427 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. for - liberal blind spot - Chris Yates - book - liberalism and the challenge of climate change - adjacency - liberalism - individual liberty - progress - bond spot - political polarization - fuel for the right -hyperobjects

      Summary - This short article contains some key insights that point to the right climate communication strategy to target and win over the working class - Currently, climate communications speak to elitist values and is having the opposite effect - The working class farmer protests spreading across the EU is a symptom of this miscommunication strategy - as is the increasing support and ascendency of right wing political parties - Researcher and author Chris Yates is in a unique position with one foot in each world - He articulates his insightful ideas and points is in the right direction to communicate in a way that reaches the working class

      comment - the figure 4 graph is an example of carbon inequality

      Example - carbon inequality - see figure 4

    1. ake all the money thou canst. If sanctimonyand a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian andsupersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and allthe tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her.

      Showing that he believes his wills make him the God of the world, that he has ultimate power over the chessboard just through intention alone -- and that is the work of the devil, the rejection of emotion's sway on decision making, and pure reason

    2. Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus orthus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our willsare gardeners

      Iago's main core lies in self-control and motivation -- he believes himself to be a man of simple free will, and unlimited freedom. Unrestrained and in control of the chessboard -- he assumes both the external world and (mistakenly) his internal world are under his control, but they may not be.

    3. Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing natureThat it engluts and swallows other sorrowsAnd it is still itself.

      Exaggerated emotions in the form of water and nature -- what could this mean? ALSO, Shows the role of emotion in this political setting, which is a recurring motif of overlap in personal and political decisions that runs throughout. How do you make a good ruler, leader who does not impulsively use personal emotion to decide in political circumstances? Reminds me of Hitler

    4. We lacked your counsel and your help tonight.

      Humorous, as it shows the lack of Brabantio's care in the political field, he is incompetent -- only woke up from bed to address his daughter's married life.

      If he can't do political, can he do personal? And vice versa -- alienates him from the reader -> Alienates from his racist ideas.

    5. Valiant Othello

      Important because it contrasts all the other views of Othello -- but when he is a general, he is valiant. What does this signify about roles? About our split between personal and professional/political life?

  2. Feb 2024
    1. How to stop profligate states before they can sap the Fed

      Perhaps we should start with those states whose population pays less in Federal taxes than they receive in Federal dollars?

    1. Noël Mamère, der bisher erfolgreichste grüne Präsidentschaftskandidat Frankreichs, und der junge Aktivist Achraf Manar stellen im Interview fest, dass die politische Ökologie im Gegensatz zu den angepassten Teilen der grünen Parteien keinen sanften Übergang" verspricht. Die globale Erhitzung trifft vor allem die Verwundbarsten der Gesellschaft, für die sich die ökologische Bewegung deshalb vor allem engagieren muss. Beide verteidigen den zivilen Ungehorsam und stellen fest, dass die ökologische Bewegung zunehmend zum Sündenbock für die Folgen der Klimakrise gemacht wird. https://www.liberation.fr/environnement/noel-mamere-et-achraf-manar-il-faut-que-celles-et-ceux-qui-subissent-les-crises-soient-au-coeur-des-prises-de-decision-20240209_QYUABTHUTBB3DCL2LXBBKLK4ZI/

  3. Jan 2024
    1. “A second Trump term is game over for the climate — really!”

      for - quote - Michael Mann - quote - a Second Trump presidency - polycrisis - politics and climate crisis - climate mitigation strategy - voting in 2024 U.S. election - adjacency - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Gen Z voting

