More on the Hamas Offensive

Below is an LTE I might not actually submit to a newspaper, but it says some things that I need to say. The first post I did on this theme is here.

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians since somewhere around 12th grade. I have protested in support of them here in America, and also in Belfast, N. Ireland. In 2002 I convinced the other members of a CU-Boulder group (Students for Justice in Northern Ireland) that we should endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine. In the last 15 years one of the main topics on my blog is supporting the Palestinians. But an even bigger part of my blog is about opposing anti-Semitism, and I’m proud to say that those two parts of my blog overlap heavily.

I know that there are many progressives who are not anti-Semitic but who have failed to condemn Hamas’ early October offensive. Although that failure is not necessarily bigoted, what Hamas has done IS bigoted. They are religious fundamentalists and overwhelmingly went after civilian life, and it was Jews they were targeting. As someone who looks back and supports almost everything the IRA did in The Troubles, I would not condemn a Palestinian effort that resembled the IRA’s campaign- targeting the military and (using methods that almost always prevent civilian death) destroying government and commercial property.

I say that because the Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality (the State is officially Jewish, it cannot be simultaneously democratic). Those in the West Bank have it even worse (they are state-less (they have no citizenship, and thus no civil rights)). And those in  the Gaza Strip live in the world’s largest open-air prison.

They have every reason to be furious at the Israeli state and Israel’s Jewish population. But intentionally killing civilians in war is, to one degree or another, wrong, and in this case bigoted.

Tom Shelley

Fuck Hamas

This is my position on what happened in Israel and Palestine in early Oct.

First, as far as the history of that conflict, about 20% of my knowledge comes from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some  mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc. In the last week it’s something like 50% the BBC, 10% Juan Cole, 10% CNN and the rest is miscellaneous.

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians pretty much since I started becoming more than a tiny bit political. I sort of explain my general thoughts about the conflict in a post here. I have only briefly been VERY familiar with Israeli and Palestinian politics, and that was the first 2-3 months of 2020 when I was reading about 15 articles a day on the web-based newspaper The Times of Israel. I used to be a member of what used to be the American section of the Socialist International (the Democratic Socialists of America) and in 2001 learned that Fatah, the leading part of the PLO (Arafat was a leader of Fatah), was a less-than-full member of the SI. Until recently I basically supported them.

That was increasingly (in recent years as more and more criticisms were made of the PLO) because of who the main alternative was. My position has always been- “Fuck Hamas.” To one degree or another Hamas is a lot more socially conservative than Fatah is, and I think that the activities of the military wing of Hamas were more likely to intentionally kill innocent civilians than the PLO was when they were fighting Israel.

But for decades now I have heard about the PLO being corrupt and abusing their power. They also have done a horrible job of advancing the interests of their people. Although that’s been clear to one degree or another for decades now, there was a BBC article that really explained that just recently. And then there was a BBC article accusing the President of the Palestinian Authority (sort of an extension of the PLO, in the West Bank) of giving a VERY anti-Semitic speech. As you’ll understand if you read that article, Abbas said that European Jews were targeted because they had money. This is not true and even if all Jews were rich, how in the world would that justify killing them- especially when rich people outside the Jewish population were not targeted as well.

I won’t discuss this in this essay, but I am not sure who I can support among the political movements in the Palestinian population.

The Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality. Those living in the West Bank have it worse (they are state-less), and in different ways the residents of the Gaza Strip have it even worse than that. The first two of the three aspects of the Israeli state I just referred to are often referred to as being governed by “Israeli Apartheid.” I explain how that’s a legitimate term for how the Palestinians are treated here. The two state solution has been dying a slow death for decades as Israel plants settlers in the West Bank, changing the “facts on the ground” that will make an independent Palestine non-viable.  The Israeli Right, who are in power right now, wants to annex all of the West Bank, at the expense of the Palestinians living there.

So, yes, the Palestinians have every reason to be FURIOUS with the Israeli state and the Israeli people. But what Hamas has done in the last few days is horrible. IF it had been aimed at the military and (using methods that avoid civilian death) government and commercial buildings, I would at least sort of approve. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a massacre of civilians and, especially with a right-wing extreme Zionist government in Jerusalem, it will provoke an even greater (UPDATE 310/10/23 bigger, and/or more extensive) response than what we have seen in the last few days. It will probably bury any chance at peace for a generation.

