26 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Underneath The News, Beneath The Blackout Blanket

I thought to call today's mediation, "The Death Of The News Cycle," but couldn't. It may be ill. One day it may die. But it's power remains vast, and we're going to discuss that first.

More from Pasquale "Pat" Scopelliti

More from News

SkyNews reporting "a major leak containing a register w/the personal identifying details of 1.95 mil Communist Party members [in #China], mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 Communist Party branches, many of them inside companies”.

What appears to be so newsworthy about this particular leaked list is the presence of CCP branches in not only foreign-invested firms in #China, but also in firms entirely located overseas.

This is by no means new-- I wrote several years ago about #China's massive Party-building drive to construct new CCP branches in Shanghai's NGOs in @chinaquarterly (The Advance of the Party: Transformation or Takeover of Urban Grassroots Society?*
https://t.co/I1XKmkPKty )...

As well as the CCP's attempts to "comprehensively cover" 全覆盖 Shanghai's private sector in "The New Life of the Party: Party-Building & Social Engineering in Greater Shanghai" in the #China Journal, but what's apparently of concern in the leaked list..

...is the number of new Communist Party branches & committees now in Chinese-invested companies abroad. This is unsurprisingly going on on a massive scale in countries housing #China's Belt and Road projects as part of the CCP's "going out" 走出去efforts...#OBOR #BRI #一带一路

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x