      adjacency - between - Michael Mann - 2nd Trump presidency - exceeding planetary boundaries - exceeding 1.5 Deg C - Trump's presidency is existential threat to humanity - Gen Z voting - 2024 election - adjacency statement - Michael Mann's quote " A second Trump term is game over for the climate - really" applies to the 2024 election if Trump becomes the Republican nominee. - Trumps dismal environmental record in his 2016 to 2020 term speaks for itself. He would do something similiar in 2025 if he were the president. G - Given there are only 5 years and 172 days before we hit the dangerous threshold of burning through all the carbon budget for humanity, - https://climateclock.world/ - It is questionable whether Biden's government alone can do enough, but certainly if Trump won the 2024 election, his term in office would create a regression severe enough to put the Paris Climate goal of staying within 1.5 Deg C out of reach, and risk triggering major planetary tipping points - A Biden government is evidence-based and believes in anthropogenic climate change and is already taking measures to mitigate it. A Trump government is not evidence-based and is supported by incumbent fossil fuel industry so does not have the interest of the U.S. population nor all of humanity at heart. - Hence, the 2024 U.S. election can really determine the fate of humanity. - Gen Z can play a critical role for humanity by voting against a government that would, in leading climate scientists Michael Mann's words, be game over for a stable climate, and therefore put humanity and unimaginable risk. - Gen Z can swing the vote to a government willing to deal with the climate crisis over one in climate denial so voting activists need to be alerted to this and create the right messaging to reach Gen Z - https://hyp.is/LOud7sBBEe6S0D8itLHw1A/circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/41-million-members-gen-z-will-be-eligible-vote-2024

    1. In dem neuen sogenannten Österreic-Plan der ÖVP spielt Klimaneutralität keine Rolle. 20 Milliarden sollen bis 2030 in den Straßenbau investiert werden, zusätzlich eine Milliarde in sogenannte grüne Verbrenner. Außerdem setzt man auf CO2 Abscheidung und Speicherung. Fragen nach dem Klimaschutz gesetzt lassen die Verantwortlichen der ÖVP unbeantwortet. https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000205164/von-oesterreich-plan-bis-klimagesetz-die-oevp-meidet-das-klima-thema

    1. Greek plays are not just about entertainment; they are invitations to the audience to discuss political events.

      Greek plays are either tragedies or comedies. There is a much deeper meaning to them than just entertaining the public. Keeping this in mind when reading the stories gives them a much deeper meaning.(https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Theatre/) To know the full extent of what they were really meant for is important to the readers. For this specific play, the meaning behind the story is that the men in charge are operating from an excessively limited perspective as they ignore their partners' informed advice. This is a huge political controversy to this day. Women are very overlooked in society especially considering how far back this is dated. Back when this play was written women were given tasks like cooking and cleaning and had little to no rights so this was a good political example of how they were treated and overlooked.

  4. Dec 2023
      • for: James Hansen - 2023 paper, key insight - James Hansen, leverage point - emergence of new 3rd political party, leverage point - youth in politics, climate change - politics, climate crisis - politics

      • Key insight: James Hansen

        • The key insight James Hansen conveys is that
          • the key to rapid system change is
            • WHAT? the rapid emergence of a new, third political party that does not take money from special interest lobbys.
            • WHY? Hit the Achilles heel of the Fossil Fuel industry
            • HOW? widespread citizen / youth campaign to elect new youth leaders across the US and around the globe
            • WHEN? Timing is critical. In the US,
              • Don't spoil the vote for the two party system in 2024 elections. Better to have a democracy than a dictatorship.
              • Realistically, likely have to wait to be a contender in the 2028 election.
      • reference

    1. Washington is a swamp it we throw out one party the other one comes in they take money from special interests and we don't have a government that's serving the interests 01:25:09 of the public that's what I think we have to fix and I don't see how we do that unless we have a party that takes no money from special interests
      • for: key insight- polycrisis - climate crisis - political crisis, climate crisis - requires a new political party, money in politics, climate crisis - fossil fuel lobbyists, climate change - politics, climate crisis - politics, James Hansen - key insight - political action - 3rd party

