This month, I have been mostly working on #ThePlan:

• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
  
• Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 1 — Craig Murray: Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends. “Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.” The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• I never saw exceptional “hard work” or “intelligence” among the members of the class I was born into — Meghan Bell in Passage: An economic system based on ruthless competition inevitably fetishizes extreme skill and effort, thus incentivizing monopolistic and gatekeeping behaviours. This has led to an increasingly polarized labour market, consisting of what author Daniel Markovits, in his book “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite,” refers to as wage-stagnated “gloomy” jobs and high-paying “glossy” jobs, such as those described above, which, by design, displace middle-class labour (Markovits uses as an example loan officers who were deskilled by financial technology; a way to climb the wealth ladder is to design or implement technologies that wipe out jobs a few rungs down). The concentration of decision-making power in fewer hands actually lowers overall production within companies, because the monopolization of power and technical knowledge diminishes the potential productivity of all the workers who are pushed to the bottom. In other words, “merit” is not about talent, ability or production so much as it’s about narcissistic control — think of the Wall Street bankers who were bailed out after the 2008 crisis because they were perceived as too big to fail.
• What Scott Morrison’s really saying by aligning with Pentecostals — Roderick St George in Pearls and Irritations: It must be clearly understood that according to Morrison and his Christian ilk there is a literal spiritual war being waged over Australia – a war between good and evil, a war being fought in the heavens between angelic and demonic powers. Morrison’s own language confirms this as evidenced by his speech at the Australian Christian Churches conference on the Gold Coast in April. Social media, he warns is a, “weapon used by the evil one.” (I am not making unsubstantiated accusations; I was myself indoctrinated by Morrison-style church culture for many years.) This ardent belief system explains – in part – why Morrison, as immigration minister, introduced a host of dictatorial and ruthless changes to Australia’s immigration policy, the like of which this country has never known. But, as an Evangelical Christian he was doing God’s work, keeping “those types” out of this Christian nation. One of his first moves was to bar all media coverage of the maritime arrivals on Christmas Island, making it easier to implement his cruel and unusual new edicts. Morrison’s claim to be called by God “for a time and a season” might be a recent revelation to the Australian public, but make no mistake; he likely believes this mandate was “given” to him many years ago.
• Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
  
• America is now in fascism’s legal phase — Jason Stanley in the Guardian: Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today. Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.