Left Jabs

  One of the many chilling ironies of the war on abortion is that the states most insistent on women having babies, no matter what, are also the ones with the least to offer those babies once they’ve had the bad luck to be born there. And it’s important to understand that these states are getting increasingly insistent on women having babies, no matter what. Goaded and guided by abortion abolitionists in legislatures, law firms, and courtrooms, Republican governments are, one way or another, actively blocking off any avenue that doesn’t lead to a woman of any age getting pregnant, giving birth, then getting pregnant again. Rinse and repeat. If the woman dies in the process, she’s easily replaced. The idea seems to be that women are a sort of production line, whose purpose is to generate usable babies. The way they get pregnant is irrelevant to the discussion. If they were impregnated by, say, an uncle, or a rapist, or a clergyman, the laws of these states ca...

  I feel a little silly using italics to introduce italics, but I need to repeat myself this week, so I had to find a piece that seemed worthy of a retrospective look. I found this one, from five days after the election, and while I wrote it quite recently, it feels like several years ago. I am most struck by how angry I sound, which is the part I like best. If you’d rather not relive that time, I can hardly blame you — I went there only reluctantly myself. Nonetheless I do feel it’s worth another read, even if just for the opening quote from a really good writer — a Canadian journalist who was going through the same holy-shit moment we all were. Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies. The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and seri...

  When you go to the website of GEO Group , the largest and most well-connected of the private prison companies, the headline that greets you on the home page reads: “Global Leader in Evidence-Based Rehabilitation.” If you were to go no further than that home page, you might think the company, based in Boca Raton, was all about “enhanced rehabilitation and reentry programs,” which is just one part of their “Continuum of Care,” a program they trademarked. The word ‘prisoner’ never appears. It’s not till you click on the tab for “GEO Secure Services” that you first encounter the word ‘offender,’ and the euphemisms start to cascade. This is where you’re told about “intake and housing of offenders,” about “secure offender transportation services,” and the “operation and management of approximately 72,000 beds in 54 secure facilities.” Not prisoners, beds. The website paints a rosy picture of a benevolent company steeped in the art and science of helping repentan...

  I don’t want to overstate the importance of protest demonstrations. Their immediate impact on the problems of the day is never likely to be more than negligible, while their long-term impact is unknowable. But I don’t want to understate their importance, either. I’ve now been to five protests — two aimed at a Tesla dealership, three aimed at the junta more generally — and I was ambivalent about all of them. Were it not for my wife’s strong feelings on the subject, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I realize I was being selfish. Surely I wasn’t the only one thinking there are better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. But the ones who showed up pushed past that, so who was I to excuse myself from a civic responsibility? As it turned out, the simple act of showing up came with unexpected benefits. What the protests may have lacked in political effectiveness, they made up for in psychic income. Our collective mental health has taken a beating of late, and ther...