      • key insight

        • Both democrats and conservatives are captured by fossil fuel lobbyist interests
        • A new third political party that does not take money from special interests is required
        • The nature of the polycrisis is that crisis are entangled . This is a case in point. The climate crisis cannot be solved unless the political crisis of money influencing politics is resolved
        • The system needs to be rapidly reformed to kick money of special interest groups out of politics.
      • question

        • Given the short timescale, the earliest we can achieve this is 2028 in the US Election cycle
        • Meanwhile what can we do in between?
        • How much impact can alternative forms of local governance like https://sonec.org/ have?
        • In particular, could citizens form local alternative forms of governance and implement incentives to drive sustainable behavior?
    2. I think that what we have to 01:23:24 do is have the revolution that Benjamin Franklin said we need if because if we don't solve the problem in the United States I don't see us solving the global 01:23:39 problem
      • for: quote - James Hansen, quote Benjamin Franklin, climate crisis - leverage point - political revolution

      • quote

        • If we don't solve the problem in the United States, I don't see us solving the global problem
      • author: James Hansen
      • date: Dec 2023

      • comment

        • Tipping Point network
    1. She is hopeful when she approaches a house with solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the driveway.
      • for: example - political polarization, example - trumpism, example - anti- vaxxers, example - conspiracy theories, nonduality - political polarization

      • example: political polarization

        • classic dualistic categories will always fail to capture the complexity
        • indyweb mindplex's could reveal the nuances
    1. in some ways it may well be that this Century will be 00:16:19 a century characterized by the emotion of fear for many people and fear doesn't stay fear it often becomes anger and anger and fear are often exploited by 00:16:31 folks who uh use those emotions as a ways of as a as a way of building their political Authority to deepen divisions within their society to draw together their followers into sort of a fevered 00:16:45 pitch and uh and use and use the exploitation as political opportunists use the exploitation of fear and anger to build their Authority and Power
      • for: adjacency - polycrisis - fear - anger - political exploitation

      • adjacency between

        • polycrisis
        • fear
        • anger
        • political exploitation
        • polarization
        • authoritarianism
      • adjacency statement
        • In this polycrisis space, we witness fear leading to anger which is then exploited by political opportunists who then create polarization through authoritarian impulses that superficially quench the desires of the unheard angry citizens
    1. The most powerful groups in society, in any case, had elaborated persuasive rationales for exemption. The clergy, a vast corporation drawing revenues from a sixth of the kingdom’s land, and creaming off, in the form of tithes, a notional tenth of the yield of the rest, paid no direct taxes on the grounds that it performed its service to society by praying and interceding with God. The nobility, the social elite which owned over a quarter of the land, levied feudal dues over much of the rest, and steadily sucked most of the newly rich into its ranks via ennobling offices, resisted the payment of direct taxes as well. Nobles, the argument went, served the kingdom with their blood, by fighting to defend it.

      Tax evasion of 1st and 2nd estates

    2. The crisis was triggered by King Louis XVI’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy.

      Cause of instability

    3. It was not that France lacked the resources to survive as a great power. Over the next generation the French would dominate the European continent more completely than they had ever done. It was rather that many of these resources were locked up by the system of government, the organization of society, and the culture of what revolutionaries would soon be calling the ancien régime, the old or former order. It took the Revolution to release them.

      Discontent with status quo and diminishing legitimacy

      • for: climate crisis - voting for global political green candidates, podcast - Planet Critical, interview - Planet Critical - James Schneider - communications officer - Progressive International, green democratic revolution, climate crisis - elite control off mainstream media

      • podcast: Planet Critical

      • host: Rachel Donald
      • title: Overthrowing the Ruling Class: The Green Democratic Revolution

