I've been thinking a lot recently about this book, Swastika Night, by Katherine Burdekin, which I originally read a couple of years ago. It was published in 1937, as WWII was ramping up, and I think it's been unjustly forgotten outside of scholarly circles (although this is almost certainly because it's not that much fun to read). The book is basically a dystopian story about what Burdekin imagined would happen if the Nazis took over the world.

I've been thinking recently about Trump's obvious difficulty with the democratic process. There's been a lot of talk about the fact that he hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises and that his main policy accomplishments have involved executive orders and/or appointing extreme right-wing capitalists as advisors or cabinet members (often, in the case of advisors, to positions that don't involve Senate approval).

I did a data visualization project on refugees and asylum seekers last year (I will not display it here because the visualization aspect was not great), and in the process I learned that I had a lot of misconceptions about what those terms mean and how the system operates. I've been thinking about it a lot recently, since immigration is obviously in the news.  On the off chance that others might have similar misconceptions, I thought I'd detail some of what I learned here.

I just finished reading a pretty wild book, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder. His argument, which I find satisfying, mindblowing, and a lot too relevant for comfort, is basically that we've made a central error in thinking of the Holocaust as the product of nation-states and bureaucracy.

I find this fascinating (although of course also horrifying), and I haven't seen anyone on any of the mainstream media outlets paying attention to it. Here's a little nugget hidden away in Section 1 of the Muslim ban (my source for the text is CNN):

"The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.

You probably already know about the Warming Pan Scandal if you either a-are British, b-study British history, or c-like BBC documentaries. I fall into category C.

I just went to Barnes and Nobles to pick up last minute Christmas presents for my girlfriend (I had something already--I didn't totally forget, just needed one more thing). It's crowded today, as I guess you might expect.

Hey, y'all. It's been a while since I wrote anything here. But in addition to the standard things that are worrying lots of Americans in the just-pre-Trump era (which are extensive, and which I don't think I need to list--yes, before you get upset at me, I did bite my tongue hard and vote for Hillary, but no, it does not seem to have helped), I have this other constellation of political worries, and I thought maybe it was time to write about them. So here goes.

For the past few days I've been meaning to sit down and write about the current fractious triangle between Black Lives Matter, progressive Jews, and the word "genocide." But last night I sat down to do some research, and it turns out I don't have to write much of anything at all--someone eminently more qualified has already written it for me. And that person is the person who invented the word to begin with.

For your general information, it turns out that there's some other stuff going on right now in US policing that for some reason isn't being brought into the current discussion of policing practices:

New Video Shows Off-Duty Cop Fatally Shooting Black Man Delrawn Smalls, from Democracy Now! This is going on right now. It's interesting because the cop was out of uniform and off-duty--it appears the whole thing was a wild overreaction (on the cop's part) to road rage.
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I'm a Jewish progressive who is really angry about racism and the uses and misuses of American history. I have a Ph.D and am currently in a Masters program for Library Science. I read a lot.
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