activists have honed and polished their street tactics and democratic process. New alliances have been created, with community groups, immigrant rights organizations, and, increasingly, labor unions.

• Malcolm Harris on parties, couches, and activism.
• Mitt Romney’s Bully Problem.
• Laurie Penny on Britain’s Private Schools and Privilege.
• Playing to Lose: A Game of Hide-and-Seek with Joseph Kony.
• The Canadian International Council has a series on the peace vs. justice debate. You should check it all out, but here is a selection:
  • An interview with Leslie Vinjamuri on the ICC and conflict zones
  • Mark Kersten on the ICC and Libya
  • Alana Tiemessen on the Paradox of Lawfare
• Love Bomb: How Deep is Israel’s Love for Iran?
• From Van Halen to U2 – Outgrowing Oneself.
• How would the most honored Supreme Court justices vote on healthcare reform?
• On the Palestinian Hunger Strikers.
• Bad World War II History: Neutrality Edition:

It is simply false to suggest that the Allies had some kind of high-minded respect for neutrality during World War II. When strategically expedient, neutrality was violated, at times for reasons that were far more legally spurious than U.S. drone strikes against al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, after all, is at least engaged in conflict with the U.S. In the case of Iran, not even the justifications used for planned or actual violations of Norwegian and Scandinavian neutrality – the presence of German naval vessels or personnel supporting them, or German invasion – were present, instead it was done as a naked attempt to secure logistical assets necessary for aiding the Soviet war effort. The war on terror is obviously not World War II. But what is rather bizarre – and it is a problem that is certainly not limited to Tom Parker, but to those who write about international security issues more broadly – is the casual and ahistorical use of World War II as some kind of moral standard for wartime conduct.

• Universities hold transcripts hostage to get students to pay off loans.
• Seth Ackerman on the historical and economic background of Europe and the Left.
• The Greek Elections aftermath as seen in the newspapers.
• The Anti-Mother’s Day.
• There’s no downside to Obama’s statement on marriage equality.
• Same-sex marriage, behind the numbers.
• Counterpoint: Obama’s Bullshit Gay Marriage Announcement.
• Obama Loves Queers (Except Not).
• Obama supports marriage equality, but not for all:

A president endorsing, even as a “personal position,” marriage equality for gays and lesbians is, as Vice President Joe Biden once said, a big fucking deal. But Obama has endorsed marriage equality federalism—not the notion that marriage for gays and lesbians is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution that can never be taken away. Obama has adopted the same position that Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2004, when Cheney said he believed in marriage equality but that the states should be allowed to decide by a show of hands, as North Carolina did Tuesday, whether gays and lesbians have the same rights as everyone else.

A lot of things have been going on, so let’s catch up with some reading:

• Why Low Minimum Wages Kill Jobs and Crush Living Standards for Everyone.
• A May Day post at Jadilyya: The obstacles facing labor in post-revolutionary Egypt.
• Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States.
• Prison labor and free market capitalism.
• Timothy Burke reflects on divestment and what campaigns did right and what they did wrong.
• Two years after the BP oil spill, people are catching shrimp without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs without claws.
• On Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger:
  • Shut up, Johnny Depp.
  • The Albatross around Johnny Depp’s Neck.
• Our Country is Being Fracked by the Merger of Government and Big Business.
• The New Inquiry has dispatches from May Day demonstrations all over.
• Massive May Day Turnout Highlights Media Disconnect.
• Police change tactics against May Day demonstrations.

Targeted arrests, through which police attempt to head off large-scale civil disobedience by snatching individual activists out of the crowd, were documented yesterday in Oakland, New York and Seattle. Unlike the now-familiar Occupy scene of demonstrators being arrested en masse in dramatic, late-night evictions, May Day protesters in many locales were arrested individually throughout the day, in some cases for crossing over onto sidewalks or, according to local media on the scene in Oakland, seemingly at random.  As Gawker reported Monday, the NYPD, with involvement from the FBI, raided at least three New York activists’ homes that day to interrogate them about their May Day plans.