      • summary

        • This is a very insightful interview with James Schneider, communications officer of Progressive International on the scales of political change required to advert our existential Poly / meta / meaning crisis.
        • James sees 3 levels of crisis
          • ordinary crisis emerging from a broken system
          • larger wicked problems that cannot be solved in isolation
          • the biggest umbrella crisis that covers all others - the last remaining decades of the fossil fuel system,
            • due to peak oil but accelerated by
            • climate crisis
        • There has to be a paradigm shift on governance, as the ruling elites are driving humanity off the cliff edge
        • This is not incremental change but a paradigm shift in governance
        • To do that, we have to adopt an anti-regime perspective, that is not reinforcing the current infective administrative state, otherwise, as COVID taught us, we will end up driving the masses to adopt hard right politicians
        • In order to establish the policies that are aligned to the science, the people and politicians have to be aligned.
        • Voting in candidates who champion policies aligned to science is a leverage point.
        • That can only be done if the citizenry is educated enough to vote for such politicians
        • So there are two parallel tasks to be done:
          • mass education program to educate citizens
          • mass program to encourage candidates aligned to climate science to run for political office
    1. the French Revolution happened in Denmark
      • for: social tipping points - political, quote - french Revolution - Denmark

      • quote.

        • the French Revolution happened in Denmark
    2. well I'll start with two extremely optimistic points
      • for: answer to above question

      • answer : two answers

        • first, the elite have the majority of
          • wealth
          • control of setting policies
          • control of the media
          • and they work really hard at controlling policy and media
          • and the people
            • hate the system
            • generally hate them
        • second, social tipping points occur. Something happened in over place, then it spreads to other places
    3. the changes that we need to make to our political system go well well 00:41:10 well beyond like having a better P party in changing who some of the MPS are and so on and so forth because it is structurally set up to insulate the ruling class from popular pressure
      • for: quote - political system change is required

      • quote

        • the changes that we need to make our political system go well beyond having a better party or changing who some of the MPS are and so on
          • because it is structurally set up to insulate the ruling class from popular pressure
    4. I you know think this is important in the kind of what the left postur is to regime break to system breakdown which 00:35:27 experiencing has to be anti-regime let
      • for: Lessons from COVID

        • Left position to avoid driving masses to the hard right
      • quote

        • i think this is important in the kind of what the left posture is to regime and system breakdown which it is experiencing has to be anti-regime
      • paraphrase

        • otherwise the anti-regime forces go to the hard right and
          • if the left follows the left wing of the management state which is trying to technocratically limit the catastrophe of breakdown,
          • it will never get popular support that's basically what happened during COVID.
            • the hard right denied science, the left went begging the administrative state and as a consequence, there was a massive expansion of the right around the globe
    1. At the same time, more andmore people are demanding a different political culture, transparent decision-making and real partici-pation in political decision-making processes 18 . The crises challenge us to develop and implement newforms of solidarity, citizenship and political action in the sense of a vita activa
      • for: vita activa, new forms of political participation
    1. This dissatisfaction with the dominant role of the state, or similar dissatisfaction by what others consider the failing market-based neoliberal order, may now go into different directions
      • for: different possible socio-economic-political futures

      • comment

        • Michel outlines the possibilities then selects the last one as the one he situates himself in and will write on, namelyl:
          • A dream to integrate:
            • markets,
            • networks,
            • state functions, AND what we could call
            • ‘the Commons’
  5. Nov 2023
      • for: commented on - Trump and failings of political system, poem - Trump a symptom of failing political system

      • commented on

        • I wrote a poem in the comment section of this video:

          • Oh what a web we weave, when we practice to deceive
          • What a distance Trump will fall, when Jack Smith and the other upholders of truth disentangles it all!
          • What lesson have we learned, what has hindsight allowed us to see
          • about the fragility of this gift called democracy?
          • Whose ideal is that men and women are all equal another way of saying we are all sacred?
          • We pay a heavy price for not taking care of our disenfranchised sisters and brothers
          • for without job and pay they may seem powerless but the minions of poor left behind,
          • not lifted by the rising tide of unequal prosperity
          • at least have a vote to vent their anger and victimhood of being forgot
          • and comes along the next power-hungry, fork-tongued, snake-oil salesman
          • who recognizes the strength in the weakness of the minion
          • enough to exploit for personal gain the aggregate vote of the disenfranchised many
          • plunging democracy and its constitutions into crisis
          • Not only in the US, but all around the world
          • we witness the same phenomena
          • as the failings of liberal democracies that have left masses behind,
          • unintentional failings of democracy,
          • is exploited by the opportunist to seize power
          • and institute intentional forms of non-democracy