Is that guaranteed? Fortunately it is not. We need to continue our efforts to change American policy on Israel. That effort will be boosted if we do more to incorporate opposition to anti-Semitism into our solidarity work in support of the Palestinians. That is one of the main themes in my post on Zionism and a one state solution. At the risk of scheming internationally, this is one more reason to support the Irish political party Sinn Fein. After SF got within striking distance of leading a left-wing and republican government in Dublin in 2020, Juan Cole wrote a post about what that might mean for the Palestinians. In recent years there has been a trend of bigger and bigger percentages of the Jewish-American population supporting the Palestinians, and this will help.

In general I am a supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, although I worry that a CULTURAL boycott could fuel anti-semitism. But an economic and political BDS network would be awesome.

So, we need to do a better job than we have done. And I think that a good place to start is to react to recent events by condemning Hamas, talking up a one state solution, and doing more of what we have already done.

 

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UPDATE 10/12/23 There is another item on the same theme here.

Law and Order Reviews G

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Manhood” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about homophobia in the police. Four cops conspire to fail at backing up a fifth one (a gay man) who is in need of assistance, because they’re homophobes and either want him dead or at least wounded.  It seems like the head of their precinct (a geographical division of the NYPD that probably includes something like 100-300 cops) was at least opposed to the Assistant DA’s effort to prosecute the four cops and may have encouraged the homophobia of his men.

At one point one of the four cops talks about gay people and political influence the same way that anti-Semites talk about Jews and political influence.

The prosecution loses when the jury acquits 3 defendants (one testified against them as part of a deal). In some ways it’s a sad ending, but probably more realistic than convictions would have been and sort of more likely to inspire anti-homophobic action (in general, not necessarily in relation to homophobia in the police).

“Volunteers” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a homeless man being  beaten (almost to death) by a middle-class resident of the NYC neighborhood he (the homeless man) lives in. To a large degree the residents and business-people of that area are jerks, but this specific homeless character is possibly worse (until you factor in the attempt at murdering him by the residents of the neighborhood, that is). That kind of undermines the liberal-progressive message the show is trying to give about being sensitive to the problem of homelessness but the writers probably needed the homeless character to provoke the people he lived near. The jury’s vote to convict on one count related to the attempted homicide is practically over-turned when the judge sentences the defendant to time served (a couple days) and a short period of probation. I think that highlights that a lot of this country’s elite is hostile to the homeless.

“Profile” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although not especially noteworthy or inspirational, this is a pretty good anti-racist episode. At one point there’s a brief statement about racial scapegoating. I think that racial scapegoating is a major problem. There’s a lot of white capitalists out there who, to one degree or another like the idea of convincing white workers that their economic misery is the fault of people of color and/or white anti-racists, and/or policies like Affirmative Action.

“Black Tie” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

In general I was thinking that maybe I should make a brief note when the defendant is a rich person. Especially with episodes like this when they use their influence to obstruct the investigation and/or get away with it because of their wealth.

People of Color and Racism

(This is what you might call a special post- I am for reasons that are both personal and political addressing something that some people who looked at my blog between 2009 and 2017 may have criticized me for)

In early 2018 a political friend (who is a widely respected Black veteran of the fight against racism) explained something to me about racism which had not been explained to me very well before that. I had done a post on my blog about the theory/fact that people of color in America can’t be racist. It was originally written and published in 2009 and in 2017 I re-wrote it so it would be more convincing. This essay is largely about how it shouldn’t be held against me, but my position in that 2017 post was that people of color can be racist.

(Not sure exactly where to place this, but in early 2018 I deleted that post)

To a large degree, back then I thought of racism as a set of beliefs and I only sort of thought of it as a system in America. I remember I DID, in the decades before 2018, use the word “structural” a lot but I did not use the word “system” and I think that using the former is less critical than using the latter (I think the latter is a more holistic way of describing it (or comprehensive or something like that)). My friend explained that since there is only one racist system in this society and it’s for the benefit of white people, people of color can’t be racist (I knew of course that there is only one racist system here and it’s for white people, but I didn’t connect the dots the way most white allies do). My very limited 2009 research into this theory/fact had led me to believe that the argument in favor of it was that people of color didn’t have the power to be racist towards whites. In 2018 the explanation that referred to a “system” made a lot more sense to me.

