Acts classed as “criminal” have historically provided marginalized people with economic and political power. This is, in part, why they were criminalized to begin with. Income inequality in the United States is the highest it’s been since the Census Bureau began tracking it 50 years ago. In light of the economic deprivation experienced by large portions of the population, the vandalizing of property and the theft of goods could just as easily be framed as the enforcement of a moral economy—the rightful reappropriation of stolen wealth. The historian E.P. Thompson has argued that the periodic bread riots that punctuated a nascent industrial society in Britain were not spontaneous outbursts, but rather a way for people to intervene in and regulate unjust distribution.
Tag: Food for Thought
Democratic Socialism practices trust in Individuals (ODT)
What the Swedish experiment demonstrates, is that there’s a way to navigate these unprecedented public health challenges without recklessly imposing police state policies and without doing irreparable harm to the economy. And, yes, the results of this experiment are not yet known, but what we do know is that most nations cannot simply print-up trillions of dollars to counter the knock-on effects of bringing the economy to a screeching halt. These countries must dip into their reserves or take out loans from the IMF in order to recover from the lack of production and activity. That means they’re going to face years of slow growth and high unemployment to dig out from the mess their leaders created for them.
via Sweden Is Right. The economy should be left open, by Mike Whitney – The Unz Review
This popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.
Only if we can trust each other to try to be honest can we hope to rebuild something resembling a truly functioning democracy. Otherwise, sooner or later this country will be seduced by the siren song of yet another strong and authoritative voice.
Humans are finite creatures and any truth we lay claim to will of necessity be partial, multi-faceted, and complex. At our best, we see only part of what is there and articulate only part of what we see. The promise of democracy — when it works — is the possibility of combining all those partially glimpsed and imperfectly reported realities into a still imperfect, but nevertheless better, whole.
via Trump’s Republic of Lies: Once to every nation comes the moment to decide
“Confidence men,” as Melville understood, are an inevitable product of the amorality of capitalism and the insatiable lust for wealth, power and empire that infects American society. Trump’s narcissism, his celebration of ignorance—which he like all confidence men confuses with innocence—his megalomania and his lack of empathy are pathologies nurtured by the American landscape. They embody the American belief, one that Mark Twain parodied in “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” F. Scott Fitzgerald excoriated in “The Great Gatsby” and William Faulkner portrayed in the depraved Snopes clan, that it does not matter in the crass commercialism of American society how you obtain wealth and power. They are their own justifications.
Perhaps it was inevitable that this poison would come to dominate our culture and our politics. It is the triumph of artifice. We live in an age when the fake, the fraudulent, the fabricated and the theatrical supplant reality. Trump’s manufactured persona was advertised on a reality television show. He sold this manufactured persona, as his ratings declined and he was in danger of being taken off the air, to become president. There are legions of agents, publicists, consultants, scriptwriters, celebrities, television and movie producers, wardrobe consultants, pollsters and television personalities dedicated to creating the myriad illusions that saturate the airwaves with Barnum-like lies. We can no longer tell the difference between illusion and reality; indeed when a version of reality is not verified on our electronic screens and by our reality manipulators it does not exist. The skillful creation of illusion and the manipulation of our emotional response, actions that profit the elites to our financial and political detriment, have seeped into religion, education, journalism, politics and culture. They solidify mob rule and magical thinking. Trump’s crass vulgarity, greed, unchecked hedonism and amorality, along with his worship of himself, are intrinsic to America, but his ascendancy, and the ascendancy of the character traits he personifies, represents cultural death.
Almost all the instances the right raise as attacks on freedom of speech are not free speech issues at all. The right cynically crow about their free speech persecution in the pages of national dailies, from the screens of nightly news programs and the lecterns of university lecture theatres.
But the left’s response to the right’s hypocrisy shouldn’t be the adoption of a relative position to freedom of speech. We need to rescue it from the right, which means fighting for the expansion of the right to free speech, not restriction.
Inevitably, calling for the restriction of freedom of speech means calling on the state or some other stand-in authority (such as university administrations) to restrict that right on our behalf, since only they have the power to effect it. And as is evident with the recent passing of various anti-protest measures at state and federal levels – including the arming of Victoria Police with so-called less-than-lethal weapons explicitly for the purpose of ‘crowd control’ – it’s never too long before the authorities turn their repression towards the left.
As a recent US study showed, the real targets of increasing censoriousness on campus has been progressives. But such is the topsy-turvy period we live in where the right have positioned themselves as the enemies of censorship and the champions of free speech. With the growth of the far right internationally, coupled with an increasingly authoritarian state, the left needs to recapture its democratic spirit – because if our project for social transformation is to be an emancipatory one, then the fight to retain and expand democratic participation is essential.
via There’s no such thing as a free speech | Overland literary journal
When Britain turned Palestine into a “second Ireland”
15 December 2017
South African university joins Israel boycott
13 December 2017
To recover our mental balance we must respond to Trump the way victims of trauma respond to abuse. We must build communities where we can find understanding and solidarity. We must allow ourselves to mourn. We must name the psychosis that afflicts us. We must carry out acts of civil disobedience and steadfast defiance to re-empower others and ourselves. We must fend off the madness and engage in dialogues based on truth, literacy, empathy and reality. We must invest more time in activities such as finding solace in nature, or focusing on music, theater, literature, art and even worship—activities that hold the capacity for renewal and transcendence. This is the only way we will remain psychologically whole. Building an outer shell or attempting to hide will exacerbate our psychological distress and depression. We may not win, but we will have, if we create small, like-minded cells of defiance, the capacity not to go insane.
Source: American Psychosis
The neoliberal, arch-capitalist era we inhabit is chock-full of statistics and stories that ought to send chills down the spines of any caring, morally sentient human. Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of the world’s population is poor, living on $10 a day or less, and 11 percent (767 million people, including 385 million children) live in what the World Bank calls “extreme poverty” (less than a $1.90 a day). Meanwhile, Oxfam reliably reports that, surreal as it sounds, the world’s eight richest people possess among themselves as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire human race.
Source: Capitalism: The Nightmare
This scene from the season premier of Planet Earth II might be the most intense nature sequence ever filmed
Source: People Will Be Talking About This Scene From Planet Earth II For a Long Time to Come «TwistedSifter
By Yakov M Rabkin | (Informed Comment) | – – The recent appointment of the Soviet-born Avigdor Lieberman has aggrieved …
Source: Is Modern Israel a Right Wing Project? | Informed Comment
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