Discuss Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/#great-leap-forward

Book review:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601652/feedingghosts/

Feeding Ghosts is about Hulls’s quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao’s police. Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, wrote a bestselling memoir about her experiences in post-revolutionary Shanghai that made her both famous and notorious, in part because of the salacious details of Sun Yi’s affair with the Swiss diplomat who fathered Rose, Hulls’s mother.

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https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/03/states-rights-trumps-wrongs/#mamdani

As fascism burns across America, it’s important to remember that Trump and his policies are not popular. Sure, the racism and cruelty excites a minority of (very broken) people, but every component of the Trump agenda is extremely unpopular with the American people, from tax cuts for billionaires to kidnapping our neighbors and shipping them to concentration camps.

Keeping this fact in mind is essential if we are to nurture hope’s embers, and fan them into the flames of change.

Glad Cory is hopeful, because I’m spent.

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It should sound plausible, but after hearing people emphasize how unpopular and fringe they are from 2020 all the way to 2024, only for Trump to win the popular vote, then seeing politicians, journalists, judges and CEOs almost universally embrace or surrender to these oh-so-unpopular and often illegal policies, let’s just say I have my doubts. Either the majority of America is indeed Nazi-friendly, or being unpopular has very little bearing on whether people will actually resist.

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