Viewing Social Science

ADDED 05/15/2018

Exclusive: how rightwing groups wield secret ‘toolkit’ to plot against US unions

FROM 05/14/2018 | The Guardian

BY Ed Pilkington

Internal documents obtained by the Guardian reveal a nationwide drive to persuade union members to quit and stop paying dues. Rightwing activists are launching a nationwide drive to persuade public-sector trade union members to tear up their membership cards and stop paying dues, posing a direct threat to the progressive movement in America. Documents obtained […]

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ADDED 05/15/2018

Democracy’s Critics

FROM 06/26/2017 | Jacobin

BY COLIN GORDON

The malevolent incompetence of the Trump White House packs a certain entertainment value, but it is also a distraction; a bumbling misdirection in a long confidence game. At stake, as historian Nancy MacLean underscores in her new book, , is not just political power, not just the final dismantling of the New Deal order, but the […]

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The surprising continuation of history. Gasp!

Twenty-eight years ago some goofball named Francis Fukuyama mistook the ever-decaying Soviet Union’s imminent demise as proof that St. Ronnie’s shining city on a hill would be the final, and finest, expression of humanity’s potential.

With all the glee they could muster, the paid propagandists at the Heritage Foundation AND Brookings Institution rallied together to move Fukuyama’s proclamation of the End of History from theory to fact.

In the intervening period, humanity did not build a liberal capitalist utopia. Instead, it immediately began devolving into a slave population in the service of a minuscule, corrupt, kleptocratic, global oligarchy. The erosion of actual self-determination is masked by the fetishization of low prices and the celebration of conspicuous wealth. The underlying theft of the 20th-century public commonwealth begun under Thatcher and Reagan has metastasized into a global race to monetize the essentials of human life itself.

Fukuyama’s back making the case that his original thesis is still valid. History is over and unfettered markets are the only way that humanity will allow humans to fulfill their potential. Timothy Snyder disagrees and explains the current historical phase as Sadopopulism – which sure sounds a lot like the preparations for a return of monarchical empires, this time with unregulated corporations wearing the warring crowns.

ADDED 05/10/2018

Sadopopulism: Timothy Snyder Speaks

FROM  | Youtube

BY Timothy Snyder

Sadopopulism: how America can be governed without policy and with pain. A guide to the logic of the Senate tax plan. Timothy Snyder is a historian at Yale University, specializing in eastern Europe, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. His books have received widespread acclaim. His most recent book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” […]

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ADDED 05/09/2018

History’s protracted end

FROM 05/09/2018 | IPS Journal

BY Francis Fukuyama

American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became an overnight star when, in a 1989 magazine article, he claimed that liberal capitalist democracy had not just triumphed over communism, but marked the last ideological stage in human history. Speaking to Nikolaos Gavalakis, Fukuyama explains why he believes his broad theory still holds despite the ascendency of populist parties […]

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ADDED 05/04/2018

The Comrade In Punjab – Lost, Irrelevant, Asleep, Even Bored!

FROM 03/05/2018 | Punjab Today

BY Kamjaat Singh

AT A TIME when Punjab is in the throes of a massive social upheaval and there is a complete disconnect between its farmers, farm labourers and those dependent on rural economy and others in towns and cities who are more cued into structures of political power, one would have thought that vast swathes of political […]

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ADDED 04/20/2018

My family has a Nazi past. I see that ideology returning across Europe

FROM 04/18/2018 | The Guardian

BY Géraldine Schwarz

In Germany and elsewhere, younger generations are becoming indifferent to the history of fascism. This is how the far right thrives. In Aistersheim, a village in north-west Austria, a pale yellow castle towers over a frozen lake, as if out of a fairy tale. It looks like it might be awaiting royal guests. But the […]

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ADDED 04/10/2018

White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy

FROM 04/09/2018 | Letters and Politics - KPFA

BY Mitch Jeserich

We talk to Elizabeth Gillespie McRae about her new book: Mother of Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy which examines the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow.  Elizabeth Gillespie McRae is a professor of history and director of graduate social science education programs at Western Carolina University.

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ADDED 04/06/2018

Have Christian nationalists staged a “soft coup,” with Trump as their figurehead?

FROM 04/05/2018 | Salon

BY Chauncey Devega

Scholar Andrew Whitehead: Right-wing evangelicals think Trump can make “their vision of a Christian nation” real y the standards of any of the world’s major religions Donald Trump is an ungodly person, an enthusiastic and unrepentant sinner who revels in his misdeeds. Trump is a serial liar and apparent narcissist. He is a greedy, crude […]

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ADDED 04/06/2018

The right’s Parkland problem: A symptom of authoritarian parenting

FROM 04/04/2018 | Salon

BY Chauncey Devega

Conservatives see the Parkland students as disrespectful and dangerous — and those feelings stem from primal fears The health of a society is measured in large part by how it treats its children. Republicans and other members of the right wing have reacted with a wide range of emotions to the survivors of the Parkland […]

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ADDED 04/04/2018

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

FROM 04/01/2018 | Monthly Review

BY Gerald Horne

The years between 1603 and 1714 were perhaps the most decisive in English history. At the onset of the seventeenth century, the sceptered isle was a second-class power, but the Great Britain that emerged by the beginning of the eighteenth century was, in many ways, the planet’s reigning superpower.1 It then passed the baton to its […]

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ADDED 04/03/2018

America’s Political Tribalism

FROM 03/28/2018 | Letters and Politics - KPFA

BY

In Political Tribes, Chua argues that humans are tribal and that we need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most – the ones that people will kill and die for – are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. [responsivevoice_button] But because America tends to see the world […]

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