Viewing Social Science

ADDED 09/07/2018

Errol Morris on Steve Bannon’s Dangerous ‘Dharma’

FROM 08/24/2018 | Boston Review

BY ERROL MORRIS, DEBORAH CHASMAN

Errol Morris’s career as an Oscar-winning documentarian has been shaped by his fascination with crime, from the false murder conviction at the center of The Thin Blue Line (1988) to the war crimes of Robert S. McNamara (The Fog of War, 2003) and Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known, 2013). His new film, American Dharma, profiles Donald Trump’s former […]

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ADDED 09/06/2018

Michael Moore Plays His Trump Card: A New Movie, Modern Fascism and a 2020 Prediction

FROM  | Hollywood Reporter

BY Gregg Kilday

He’s America’s most successful documentarian and one of the few on the left who predicted the 2016 election upset. Now, as Moore readies his anticipated polemic ‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ for its Toronto film festival debut, he takes aim at Trump (and Nancy Pelosi … and Harvey Weinstein …) and those actually responsible for the president’s rapid […]

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ADDED 09/06/2018

Neoliberal Fascism and the Twilight of the Social

FROM 09/05/2018 | Truthout

BY Henry Giroux

Donald Trump’s increasingly dangerous, incendiary attacks on the media, his willingness to separate children from their parents at the southern border, his efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized citizens and deport US citizens on the groundless claim that they have fraudulent birth certificates, and his relentless attempts to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others to obstruct the rule of […]

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ADDED 09/02/2018

Fighting Fascism and White Supremacy by Understanding History

FROM 09/01/2018 | Truthout

BY Chris Steele

“What is euphemistically referred to as ‘modernity’ is marked with the indelible stain of what might be termed the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism, with the bloody process of human bondage being the driving and animating force of this abject horror.” — Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism In a […]

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ADDED 08/31/2018

Viktor Orban’s Illiberal State Declares War on the Liberal Arts in Hungary

FROM 08/31/2018 | Slate

BY JOSHUA KEATING

Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, has boasted of his intention to create an “illiberal” state, and this week took two major steps toward wiping out liberal arts education. The Budapest-based Central European University has announced that it will suspend its pioneering Open Learning Initiative, a program that offered free non-degree courses to refugees and asylum-seekers. It will be the […]

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ADDED 08/15/2018

The Use of the Classical World to Defend White Supremacy

FROM  | Letters and Politics - KPFA

BY Mitch Jeserich

A conversation on how white supremacists throughout history and now appropriated the classical world to promote their own ideology.  We speak to classicist Sarah Teets. Guest: Sarah Teets is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, her focus is on the classical world. Her article Classical Slavery and Jeffersonian […]

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ADDED 08/13/2018

Observer Boris Johnson ‘Morally empty’ Johnson is courting fascism, says peer as Tory crisis mounts

FROM 08/12/2018 | The Guardian

BY Mark Townsend and Toby Helm

Ex-Cameron aide and Muslim leaders join condemnation over the former foreign secretary’s burqa comments. A Tory peer and former aide to David Cameron accused Boris Johnson of “moral emptiness”, casual racism and “courting fascism” as division over the former foreign secretary’s comments about Muslim women threatened to develop into a full-blown crisis for Theresa May and her […]

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ADDED 08/11/2018

The Rise of Illiberal Artificial Intelligence

FROM 08/10/2018 | National Review

BY RYAN KHURANA

Chinese AI technology provides a blueprint for autocracies around the world. Chinese artificial-intelligence startup CloudWalk Technology signed a deal in March with the Zimbabwean government, providing the authoritarian regime an advanced facial-recognition system that it can use to identify, track, and monitor citizens. In exchange, CloudWalk gains access to the facial data of the demographically […]

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ADDED 07/31/2018

Israel’s drift to authoritarianism: An illiberal ‘Jewish democracy’ embraces the populist nationalist model

FROM 07/30/2018 | Mondoweiss

BY Jamil Khader

Two important events happened towards the end of the third week of July in Israel: The ethnocratic settler-colonial state of Israel passed its new Jewish nation state law, which has been in the making for over two years now, and Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a two-day visit to Israel. Despite the international uproar over the […]

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ADDED 07/29/2018

Democracy’s decline

FROM 07/28/2018 | Winnipeg Free Press

BY Matt Henderson

The horrific authoritarian and fascist regimes of the 20th century might seem like a distant memory to some, as are the prophetic works by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. But, according to famed educational philosopher and pedagogue Henry Giroux, neo-fascism in the form of Trumpism has reared its ugly head in 2018. In American Nightmare: Facing […]

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ADDED 07/20/2018

Europe’s Fascists Are Back. But They Never Really Died.

FROM 07/20/2018 | Daily Beast

BY CLIVE IRVING

Spain’s prime minister wants to exorcise the spirit of Franco. But the spirit of the dictators is not that easy to eradicate. Take a look at Germany and, more worryingly, Italy. There’s enough of the whiff of fascism in the air without having to worry about the ghosts of its principal twentieth century practitioners. Or […]

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ADDED 07/09/2018

Higher Court Orders Lula’s Release. Moro Tries to Ignore Orders.

FROM 07/08/2018 | Brasil Wire

BY Brian Mier

Today, on July 8th, 2018, Brazil’s 4th Regional Federal Court Chief Judge Rogerio Favreto ordered ex-President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s immediate release from prison, ruling on a motion filed by Workers’ Party Congressmen Paulo Pimenta and Wadir Damous Filho. Judge Sergio Moro, a lower court judge and hero to the Brazilian far right who has been working […]

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