To End a War

 

In short, nuclear weapons were created and used to end a war, not to fight one. Oppenheimer understood that only too well. He knew that ever more powerful weapons would be coming, which is why he so strongly opposed the H-bomb.

Perhaps, instead of just roiling clouds, his eponymous movie should have shown the actual death and destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that today’s leaders, and those of the future, could see what a single weapon, of the thousands that now exist, could do.

-Walter Pincus in the WaPost

 We are in the quiet before the storm, and the storm is the presidential  election of 2024.

 “Oppenheimer” is about more than just the man. It explores the moral agony that comes with the power to destroy the world.

House of Lies

 At a certain point, Trump's house of lies will collapse on itself."

-Salon.com

Showdown Time

 And now? It’s showdown time. The defendant has convinced a significant (though minority) segment of the country of his lies. The sitting chief executive does not, alas, enjoy the confidence of enough of the country for this to be an open-and-shut matter politically. But legally? It sure seems like it should be open-and-shut. Even a federal jury, however, can’t close this sarcophagus lid. That has to be done by the voters, next November 5. As nerve-racking as that prospect is and will be, it’s the right prospect, because, as the indictment affirms, that’s the engine of the whole enterprise: “the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

-Michael Tomasky in The New Republic

A Wild Ride is Ahead

 With the upcoming Trump trials and tribulations.

It's About Anti-Anti-racism

 In a sense, anti-antiracism is its own ideology. It holds that racism directed at minorities is largely a thing of the past; that whatever racism does exist is a product only of individual hearts and not of institutions and systems; that efforts to ameliorate racism and promote diversity are both counterproductive and morally abhorrent; and, most critically, that those efforts must not only be stopped but also rolled back.

Listen to conservative rhetoric on book banning, affirmative action, teaching history or any of the ways race touches their war on “wokeness,” and you hear this theme repeated: We must stop talking and thinking about racism, and most of all we must stop trying to do anything about racism.

For some people, “opposition to antiracism is a way of expressing racial animus without explicitly endorsing it,” Wetts said. For others it’s about “distaste, anger and frustration with antiracists themselves,” an expression of revulsion against liberals and everything they want to do. Anti-antiracism is one more way to own the libs.

Feelings have become central to the way conservatives think about race; it’s no accident that many of the laws regarding critical race theory passed in conservative states explicitly outlaw discussions in schools that could make students feel “guilt” or “discomfort.” Anti-antiracism is fueled by White people’s unease with the growing diversity of American society, the knowledge that they’ve lost their dominant position — and to boot, liberals keep trying to make them feel bad.

Paul Waldman

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