Could we suggest The Guardian reads up a bit on America?
We’re all for globalisation, of course we are. So, The Guardian wants to become the global English language newspaper for the progressive types. We can - and do - moan about the content but can’t fault the ambition. We would though suggest that actually learning something about that globe out there is a useful precondition.
At which point:
On Tuesday, the US supreme court in its Merrill v Milligan decision, upheld Alabama’s racially gerrymandered congressional map, which see Black people represented in only 14% of congressional districts, despite making up about 27% of Alabama’s population. This ruling is reminiscent of the holding in the supreme court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. Even though the two cases addressed two different situations, the overall disregard of the rights of Black people in America by the highest court in the country is the same.
And Jim Crow is coming back and aren’t Republicans awful and so on. It would only take the slightest of tweaks to the GuardianColumnGeneratorBot to complete the 1200 words.
Except the Supreme Court didn’t uphold anything. What it said was that it shouldn’t be overturned right now. Hey, it might be terrible, that’s for the full case to be heard, but we can’t go around changing election rules right before an election. That is what the court said. If there’s to be an election then everyone needs to know what the rules for this election are, what the districts are, which ones to run for, even which ones the would be politician currently lives in.
There is a tension, that is, between having good rules for this election and having settled rules that allow the election to take place. In accordance with previous decisions given the imminence of the election having settled rules won over good rules.
BTW, the election started yesterday, Friday, Feb 11. That was the filing date to run in the Republican primaries.
This might all sound too detailed about something far away from our usual concerns here. But there is that Gell Mann Amnesia effect to think about. When the details of the story are examined it turns out not to be the way the newspaper tells us it is. Which has implications for everything else The Guardian tells us, doesn’t it?
Err, remember the amnesia that is.