Too much work last week to pull together a Weekly Digest so this week is a double edition.

Worth reading

• Clifford Thompon, Roots & Reality

Being rooted in something – whether a community, a faith, a set of traditions, a philosophy, or a devotion to a particular activity – is a way of forming an identity, of telling others, but mostly ourselves, who we are. Rootedness gives us a way of orienting ourselves in the world, of navigating our way through the challenges we face by locating ourselves vis-à-vis the phenomena we encounter… Rootedness, then, is a good thing. However, it comes with some drawbacks. Chief among those is that when we must decide either to hold tight to the ways we are rooted or to believe the reality in front of our faces…

• Zachery Tyson Brown, Unmasking War’s Changing Character

To be useful, paradigms must accurately reflect reality. When they cease to do so, they must be replaced, or the institutions that rely upon them will inevitably fail.

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Worth Reading

• WBUR, Housing Advocates, Landlords Vie For Funds To Cover Rents And Head Off Evictions In Mass.

Housing groups, tenant advocates and landlords are working to hash out a deal with the Baker administration to deploy more federal money for people struggling to pay rent amid the coronavirus recession.

At the same time, the state’s housing courts are planning furiously to add resources to handle an expected flood of eviction filings that could come soon after the commonwealth’s eviction moratorium ends on Oct. 17.

[Ed.:  Please contact your State Rep and ask them to support H.5018, An Act to guarantee housing stability during the COVID-19 emergency and recovery.]

• Mary McCord, The Plot Against Gretchen Whitmer Shows the Danger of Private Militias (These groups have no constitutional right to exist.)

Emerging from the American Revolution, the founders reasonably were wary of insurgencies that could threaten the stability of the new Union. Shays’ Rebellion and other early armed uprisings against the states only solidified those fears. Thus, the “well regulated militia” in the Constitution’s Second Amendment refers to the militia that were once called forth by the government, not by private vigilante organizations deciding when and under what circumstances to organize and self-deploy.

The federal and state government control of the militia has also been confirmed by the Supreme Court. In 1886, the court upheld the constitutionality of a state criminal law that made it unlawful for “any body of men” outside state or federal governmental authority to “associate themselves together as a military company or organization, or to drill or parade with arms in any city or town of the state.”

• Jamelle Bouie, Court Packing Can Be an Instrument of Justice

To allow the American people to govern themselves, to rein in the judiciary and break a would-be reactionary super-legislature — to show Republicans that they cannot keep the ill-gotten gains of the Trump years — Democrats will need to expand the courts.

• Joe Klein, Does an Intellectual History of the Trump Era Exist? It Does Now

[In his book “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos] Lozada finds subtleties in areas we’ve assumed clear-cut. Take the president’s mind-numbing spew of lies. Lozada praises the former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani for lambasting “lefty academics who … argued that truth is not universal but malleable, a reflection of economic, political and cultural forces.” Or, as the philosopher Lee McIntyre put it, postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth.”

And here Lozada comes close to the core of the matter: Messing around with the notion of truth is a luxury that comes with affluence. We have spent the past 50 years undermining the basic institutions of society — not just our sense of common purpose and identity, but also normative values like truth and duty and expertise. The politics of consumerism — and grievance — have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility.

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