The 2017 version of that post focused largely on two arguments. First, that people of color DID have SOME power with which to be racist towards whites (i.e. the use of physical violence). Second, that I referred to both anti-Catholic and  anti-Protestant bigotry in N. Ireland with the word “sectarianism,” and if I did that I was going to communicate in a similar way about racism in this country.

There are three general points I need to stress. First, what I was calling “anti-white racism” is what many people (including the friend I refer to above) call “anti-white bigotry.” Second, I wrote a very long paragraph in that post explaining why I believe that what I now call anti-white bigotry is a very small problem. That paragraph, with a couple of small changes, is available in a post here. It is about half-way down from the top and starts with “Even without that…” Third, since 2018 there have been 1-2 posts that were “labelled” (“tagged”) “anti-white bigotry,” meaning that they are partly or mostly or completely about that topic (in early 2018 I deleted the post where I said people of color could be racist). At this point there are 109 posts labelled “anti-racist” and there are about 41-189 more that could more or less be labelled that way, so I was and am OVERWHELMINGLY more concerned about white supremacy than I am concerned about anti-white bigotry.

In the context of admitting this mistake I made I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but as you may know I got an Ethnic Studies degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Somehow I missed being told in those classes that people of color can’t be racist. First, I hope this isn’t held against any of my professors. Second, I really was a fairly or almost very good Ethnic Studies student and further down I publish the grades I got in those classes.

And there’s some even better evidence that I was a good anti-racist in general. Although some of my anti-racist activism wasn’t about power and privilege and control and exploitation (some of it was just about challenging the prejudice of most white people) I DID do a lot of anti-racist activism that WAS about what I then called “structural racism.” In the mid-90s I did a lot of activity around defending Affirmative Action and defending immigrants. In 1996 and 2000 I attended a total of about 5 actions that were part of two labor union campaigns by the “Justice for Janitors” project of the Service Employees International Union. In 2001 I helped organize three events about racism in America that were largely about racial injustice and inequality. In the late 1990s I went to 3-4 actions in Denver about police brutality and in the last 10 years I went to two Black Lives Matter protests in Boulder. Some of the material on my blog is about “structural racism” (that is not everything I did as a white ally, but probably about 2/3 of it).

Although it was about challenging the prejudice of racist Irish-Americans and not about concrete improvements in the lives of people of color, a large chunk of my Northern Ireland activism was done in a way that was in conflict with white supremacy in this country. That and some other relevant thoughts are in a long post here.

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There are four things I need to explain that help justify my belief that this political mistake shouldn’t be held against me.

First, a lot of the books I read about N. Ireland that were written by anti-Unionist (“unionist” meaning pro-British) leftists referred to both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarian. I offer examples of that further below.

Second, the post I deleted in 2018 was called “Guilty of Being White.” I got that title from a song of the same name by a 1980s punk rock band called Minor Threat. The man who wrote that song is Ian MacKaye and it was apparently inspired by he and his friends in High School getting beaten up by Black kids (I may have gotten that from wikipedia but I just found a better source for it here). The thing is, Ian MacKaye I believe is very anti-racist. That’s mostly based on the following: I found a YouTube fan video about anti-racist skinheads that had 4 Minor Threat songs as the soundtrack; and after leaving Minor Threat, he became the vocalist for a band called Fugazi and according to another Black veteran of the fight against racism (Daraka Larimore) Fugazi was in 2001 the most progressive hard-core punk band.

Third, in a song on Body Count’s first album, Ice-T (the vocalist of the heavy metal band) refers to a Black woman who hates white people as a racist. That was on the same album as “Cop Killer” and was thus long before any alleged “selling out” by Ice-T when he joined the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Also, since he got that job Body Count has often played "Cop Killer" at concerts and on a 2017 BC album (Bloodlust) Ice-T did a song called “No Lives Matter” where the lyrics are a creatively written hybrid of support for Black Lives Matter and opposition to poverty. Another reason I would say that he didn’t “sell-out” by joining the cast of SVU is that in 1993 when BC played “Cop Killer” at a concert I went to, Ice-T first said something about how in theory being a cop is something cops should be proud of, but that the reality is very different. He wasn’t 100% anti-cop even then and if you consider the fact that almost once a season SVU’s writers give his character good lines criticizing the police, I don’t think that he has compromised his values to be on that show.