          • The bottom line (below):

          • Regardless of political ideology,
          • genuine empathy for all
          • not just in theory, but in practice
          • is the path to a just, stable and thriving society
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, bracketing, applied epoche, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization, epoche - research application

      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, poltical polarization, religious polarization, hermenneutic, hermeneutical phenomenological method

      • summary

        • a very insightful paper
      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
    1. On the Function of the Epoche inPhenomenological Interpretations of Religion
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization

      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
  6. Oct 2023
    1. They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name

      this.

    1. In 2022, PRRI asked Americans their views on the utility of violence as a political tactic. Three in 10 Republicans said they agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” That was about three times the percentage of Democrats agreeing with the same sentiment.
    2. There was former Ohio congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R) — a former professional football player — who deemed the hostility he faced after opposing Trump too much of a risk for his family. Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney (R) described similar fears from other legislators, as did former Michigan representative Peter Meijer (R). That these three are all former legislators is not a coincidence: They resigned or were beaten in primaries largely because they saw how the party had turned against them. See also: Romney, Mitt.

      The threat of physical violence is silencing those in power even on the right. We're already at war except for the bullets.

  7. Sep 2023
      • for: Christian nationalism, Christian national, far right politics, Christian right, political extremism, MAGA fuel
      • comment
        • the extreme right, MAGA Republican party is fueled by a movement composed of threatened Christian nationalists entering politics to assert power.
        • The extremism in the far right politics is in direct proportion to the high degree to which they perceive threat
        • Religious faith can inspire extremely powerful emotional responses and devotion. When combined with politics this can lead to extreme events, such as the Jan. 6 insurrection.
        • The mobilization of Christian nationals into local school boards has turned education into a political battleground.
    1. that's that is the Dirty Little Secret 00:12:08 of where we're at right now with Americans at each other's throats politically it's being created caused on purpose by the Chinese and the Russians who are manipulating people 00:12:22 through um use of phony websites and other disinformation campaigns being run which is a type of warfare that's being run 00:12:34 against the American people and they're falling for it
      • for: example, example - internet flaws, polarization, disinformation,, example - polarization, political interference - Russia, political interference - China
      • example: polarization, internet flaws
  8. Aug 2023
    1. The January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill over one year ago, and the United States’ ongoing struggle to respond effectively to threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, warn us of the dangers posed by unchecked polarization.
      • for: polarization, political polarization, conflict, water, violence, trump
      • Paraphrase
        • current example of polarization
          • The January 6th US insurrection on Capitol Hill
          • COVID-19 pandemic
          • climate change,
        • warn us of the dangers posed by unchecked polarization.
    1. signs of collapse include
      • for: collapse, polycrisis, political collapse
      • signs of collapse
        • misinformation
        • disinformation,
        • propaganda
        • censorship,
        • scapegoating,
        • disenfranchisement,
        • suppression of dissent,
        • widespread surveillance,
        • overt and large-scale corruption,
        • emergence and use of paramilitaries,
        • widespread
          • arrests,
          • incarcerations and
          • ‘disappearances’,
        • election interference and fraud,
        • election cancellations and
        • the dismantling of democratic institutions. Over the past decade, most of these have been employed in many countries, and their use is becoming widely normalized in much of the world.
    1. Was Ronald Reagan's shift in politics an example of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” (Upton Sinclair)? (see also: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/)

      Link to https://hypothes.is/a/Kft7kDOrEe6TQKcW-dREwQ in The Big Myth on Regan's shift in political views while working for General Electric.

