ADDED 11/02/2018
FROM 10/28/2018 | New York Times
BY Kevin Roose
Early Saturday, moments before the police say he barged into a Pittsburgh synagogue and opened fire, Robert Bowers’s anti-Semitic rage finally boiled over as he posted one last message online. But he did not turn to Facebook or Twitter. Instead, the man accused of killing 11 people went to Gab, a two-year-old social network that […]
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ADDED 11/02/2018
FROM 10/25/2018 | Tablet
BY Shany Mor
For two generations, Israeli politics has been riven by one question: the future of the West Bank. A loose coalition of right-wing factions, nationalists, and religious parties wants to keep the territory conquered in 1967 and settle it with Jewish civilians, and an even looser coalition of leftists, liberals, secularists, and Arabs opposes this. For […]
see sourceADDED 11/01/2018
FROM 06/21/2018 | YouTube
BY Timothy Snyder
History is not just what happens in time, it is how we think about time. The present moment seems not just threatening but destabilizing because many of us are shifting from one sense of time to another. The concepts of eternity and inevitability conclude On Tyranny and frame “Road to Unfreedom.” In this talk I […]
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ADDED 11/01/2018
FROM 10/31/2018 | Al Jazeera
BY Mariana Prandini Assis & Ana Carolina Ogando
Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power marks the return of white, male, sexist and authoritarian politics in Brazil. Brazil has just elected Jair Bolsonaro as its next president – a man well-known nationally and internationally for his misogyny and homophobia. Although over the years, his rhetoric targeting women, the LGBTQI community and minorities grew increasingly obscene, it in no […]
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ADDED 11/01/2018
FROM | Venezuelanalysis
BY Cira Pascual Marquina
Born in 1938, Julio Escalona began his revolutionary activity at an early age in the MIR (Left Revolutionary Movement). Later he helped to found the urban guerrilla OR (Organization of Revolutionaries) and its political arm the Socialist League. A professor of economy in Venezuela’s Central University, he has also been part of Venezuela’s UN delegation. Today, while […]
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ADDED 11/01/2018
FROM 10/30/2018 | GQ
BY Drew Magary
Here are two awful things in a vast timeline of awful things: Over the weekend, Brazilians elected aspiring dictator Jair Bolsonaro to be their next president. You can find plenty of explainers online as to why Bolsonaro is a monster (naturally, President Trump offered him warm congratulations on his victory), but I can go ahead and give you a […]
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ADDED 10/29/2018
FROM 10/17/2018 | Letters and Politics
BY Mitch Jeserich
A conversation with Professor of History Arthur Eckstein about how democracies and republics fell apart into chaos or despotism in the ancient western world. A history that recounts the current state of the rise of despotic demagogy in the White House. Guest: Arthur Eckstein is Distinguished Scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park. He specializes in the history of […]
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ADDED 10/29/2018
FROM 10/29/2018 | Mint Press
BY Rob Urie
With Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral victory in Sunday’s runoff election for president of Brazil, a global resurgence of the radical right is indisputable. Mr. Bolsonaro is a particularly ugly representative of this movement, both politically repressive and culturally intolerant. The question being asked in the bourgeois press is: what psychological malady is taking hold that could […]
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ADDED 10/27/2018
FROM 10/27/2018 | Common Dreams
BY William E. Connolly
Neoliberalism is not fascism. But the fact that many famous neoliberals have been moved to support fascism to protect a regime from social democracy or socialism does give one pause. Hayek, Friedman, von Mises, among others, took such a turn under duress. They also had highly expansive views of what counted as a “socialist” threat. […]
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ADDED 10/21/2018
FROM 10/21/2018 | BrasilWire
BY Brian Wier
Bolsonaro’s illegal slush-fund financed social media campaign appears too sophisticated for his tiny political party to be doing on its own. On the Friday before the October 7 Brazilian presidential elections, Brasil Wire ran two articles that proved to be prophetic. In the first I warned that the integrity of the election was being compromised by presidential […]
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ADDED 10/18/2018
FROM 10/18/2018 | Open Democracy
BY Tom Junes
A review of John Feffer’s Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe’s Broken Dreams. On the eve of the 30th anniversary of 1989, one could be forgiven succumbing to pessimism following the news coming out of Eastern Europe. Apart from the alarmism about a resurgent and aggressive Russia, it is the “rise of illiberalism”, for instance, in […]
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ADDED 10/18/2018
FROM 10/18/2018 | BrasilWire
BY BrasilWire
A fifty year foreign battle to combat Catholic Liberation Theology in Brazil promises rich rewards for the vested interests which initiated it, at great human cost. “Brazil is at the vanguard of the global trend of the Pentecostalization of Christianity,” as well as “the epicenter of world Christianity, with the largest Pentecostal population” says Andrew […]
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