Fourth, I know that at least in 2009 at least some people at the Southern Poverty Law Center believed that people of color could be racist. Although they are wrong about that I imagine it was a semantics thing the way it was with me (in the sense that they were probably referring to anti-white bigotry but were inappropriately using the word “racist”). (Part of why I am reluctant to penalize them much about this is that, at least in recent years and maybe for decades now, in addition to their work on stuff like tracking Klan activity, they also do a lot of work that’s about economic justice)

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Below are the grades I got for classes that were part of my major.

Intro to Asian-American History. B-

Intro to Ethnic Studies B

Indian/Govt Conflicts FBI on Pine Ridge A (Note: about 1/4 of it was about the Black Panthers)

Race, Class, and Pollution F (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I failed this is that I made some bad decisions about what to spend time on, I had some personal problems, and I hadn’t, at that point, taken the Research Methods in Ethnic Studies class and until I took it I did not like doing research)

American Indians in Film A

Emergence of Modern Mexico D (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I got a D is that I learned that Summer that Summer School isn’t a good way for me take college classes)

Asian-Pacific American Communities C

Chicanos/US Social System C

Research Methods in Ethnic Studies B

Topical Issues in Native North America A

Selected Topics in Ethnic Studies: Prisons, Crime and Culture B- (Note: About 10% was about the Black Panthers)

Research Practicum in Ethnic Studies B+

Japanese-America: Critical Thinking A-

North American Indians: Traditional Culture B

Senior Seminar in Ethnic Studies A-

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This last part is about the N. Ireland dimension of this that I referred to above. It’s a work-in-progress because I have only just started reading those books (4 out of 5 I have read before and I remember some stuff that backs me up on this, but I need to read them again and take some notes and then I’ll add that material here). (I get the impression that in the last 10-20 years it may have become unpopular among anti-Unionists to refer to anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarianism, but most of my reading of the books I’m referring to was around 2000 (I might change how I talk about it, but I am unlikely to become active on the NI issue in the future and may not have the opportunities to discuss this with other anti-Unionists))

Law and Order Reviews F

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“The Corporate Veil” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is a good one where a corporation is the criminal. There’s also a brief positive reference to Ralph Nader.

“Wedded Bliss” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is about sweatshop labor. It’s pretty damning.

“Mother Love” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

One of the detectives says that crack cocaine should be legalized, and his partner doesn’t seem to strongly disagree. I support ending the war on drugs, at least in relation to some and maybe all drugs. I think marijuana legalization is great. To one degree or another, I believe other drugs should be either legalized or decriminalized- that is decriminalization of possession of a small amount (this approach would probably not change the law as far as people who sell drugs). Decriminalization would involve treating addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal one. I think that this would be an appropriate way to deal with crack.

“Jurisdiction” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

Although he’s alone and pretty junior, a corrupt cop is stopped.

“Conduct Unbecoming” Season 3. For a plot summary see this.

In general, it’s almost critical of the US military. The plot includes the Navy trying to bury the scandal by sacrificing a low-ranking officer in a court-martial but on the other hand the Navy apparently had come down slightly hard on the senior officer who had engaged in “conduct unbecoming.”
Then there's the time that one detective mentions that the tax-payers paid for the massive party the Navy crew had at an NYC hotel. The other detective says: “nice to know my tax dollars aren’t being wasted on school books.”

Law and Order Reviews E

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Cradle to Grave” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

At the beginning there’s one very progressive statement. The cops are looking for the parent(s) of a dead baby and are asking at child care places. A woman working at one says that they used to watch babies, but because of a cut in the federal funding they got, they had to stop. She says something about how the federal government was able to buy a couple more military aircraft because of those nation-wide cuts to child care subsidies, and implies that it was a bad set of priorities.

After about 10 minutes it became clear to me that it was about a lazy, greedy slum-lord property owner. In order to transform her decaying, low-rent buildings into something more profitable, she encourages tenants to move out- a corrupt building superintendent and a thug posing as a tenant make life very difficult for the tenants. The owner and her two helpers are charged in connection with the baby dying because the heat was turned off and there was a broken window in the apartment the baby died in.