• Politicians reel as Europeans turn against austerity.
• Bill Easterly translates founding documents into World Bank jargon
• The Accidental Sex Offender.
• The assumption that immigrants shouldn’t get to vote in an election is just that – an assumption.
• So, the UCLA Medical School is run by a bunch of racists.
• Here’s the racist blog post at the Chronicle about Black Studies. And some responses here and here.
• Some laws are recognizing the racial influence in death sentence verdicts.
• Tunisian courts convict filmmakers for translating Persepolis.
• Sympathy for Obama.

It seems that he exerted all the pressure he reasonably could within the system we have. At every step, he was as attentive as possible to the weirdness of the system, starting with the primaries. He pushed the discipline of the Democratic party as far as he could, for instance by naming as his point-man the guy to whom the younger and more centrist Democrats owed their jobs (Rahm Emanuel). He was willing to pay people off if necessary — remember when Ben Nelson demanded a special exemption for Nebraska from one of the provisions of health care reform? He was willing to exploit procedural loopholes when possible, as in using reconciliation to pass the health care reform bill (retrospectively making his odd insistence on making it deficit-reducing seem like a pretty good idea). And it seems like all the things that he could’ve done unilaterally would have just increased the executive power grab that, as I recall, we were all opposed to when Bush was president.

• The entirety of civic life cannot be reduced to a get out the vote campaign. Why Occupy shouldn’t be the Tea Party of the Left.
• 68% of the sons of the 1% work for daddy.
• Babies are racist. What else is new?
• Ethno-nationalism is on the rise across Europe.
• Daniel Solomon’s response to Gerard Prunier’s latest op-ed.

Have a seat and grab something to read:

• Fascism and Nazism are not ideologies of the Left, in case any of you were still confused.
• America’s History of Torture.
• GE paid nothing in taxes in 2010. How much did undocumented immigrants pay?
• And Mike Konczal on policy in the era of mass incarceration.
• Does anyone know why this look at Chernobyl looks like a Land Rover commercial?
• Makode Linde, the artist behind the Swedish blackface cake, explains himself on Africa is a Country.
• Aaron Bady’s article from this past winter on privacy in the age of datamining, now ungated at Technology Review, “World Without Walls:”

When we talk about privacy and surveillance, it is impossible to avoid mentioning 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian account of a world without walls, where television watches you and microphones record every sound above a low whisper. But Orwell said nothing about dataveillance. And while the Fourth Amendment guarantees protection from the kinds of governmental invasions that tend to concern Americans the most (reading our mail, searching our homes), when we think about the problem this way we tend to overlook the kinds of knowledge discovery that don’t require anyone to break into anything.

Data mining as criminal investigation is a good example. Investigating a suspect’s known associates is an ancient tactic in policing, but it costs money, time, and effort, and it’s legally complicated; investigations tend to be constrained by a high threshold of initial suspicion. But as the amount of widely available data rises, another kind of search becomes possible. Instead of starting from a subject of suspicion and placing that person within a map tracing patterns of behavior and networks of associates, it becomes feasible to begin with the whole map and derive the subjects of suspicion from the patterns one finds. Pattern-­based data mining, in other words, works in reverse from a subject-based search: instead of starting from known or strongly suspected criminal associations, the data miner attempts to divine individuals who match a data profile, drawing them out of a sea of dots like the pattern in a color-blindness test. Dataveillance draws powerful inferences about people and their associates from deep and rich—and often publicly available—records of otherwise routine behavior. Automated systems monitor the environment to match the profiles of particular users to pattern signatures associated with criminal behavior, using algorithms to track and analyze anomalies or deviations from what someone, somewhere, has deemed normal.