    1. Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reaganwas an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screencareer was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation(GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show General ElectricTheater, where each week his voice and face reached into tens ofmillions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism andfree enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country onbehalf of GE—visiting factories, making speeches at schools, anddoing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence—promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion andantigovernment vision.

      From a philosophical viewpoint, Reagan grew up in Dixon, Illinois a small town (surrounded by farmland) in North West-ish Illinois roughly on the border of the political borders of what Colin Woodard calls The Midlands and Greater Appalachia. He seems to have been a Midlander for the first half of his life, but obviously had an easy time moving to a more Greater Appalachia viewpoint when working for GE.

  9. Jul 2023
    1. at third act where we organize old people like me over the age 00:05:36 of 60. we're concentrating on democracy and on climate they seem uh they seem the twin crises that we face
      • for: polycrisis, dual crisis, climate change and political polarization

      • key insight

        • we have to deal with climate crisis AND political polarization simultaneously
        • unless we solve the political polarization problem, we will be stuck in policy gridlock
    1. there's really shocking data that shows red zip codes are getting red or redder and blue ones Bluer and Bluer
      • US political polarization at local level
        • there's really shocking data that shows
          • red zip codes are getting red or redder and
          • blue states are getting Bluer
        • people are self-selecting into communities based on their political beliefs
          • and this is the highest rate we've ever seen it since polling began in that space
        • The phenomenon is really hyper localized
  10. May 2023
    1. An analysis of the modern capitalist state that distinguishes between political society, which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society, where leadership is constituted through consent

      What is the current separation of political and civil society in America in 2023? Do the differences in these two (particularly with respect to Antonio Gramsci's framing) still have distinguishing features?

    2. the Prison Notebooks, contain Gramsci's tracing of Italian history and nationalism, as well as some ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory associated with his name, such as: Cultural hegemony as a means of maintaining and legitimising the capitalist state The need for popular workers' education to encourage development of intellectuals from the working-class An analysis of the modern capitalist state that distinguishes between political society, which dominates directly and coercively, and civil society, where leadership is constituted through consent Absolute historicism A critique of economic determinism that opposes fatalistic interpretations of Marxism A critique of philosophical materialism
  11. Apr 2023
    1. In Vice, Maggie Puniewska points to the moral foundations theory, according to which liberals and conservatives prioritize different ethics: the former compassion, fairness and liberty, the latter purity, loyalty and obedience to authority.
  12. Mar 2023
    1. The starkest danger of the “consumer in charge” narrative is that itdepoliticizes the challenges before us, at a time when a citizen politicsis most called for. With consumers in charge, only the softest and mostbenevolent policy interventions are required from governments, likeproviding consumers with information on the environmental and so-cial characteristics of products, and information on how to use theseproducts in a better (especially more effcient) way. For these reasons,the consumer sovereignty narrative is attractive to politicians, as itshifts responsibility away from producers, retailers, and those taskedwith regulating commercial activity

      // - this, however, can be transformed through coordination. After all, it's the same principle of having enough people in consensus - one is in the economic arena, the other is in the political (voting). We can and should do both

  13. Jan 2023
    1. you you have to back politicians who are   00:52:41 willing to change this and unfortunately there's  no party that's uh in favor of canceling student   debt or any kind of debt in the united states  because the political parties are subsidized   by the banking in the financial sector so  uh i don't see uh i don't see a way out

      !- Michael Hudson : The realities of debt writedown of any kind - Not pragmatic because no political party will support it because all political parties are subsidized by banking and financial sector

