Episode 24: Jan. 6th Committee hearings

Wear is the Love, Episode 24

This week, we discuss the first primetime, live hearing of the January 6th select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection. It’s a brief episode, but we see some glimmers of hope for competence and professionalism in this first hearing, and discuss what comes next from the committee.

What were your thoughts?

Episode notes:

“After dramatic first night, Jan. 6 panel plans several more high-profile hearings” (WaPo)

“The Jan. 6 Hearing Put a True-Crime Drama on Prime-Time TV” (NYT)

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “Permanent Pandemic” (Harper’s Magazine)

   Because this essay is particularly thought-provoking. “The new regime is as much a technological regime as it is a pandemic regime. It has as much to do with apps and trackers, and governmental and corporate interests in controlling them, as it does with viruses and aerosols and nasal swabs. Fluids and microbes combined with touchscreens and lithium batteries to form a vast apparatus of control, which will almost certainly survive beyond the end date of any epidemiological rationale for the state of exception that began in early 2020.

   The last great regime change happened after September 11, 2001, when terrorism and the pretext of its prevention began to reshape the contours of our public life.”

2. “400 Years Ago, They Would Be Witches. Today, They Can Be Your Coach.” (NYT)

   Because Molly Worthen writes with great care here, while not avoiding critical questions: “Spiritual coaches provoke a raised eyebrow, in part, because secular people still believe in the ghosts of Christendom — including the idea that religion should be hard and not particularly democratic. It shouldn’t be something that a frustrated woman can just assemble for herself; it should require submission to some venerable institution with ancient traditions. I’m not sure those ghosts are entirely make-believe. Self-made liberation can turn into an existential hamster wheel: Manifest one accolade, and then you’re breathlessly onto the next. What’s the point? Perhaps true freedom “is not the absence of limitations and constraints but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us,” the Protestant theologian Timothy Keller wrote in his book The Reason for God.”

3. “The Art of the Pump” (Washington Monthly)

   Because “PredictIt, it must be said, is a strange place—an eclectic virtual clubhouse teeming with cliques and crazies, conspiracy theories and camaraderie. But amid the madness, a powerful force is at work. Here, those with a sixth sense for distinguishing news from noise get paid. Here, in a game where information is money, expertise is measured not with blue checkmarks or column inches, but in cash. PredictIt and its industry peers call themselves prediction markets, but they are actually something far more important: perhaps the one final place in our smoke-and-mirrors political world, bursting at the seams with bluster…where nothing is more valuable than the truth.”

4. “‘I felt like I was a prisoner’: The rapid rise of US immigration authorities’ electronic surveillance programs” (.coda)

   Because “Across the U.S., a surveillance system tracking the movements of tens of thousands of people seeking refuge or permanent residency in the U.S. is quietly but quickly expanding. The ankle monitor…is one piece of a program run by federal immigration officials known as “Alternatives to Detention,” (ATD) which places people in deportation proceedings and awaiting court hearings under electronic surveillance while their cases are pending.”

5. “Would the world be better off without philanthropists” (New Yorker)

   Because the answer is no, but a new book by a young scholar, Emma Saunders-Hastings, looks particularly at relational inequality from philanthropic endeavors. “Skeptics of philanthropy, even those as thoughtful as Saunders-Hastings, tend to have an incomplete sense of the world’s imperfections. Surely most recipients of philanthropy are aware of the aspects of philanthropy that have attracted Saunders-Hastings’s disapproving attention—circumstances of relational inequality that are practically universal inside and outside philanthropy—but are thankful that they at least get to work for a cause they believe in. That makes the deference their work requires worth putting up with; Saunders-Hastings’s zeal to protect us from paternalism can itself acquire a paternalistic air. Still, concerns about political equity—bearing in mind that philanthropy is only one of the ways in which capital can be converted into power—deserve systematic and rigorous investigation. Several universities have created centers for the research. It’s either apt or ironic that philanthropy pays for this, too”