Existing privacy protections are largely irrelevant to this kind of surveillance. The Fourth Amendment protects only what is said in a conversation. But much the way pen registers and tap-and-trace devices (which record which numbers you dial, who calls you, and how long you talk) do not trigger the same Fourth Amendment privacy protections that a wiretap would, telecommunications companies are not banned from amassing and selling vast databases of call data. The Supreme Court has ruled that once information about call “attributes” passes into the possession of a third-party carrier like a telecommunications company, it effectively becomes the property of that third party, which may collect, store, and circulate it as it pleases.

• Against the ‘unschooling’ of anarchists, the case for a smart approach to compulsory schooling:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Taylor summarizes the debate over compulsory schooling as, “Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not?” To me, it seems to be about sparing children the discomfort of conflict. Curiosity leads us to follow our own interests, but what about the interests of others? Conflict is what happens when we’re asked to reckon with them. Just as not every child learns to read “when they’re ready,” some students understandably “resist the critical thinking process; they are more comfortable with learning that allows them to remain passive” (as bell hooks writes).

• Congress hasn’t done anything about America’s growing long-term unemployment.
• Is now the time for Social Democrats to step up?
• Why do soldiers take photos of war?
• Laura Seay breaks down just how not to write about Africa.
• The Exclusive Club of Moral Authority: From Nick Kristof to Kony 2012.
• Tom Friedman’s War on Humanity.
• The recession didn’t gut the prospects of American young people, the baby boomers took care of that.

The gerontocracy begins at the top. The 111th Congress was the oldest since the end of the Second World War, and the average age of its members has been rising steadily since 1981. The graying of Congress has obvious political ramifications, although generalizations can be deceiving. The Republican representatives tend to be younger than the Democrats, but that doesn’t mean they represent the interests of the young. The youngest senators are Tea Party members, Mike Lee from Utah and Marco Rubio from Florida (both forty). Here’s Rubio: “Americans chose a free-enterprise system designed to provide a quality of opportunity, not compel a quality of results. And that is why this is the only place in the world where you can open up a business in the spare bedroom of your home.” He is speaking to people who own homes that have empty spare bedrooms. He will not or cannot understand that the spare bedrooms of America are filling up with returning adult children, like the estimated 85 percent of college graduates who returned to their childhood beds in 2010, toting along $25,250 of debt.

David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter, had the guts to acknowledge that the Tea Party’s combination of expensive entitlement programs and tax cuts is something entirely different from a traditional political program: “This isn’t conservatism: It’s a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boom generation.” The economic motive is growing ever more naked, and has nothing to do with any principle that could be articulated by Goldwater or Reagan, or indeed with any principle at all. The political imperative is to preserve the economic cloak of unreality that the Boomers have wrapped themselves in.

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama’s 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.

• Occupy vs. Whole Foods – an overview of Occupy the Farm, where activists are turning UC land into a farm instead of a Whole Foods. Taking back the Tract is a model of resistance.
• What’s at stake on May Day?
• Paper and Tigers: Was Lenin Really an Anarchist?
• Occupy the Russian Revolution.
• The Catholic Church has its own war on nuns.
• The Top 5 Interest Groups Keeping Marijuana Illegal.
• The Sierra Leone Stock Exchange: where one company’s stock is traded for about an hour, once a week.
• On Jeremy Lin and race in sports: Hate and Basketball.
• Who knows the difference between a stay-at-home mother and a welfare mother?

When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself. Just ask Mitt Romney. In a neat catch that in a sane world would have put the Rosen gaffe to rest forever, Nation editor at large Chris Hayes aired a video clip on his weekend-morning MSNBC show displaying Romney this past January calling for parents on welfare to get jobs: “While I was governor, 85 percent of the people on a form of welfare assistance in my state had no work requirement. And I wanted to increase the work requirement. I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless,’ and I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving daycare to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.’” (Don’t be fooled by the gender-neutral language—he’s talking about mothers.)

