Covid reading

My maiden voyage

I’m in the midst of my first bout with covid, hence the radio silence here for longer than I would like. Knock on wood, it’s not been too bad, but my energy has been low. So, in lieu of my usual, scintillating thoughts, I just wanted to share a handful of things I’ve read this week that I found especially worthwhile.

1.Eric Levitz, in New York Magazine, explains clearly the stakes in the impasse between railworkers and their employers. Those employers - the industry is essentially an oligopoly controlled by seven major entities - have enjoyed record profits in recent years. They’ve done so, in part, by slashing their workforces. One upshot of cutting those jobs is that there is really no scheduling slack for the remaining workers. The result: they won’t give an inch on paid sick time. As John Mellencamp once said, “ah, but ain’t that America…”

2.I found this conversation between Ezra Klein and Michael Brendan Dougherty, a writer for the National Review, worthwhile. (Because of their ideological differences, the two kept it a pretty analytical level, to be clear). In particular, I thought Dougherty explained well how to understand the contemporary GOP:

“It’s just a coalition of voters. It’s not the embodiment of a coherent philosophy. It is not the coherent representative of one particular class or class interest, although those are implicated in it. And it’s not the voice of one ideology, like of capitalism or conservatism or national populism. It’s just the collection of voters. And it’s a protean force. And it will look like it has a different personality every time its leadership changes.”

As Klein and Dougherty get into, in basic, structural terms, this isn’t all that different for the Democratic Party, either, as I’ve written about before.

3.A long, informative article in Dissent, by UC Santa Barbara professors Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, about the ongoing protests in Iran. In September, a 22-year old Kurdish woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, traveled to Tehran with her family on vacation. She was detained for “improperly wearing her Hijab,” was severely beaten in custody and died from her injuries.

Afary and Anderson explain what has happened since:

Amini’s death struck a nerve throughout the nation. The state’s refusal to look into the causes of her death, or to offer an apology, further fanned the anger of protesters. Demonstrators soon began to chant, “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, we are all together.”

Demonstrations have taken place in more than eighty cities and towns throughout the entire country. As the protests have spread, young women, even high-school and middle-school students, have ripped off their headscarves and cried, “Death to the dictator!” The uprising is rooted in red-hot anger against gender apartheid, and not only among women. As the renowned actress Golshifteh Farahani told Le Monde, what has made these protests historically novel is that “men are willing to die for women’s freedom.

Demographically, Iran, with a population of 85 million, is a very different country than what it was in 1979. Fully 75 percent of the country is urbanized, literacy stands at almost 100 percent among people under twenty-five, and there are 4 million university students, the majority of whom are women. Meanwhile, the fertility rate has fallen to 2.1 births per woman, from 6.5 in 1979.

Many issues besides women’s rights are bound up in the protests: authoritarianism, economic stagnation and severe unemployment, climate disaster, and various religious-fundamentalist impositions.

There’s much more here. Iran has experienced significant political protests before since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979, but none so far have represented a serious threat to the regime. The authors are confident the current protests have already changed Iranian society in important respects. I’m going to try to keep better track of this.

Have a good weekend all. I hope to be back to “normal” soon.