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.
ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Esquire
BY Charles P. Pierce
This shebeen largely has stayed out of the tiresome troll-war concerning the unruly reception that some speakers have received on various college campuses. I wish folks could be more civil and welcoming, because I am a gentle fellow with a fairly well-known taste for temperate rhetoric, but I also wish that there weren’t so many […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | Ahval News
BY Michael Koplow
As I previously wrote, there are many similarities between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But despite these shared attributes and the fact that they have both dealt with ongoing corruption charges and investigations, Israel’s future will not look like Turkey’s present irrespective of whether or not Netanyahu is able to […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Slate
BY YASCHA MOUNK
He is following the same playbook as other authoritarian populists around the world. He’s just bad at it—so far. A week after the horrific shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead and 14 injured, Donald Trump publicly scolded members of his own party: “They have great power over you […]
see sourceADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Budapest Beacon
BY Staff
“If you don’t have a free and pluralistic press that is conveying messages on different sides of issues and which is actively critical of the government and its policies, then democracy starts to be meaningless. If people are just fed a steady diet of pro-government propaganda by media sources either controlled by the government or […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | ABC News
BY Jim Gomez, Associated Press
The Philippines‘ embattled Supreme Court chief justice urged Filipinos on Wednesday to stand up against authoritarianism and threats to human rights, in an indirect criticism of the country’s volatile leader, who has long called for her removal. Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno is facing two ouster attempts, including by President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, whose legal counsel asked […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM | The Economist
BY Bagehot
British institutions may not withstand the authoritarian-populist wave. IN HIS dystopian novel of 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis described the rise of an American Caesar, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Buzz easily defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency by promising to make America great again. He then sets about destroying the country’s system of checks […]
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ADDED 03/08/2018
FROM 03/08/2018 | Open Democracy
BY Bilge Yabanci
Not a single International Women’s Day or Mother’s Day can pass by without reasserting women’s main duty as child-bearers and men’s responsibility to ‘protect’ and ‘rekindle’ fragile mothers. Last January, shortly after Turkey’s military operation started in Afrin, I was at a women’s event held by a pro-government civil society organisation in a working-class suburban […]
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ADDED 03/07/2018
FROM 03/06/2018 | Quartz
BY Annalisa Merelli
Steve Bannon’s “ultimate dream” came true last night in Italy: Anti-establishmentarianism, isolationism, xenophobia and populism won the country’s general elections on March 4. On March 4, populist party Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement) won the most votes. Meanwhile, radically xenophobic Lega Nord(Northern League) overtook center-right party Forza Italia. More than half of the parliament is now in the […]
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ADDED 03/06/2018
FROM | Ha'aretz
BY Uri Misgav
The Netanyahu regime is a populist, Peronist right. It’s doubtful it can even be called fascist; fascism is an ideology with core values that can be challenged. How do they look at themselves in the mirror, the new right-wingers? The prime minister is suspected of receiving a million shekels’ worth of “gifts” and of bribery […]
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ADDED 03/06/2018
FROM 03/05/2018 | Jacobin
BY DAVID BRODER
After yesterday’s Italian election, the old is dying and something superficially different but not altogether new has been born. The Italian election results, which produced a hung parliament, are surprising but not exactly shocking. While the campaign was mostly lifeless, the Five Star Movement (M5S) achieved far greater support than expected. It won around 31 percent of votes, […]
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