• A path to labor law reform – labor rights as civil rights.
• The “Other America” is increasingly made up of nearly-poor.
• Stand your ground laws didn’t protect this woman, who allegedly defended herself from an abusive husband.
• The two lawyers that started the “self-deportation” war of attrition against immigrants.
• The Unintended Hilarity of Patent Art.
• African asylum-seekers suffer arson attacks in Tel Aviv neighborhood.
• A Professor Addresses Sexism in the Ivy League.
• Competing Under False Pretenses: Fake Handicaps a Growing Problem for Disabled Sports.
• Binyavanga Wainaina on Africa’s unfair image.

If you’re in the need of some reading, take your pick from this sampling:

• How can Herbert Spencer’s 1892 revisions explain conservative opposition to the individual mandate?
• Libertarians and the Left: the possibilities and limitations of building an alliance.
• A Genocide in Northern Uganda? Patrick Wegner looks at the internal displacement policy of the early 2000s and debates what options the ICC has.
• Hayes Brown dissects Walter Russell Mead’s uninformed analysis of the UN.
• And Dan Drezner compares the Cold War UN to the contemporary one.
• What is Behind Africa’s Illegal Gun-Running?
• The student strike in Quebec enters its tenth week – an overview at Student Activism.
• The Disappearing Face of New York.
• How do we define dignity?

When Kim Jong Il died in December, his regime praised him and said he’d brought “dignity” to North Korea “on the highest level and ushered in the golden days of prosperity unprecedented in the nation’s history.” Or, translated from the original totalitarianese: North Koreans are two inches shorter than the average South Korean due to sheer malnutrition, and they wept forcibly at their dictator’s passing lest anybody suspected they possessed insufficient patriotic grief.

Dignity is not just a laurel for when totalitarians die but also for when we kill them. When President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, he said “his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.” I have no sympathy for bin Laden, but I would not attach the words “peace” or “dignity” to clandestine nighttime raids in which the state shoots its enemies through the face. Surely the relatives of 9/11 victims felt some quiet justice from the killing, but young Americans embraced peace and dignity by dancing in the streets and singing drunkenly of death.

So what is dignity, exactly? The word litters Cossery’s novel without much definition, much as we often use it casually with each other without ever saying precisely what we mean. In March 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics released a 555-page attempt to define the concept. It had to. Since the council’s inception in 2001 — after which its largely religious membership gave ethical opinions replicating the administration’s Christian orthodoxy on stem-cell research and abortion — critics believed it had “employed the language of human dignity so loosely that it was nothing more than a rhetorical trump card used to reject policies that were at odds with the Bush administration’s perspective,” Leslie A. Meltzer wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dignity was a blatant political weapon.

• Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook as life viewed through the Claude glass.
• Gregory Mann tackles how the media has ignored the crisis in Mali.
• Does a cities walkability affect its politics?
• Why the Mandate is Constitutional: Ronald Dworkin on the individual mandate and the Supreme Court.
• And if individual mandates are unconstitutional, why did so many founding fathers support them?
• Reading Katehi at UC Davis, a breakdown of the Pepper Spray Chancellor’s verbal dance around accountability.
• A two-tier system at the Strand – the future of organized labor?
• Some thoughts on the Healthcare mandate and the Commerce Clause’s Activity/Inactivity distinction.
• Occupy Oakland, Permitted Protests, and Police Repression.
• One Nation Under the Gun, on Trayvon Martin and America’s gun laws:

One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

• America’s Deadly Devotion to Guns.
• Let’s be honest: America’s got a drone problem.
• A(nother) revision on the viability of cookstove campaigns.
• The bubble within the higher education bubble.
• Every year, JSTOR denies 150 million attempts to access articles.
• Africans Shocked by Uncivilized Antics of European Savages.
• Somebody is really mad about their seat on the airplane.
• Another great NYT correction – this time inspiring more.
• Americans think Iran is as big of a threat as the 80s-era Soviet Union.
• Misrata, one year later – a reporter revisits where his friend perished.
• How Estonia became an internet titan:

“We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody,” Viik said. “So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn’t afford them at home.”

The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.

Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line.