“The Fertile Fields” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

Initially there’s some chance that the murder was an anti-semitic hate crime carried out by Black teens. The senior police officer is reluctant to rush to that assumption, worried that it will greatly aggravate relations between NYC Jews and NYC Blacks. The way that the murder turns out to have been committed by a white, non-Jewish criminal I think says a lot about a tendency to blame black teens when they’re innocent.

“Intolerance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a little bit of anti-racism. The white suspects (their conviction was overturned when a mistrial was declared) brought a bit of racism to the academic competition between their loved one and his Chinese-American peer, who they probably killed.

“Silence” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

This is basically about homophobia. It’s a little flawed but overall it’s anti-homophobic. It’s about a black-mail scam by straight prison inmates against closeted gay men outside prison (I think it might happen in reality because I first read about it in a John Grisham novel two decades ago, and now this (this episode was done about 10 years before that book, so people were thinking about it at two different times in our recent history)). If it IS real, that’s just one more reason to fight homophobia.

“The Working Stiff Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

Although it could be more pro-union and I wouldn’t call it socialist, it is in a fairly good way about conflict between the working-class and the upper-class. The union activist with an attitude toward the bosses gets along well with the cops and the Assistant DAs, so I think the viewer is sort of supposed to like him.

Law and Order Reviews D

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here.  In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Heaven” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things worth mentioning. First, the senior police officer says that in the absence of a tragedy like the lethal fire they’re investigating, most New Yorkers don’t care about brown-skinned immigrants.

Also, the junior ADA says (approvingly) that constitutional protections like the 4th and 5th Amendments are for everyone including undocumented immigrants.

“Severance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

The killer was hired for the job by a crooked defense contractor.

“Blood is Thicker” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s one brief mention of how GOP politician Dan Quayle (VP of the US 1989-1993) avoided Vietnam by joining the National Guard, at a time when getting in the Guard meant you wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. Although the Washington Post article I just read wasn’t explicit about Quayle’s position on the war at the time he avoided it, in general he was a hawk during his political career. There were millions of people who supported the war and tried to avoid fighting in it because they didn’t want to be killed.

“Vengeance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a tiny bit of dialogue between minor characters that might be considered pro-union.

“Sisters of Mercy” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

To one degree or another this is about a man, probably around 30 years old, coercing girls in their mid-teens into having sex with him.

Roseanne Reviews T

This is a set of reviews of Roseanne episodes. My general thoughts about that show are here. I will focus only on the political aspects and will mention what percent of lines spoken by non-family members are spoken by people of color.

“Promises, Promises” Episode 22, Season 5. Wikipedia summary is here.

First, I occasionally have to criticize this show and this is one such episode. Although the show really is, overall, very anti-homophobic, in an earlier episode there was a counter-example to that and it shows up in this episode, too. In this episode, some of the adults try hiding from David (a teenage boy) the fact that a friend of the family is a lesbian. It’s simply because he’s a minor (well, I’m pretty sure they have no reason to think he’s homophobic, so I think it’s because of his age).

There are 35-40 lines in this episode spoken by non-family members, and about 20% are by people of color.

“Glengary, Glen Rosey” Episode 23, Season 5. For a plot summary see this.

Out of about 50 lines by non-family members, about 1/4 were by people of color.

“Tooth or Consequences” Episode 24, Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

Out of about 15 lines spoken by non-family members, all were spoken by white people (but almost all were spoken by two gay or bi-sexual characters).

“The Mommy’s Curse” Episode 2, season 6. For a plot summary see this.

Out of 20-25 lines by non-family members, none are by people of color.

“Party Politics” Episode 3, Season 6. See this for a plot summary.

Out of about 10-15 lines spoken by non-family members, none are spoken by people of color.

Law and Order Reviews C

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Sonata for Solo Organ” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about an INCREDIBLY wealthy man spending 1-2 million dollars on a plot to extract a kidney from an unwilling donor (who almost dies) so that his (the wealthy man’s) daughter can get a new kidney. The head of the national agency handling organ transplants demands that the prosecutors go after the wealthy man who demanded special treatment because of his wealth- instead of just the MD and nurse who did the dirty work. He says that his organization “is the one true democracy. One of the few instances where money doesn’t talk- at all.”

