ADDED 03/29/2018
FROM 03/28/2018 | Letters and Politics - KPFA
BY
Today we are in conversation with professor Christian Fuchs to examine the right-wing authoritarian use of social media and the capitalist models that allow growing such issues as the one concerning Cambridge Analitica. Christian Fuchs is a professor of social media at the University of Westminster, Director of the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies & Communication and Media Research Institute, United Kingdom. […]
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ADDED 03/28/2018
FROM 03/26/2018 | Pacific Standard
BY Tom Jacobs
Can It Happen Here?, a new collection of essays that ask whether America is susceptible to creeping authoritarianism, includes a startling assertion by psychologists Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt. “Western liberal democracies,” they write, “have now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate them.” Their analysis of a survey conducted at the end of 2016 found “about a third of white responders across […]
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ADDED 03/28/2018
FROM 03/28/2018 | Slate
BY Slate
Anand Giridharadas on why many rich people do harm—even when they think they’re doing good. Yascha Mounk discusses the limits of philanthropy, how the hopey-changey narrative of the affluent cloaks the power they exercise, and how they can do better with author of the forthcoming book Winners Take All and former New York Times and current NBC […]
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ADDED 03/24/2018
FROM 03/23/2018 | The Conversation
BY The Conversation
The punk movement is notable for its anti-establishment stance and distinct music and fashion style. Starting in the 1970s in the UK and US, the subculture became global and took different forms in each local setting. In Indonesia, punk bands started to emerge in the 1990s. They were central in nurturing leftist activism during the […]
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ADDED 03/23/2018
FROM 03/22/2018 | American Prospect
BY Paul Starr
This article will appear in the Spring 2018 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. “It is now clear that the most frightening threats to ordinary politics in the United States are empty or easily contained. … The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red.” So wrote two distinguished historians, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, in […]
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ADDED 03/22/2018
FROM 03/20/2018 | AlterNet
BY Mehreen Kasana
The practice of governments and security firms conducting wide-scale exploitation of major disasters, natural and otherwise, is nothing new. Last week, the Intercept reported on TigerSwan, a mercenary security firm that follows a similar disaster-capitalist model and has attacked the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement since 2016, at least. But that’s not all: TigerSwan has also been preying […]
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ADDED 03/22/2018
FROM 03/18/2018 | The Intercept
BY Carol Schaeffer
A WEEK AND A HALF after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Jason Reza Jorjani took the stage at a white supremacist conference in Washington, D.C. Richard Spencer gave him an awkward hug and pat on the back before he shuffled to the podium and spoke into the microphone. “In light of the outcome […]
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ADDED 03/22/2018
FROM 03/20/2018 | Foreign Policy in Focus
BY Conn Hallinan
More than a quarter of a century ago, much of the European center-left made a course change, edging away from its working class base, accommodating itself to the globalization of capital, and handing over the post-World War II social contract to private industry. Whether it was the “New Labor” of Tony Blair in Britain or Gerhard […]
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ADDED 03/16/2018
FROM | The Guardian - Australia
BY Scott Ludlam
Australia’s accelerating militarisation and erosion of civil liberties must be resisted. There’s an old aphorism about the best way to boil a frog which holds that if that’s your thing, you sicko, you should turn the temperature up very, very slowly. Shock the frog with a sharp enough temperature increase and she’ll jump right out […]
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ADDED 03/16/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | The Nation
BY Katha Pollitt
Some on the left are still waving away the inconvenient facts that don’t fit with their politics. When will we really know what happened with Russia and the 2016 election? The story lines proliferate so quickly that it’s a full-time job following them all. Quick: How did the Democratic memo refute the Nunes memo? Identify: […]
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ADDED 03/16/2018
FROM 03/14/2018 | Medium
BY Robert Greenfield IV
Maduro’s new Petro token is consolidating power and crowdfunding oppression. “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” ― Simone Weil Last year, token sales raised approximately $5.6 billion. The crypto-method of crowdfunding has opened the floodgates to decentralized funding, which […]
see sourceWe can’t name it. We can’t organize against it. We retreat to the false safety of personal utopias.
This thing we feel we hate about Trump is the same thing millions around the world feel they hate about their own local political malefactors. No one has any idea how to fight back because no one can agree what constitutes the threat. Politics is impotent. Online petitions are impotent. Massive street protests are impotent. All this impotence is the nameless monster’s goal.
The monster can be named. Some smart folks are working on this problem. Let’s take a look at three recent efforts to find names for the threat and its fallout.