“The Blue Wall” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

There are three aspects of this episode which are good politically.

1. It’s indirectly about an effort to go after white-collar crime.
2. It’s also partly about corrupt cops, including a very senior one.
3. There’s a corrupt  congressman involved. He’s an ex-cop, which makes me think he’s Republican- I have gotten the impression that some massive majority of cops are Republican.

“Asylum” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things about the senior Assistant DA. First, although he is sort of in conflict with supporters of the homeless in this episode, he DOES say that “homelessness may be the greatest tragedy of our time.” Also, it sounds like he was a member or at least an active supporter of the ACLU, and his opinion of them changed when they defended the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois. I’m not saying he’s a progressive, but I think he might be more or less a liberal (although I don’t have a philosophical definition of liberal, A) I’d say they’re to the left of former President Bill Clinton (what he was like in office) and to the right of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and B) I go into more detail here).

“In Memory Of” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is sort of about homophobia. The original NYPD investigators (about 30 years before the events in this episode) suspected  a gay couple in the disappearance of a young boy. Although at the very beginning of their investigation two of the main characters spend a little time pursuing that lead, after about 10 minutes of the 45 min. episode that assumption is illustrated  as nonsense. One of the detectives says that cops know that a majority of child molesters are straight. It’s a good statement (not the first part (I imagine that back then there was a ton of homophobia among cops)), although I assume it could have been better without sacrificing accuracy- it should have been said that gays are no more likely to molest kids than straight people are (i.e. if 10% of the population is gay, 10% of child molesters are gay). They identify and prosecute another suspect who’s straight and he pleads guilty at the end.

Letter-to-the-editor on Trump and the Confederacy

This was published in the Boulder Weekly Jan. 26th 2023, here. The column I'm responding to is here.

Editor,

As much as I usually love Dave Anderson’s columns, his latest, about the Civil War, could have been better. I’d like to offer some facts that Dave at least kind of left out. In recent years I have frequently gotten the impression that a LOT of Americans are confused about the Civil War. People think it was about states’ rights and not slavery and racism. In recent decades many people in the Republican Party who were either closet racists (or had been fooled by them) thought it was fine to have the Confederate flag displayed wherever people wanted to display it, including as part of state flags.

The Confederacy and it’s symbols were and are about slavery and racism. The Confederacy was NOT about state’s rights as some have claimed. Those who pushed for it’s creation complained that northern States had anti-slavery laws. At one point, the Confederacy’s leaders briefly considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe- support that probably would have resulted in victory against the Union. They decided to keep slavery, meaning that slavery was more important to them than independence from Washington D.C. And there was at least one incident where Black Union soldiers captured by the South were executed instead of being taken to POW camps as were the White Union soldiers.

When Donald Trump needed a new Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2018, the position was filled by Robert Wilkie, a man with a history of involvement with the Neo-Confederate movement. In 2020 Trump passionately opposed re-naming military bases named after Confederate military leaders, including one responsible for the incident where Black POWs were executed. In 2017 Trump talked about the Civil War and said that the former President Andrew Jackson would have handled the slavery issue better than Lincoln did and the Civil War would have been avoided. Jackson was a passionate opponent of abolitionists and would have compromised with the South and slavery would have continued with (at most) minor changes to it's geographic scope and/or life time and/or there may have been minor changes in how slaves were treated. Or he may have done absolutely nothing about slavery- if it were up to Donald Trump, slavery might still exist today.

As Dave said, the Neo-Confederate view is part of the MAGA movement.

Tom Shelley
Boulder

Law and Order Reviews B

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Life Choice” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

Although it’s a little mixed, this episode leans heavily towards being pro-choice.

“A Death in the Family” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

In this episode the detectives and the ADAs see things differently. The ADAs ask if the life of a cop is worth more than the life of a civilian. They find themselves investigating the death of a corrupt cop. Most damning of all, the senior ADA says that a lot of cops carry an untraceable gun that they can plant on someone if they shoot a suspect and it turns out the suspect was not armed.

“Mushrooms” Season 1. For a summary see this. 

The Black woman whose sons are killed or wounded doesn’t get along perfectly with the police. But that’s just realistic (MANY people of color don’t get along with cops) and I don’t think it dilutes what I’m about to say- she’s not seen as a suspect or an enemy of the police or something (you’re supposed to sympathize with her). She says at one point that her supervisor (she’s a janitor) wouldn’t allow her to go to the morgue and the hospital about her two sons. First, that’s just messed up in general. But people of color are more likely than white people to be in a financial situation where they cannot afford to lose their job in a crisis like that. Poverty is a more common problem among people of color than it is among white people. Part of this means that they are less likely than white people to know someone who can loan them some money until they get a new job after they lose their job (for leaving work during a family emergency). And, even more damning of some supervisors and employers, in some cases like this it’s a job that probably can be skipped for a day.

“The Troubles” Season 1. See this for a plot summary.

This is largely about N. Ireland. There are so many statements that are demanding I comment on them that this review would be about 3,000 words if I commented on all of them. The short version is that there’s a lot of nonsense.

There is one thing I’m going to comment on, something that, for some weird reason I haven’t really commented on before. One of the two cops buys the IRA member’s PR effort for America, and is sympathetic to him, basically because he (the cop) is Irish-American. Does law enforcement and the intelligence community in America go easy on the IRA because the vast majority of IRA supporters here are white Irish-Americans? First, as I explain here and here, the IRA was not a terrorist organization, and that has nothing to do with their skin color or their political goals. Second, the US government was largely on the side of the British, as I explain in note #17 of the poem here.                              

Are there or were there racist NYPD cops who supported the IRA but not the armed wing of the African National Congress? Yes, and there may have been a few FBI agents like that (although probably just a few- I imagine the FBI was less tolerant of IRA supporters than the NYPD were). Was there something racist about the fact that the IRA was never on any US list of terrorist organizations? Although I’m not real familiar with those lists, as I explaIn above, the IRA were, objectively, not terrorists.

If you look beyond the white privilege of most IRA supporters in America, globally their supporters were mostly what we would call in America “progressive.”

Law and Order Reviews A

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

"Subterranean Homeboy Blues” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

I am not sure I should be reviewing this episode since it’s not real clear exactly where the main characters and the writers are politically. But there is some anti-racism involved and some feminism involved (unfortunately, they’re sort of at odds with each other, but it’s still an okay episode politically (the white woman who killed a black man on the subway was either a feminist warrior who had earlier been attacked by a man, or she’s a racist who shot the man partly because he was black)).

“The Reaper’s Helper” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

I’m not sure I want to review this one, but it does involve the gay population and AIDS. Is it about homophobia and/or AIDS-phopbia? Not really. It’s about a gay man who euthanizes gay men with AIDS, AT THEIR REQUEST (the jury says the guy is only guilty of promoting a suicide attempt). One of the two detectives seems a little homophobic and the other seems a little better than that. The prosecutors have mixed feelings about prosecuting the killer and at the end the senior of the two ADAs sabotages their effort at prosecution and the killer is acquitted of 4/5 of the charges. It’s pretty complicated, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of HIV+ people would like it (it was made in 1990, when there were few effective drugs for AIDS and people with it faced a short life and a horrible death). I think it’s good that the killer wasn’t convicted of anything serious.


“Everybody’s Favorite Bagman” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

A small part of this is about a successful effort to bring down a corrupt senior officer in the NYPD.

“Poison Ivy” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

They go after a white cop who killed an unarmed Black man and planted a gun in his hand.

“Indifference” Season 1. Wikipedia summary is here.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show. With that in mind, in this episodes there is a fair amount of stuff about not just domestic violence and child sexual abuse, but EXTRAORDINARY domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

At the beginning of this episode a Puerto Rican elementary school teacher calls the police when she strongly suspects that a child is being abused at home. When the detectives show up, the white principal says at first that the teacher is “trigger happy,” and then later says that she is “prone to excitability” (that time he says it’s a “cultural thing”). The principal says the teacher should have followed the school district's process for suspicions of child abuse and then explains it. One of the detectives responds by saying: “When someone, anyone- even a high-strung Puerto Rican lady, COMPRENDE? -thinks a child is being beaten, that person is supposed to report it to the authorities.” To a large degree I think it’s an anti-racist statement by both the character and the writers who wrote the episode.