    2. as long as the system of  of political finance and you know parties and   campaigns and media and think tank you know  are largely controlled by by large wealth   00:29:11 holders you know our collective ability to  change the distribution of wealth and the   you know through through taxation or that  consolation and or what you know whatever   the method is going to be limited so it will take  major political fights and in some cases you know   changing the political rules of the game and the  political institution to to to changes and and   you know the good news is that this has  always been like this or this has always   00:29:39 and and still sometimes you know it has worked  in the in the past but it has worked you know   i mentioned the french revolution you know of  course that's a huge popular mobilization uh also   in the 20th century i mentioned after world war  ii after world war one well let's be clear it's   only because there was a very powerful uh you know  labor movement a socialist movement and communist   counter model in the east which in the end put  pressure uh on the on the uh and you know and on   00:30:09 the in effect and the elite governing elite in in  in the west so that they they they had to accept   a number of decisions you know which which were  limited in their scope but still which transform   the economic and social system in in a very  substantial way as compared to the pre-world   war one and 19th century economic system but it's  only through this enormous political mobilization   00:30:34 and collective organization and you know it will  be the same in in the past

      !- Thomas Piketty : limited ability for real change as long as elites can lobby governments - but in the past, there has been success, as the two cases previously mentioned - so it is possible, but will take just as enormous a political mobilization of the people

  14. Nov 2022
    1. i think so like in social terms the conservatives would say well i like that it benefits from the wisdom of math already invented you're not 00:36:39 throwing anything away you're not you're not throwing it all away and starting over you're taking what we already have and you're you're using it that's great and a libertarian might say i really like that you're free to create as you see fit you can make anything you 00:36:52 want and you're working within this background framework that's minimally invasive it doesn't make a lot of rules for you but it is highly functional i like that it kind of keeps everyone in line while 00:37:03 like satisfying some formal contracts or something while still being uh i'm still free to create and a progressive might say i like about category that theory that everyone can contribute to 00:37:15 making their own world making it more rich adding new ideas uh making it more meaningful understanding connections between things a modern viewpoint would say i like that 00:37:26 it's completely rigorous that it's been used in proving well-known conjectures that people thought were important to prove but also that it's interesting it's useful in science and technology and a postmodern person might say i like 00:37:40 that um that no perspective is right that that there's just all sorts of different categories but that navigating between these perspectives lets you look at problems from all sides or a hippie might say i like that it's 00:37:53 all about relationship and connection or irrelevant i don't know what that means maybe a practical person might say that i like that it's that we can actually use it to organize and learn from big data in 00:38:06 today's world or to manage complexity of software projects that are that are very large and changing all the time i like that you can think about ai and other complex systems with this stuff i think it's relevant and 00:38:19 practical for right now so that's that's my uh tutorial or that's the the part i'm going to record and now i'm going to open it up for questions

      David Spivak discusses how category theory may appeal to different political ideologies for a variety of reasons.

    1. He outspent Bass by very wide margins, largely using his own money (see below).

      https://laist.com/news/politics/2022-election-california-general-live-results-los-angeles-city-mayor-bass-caruso

      What the hell is Rick Caruso doing spending over $100M!! to defeat Karen Bass? He put in $101,477,500 of his own money along with $3.4M from a group opposing Bass compared to Bass's roughly $18M raise.

      So many better things he could have done with that money, if in fact, people really think that he's got ideas that will actively make the city better.

      Caruso outspent Bass 5 to 1.

      Caruso spent $400 per vote for the 252,476 votes he got (as of 2022-11-09 9:24 AM).

  15. Oct 2022
    1. Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy of Science, Religion, and GrowthRoland Bénabou, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea VindigniNBER Working Paper No. 21105
    1. The danger is in conflating our Christian identity and our national identity. We can be Christian, we can also be American. But to assume that being American means being Christian and that being Christian means holding to a narrow view of what it means to be American is limiting to all of the above.

      Being Christian means performing our commitment to follow Jesus along the Way of Love as our response to God's abundant grace. Being American means performing our commitment to a common life within our nation-state according to our founding and constitutional principles. To excel in our American identity, one need not be Christian. To excel in our Christian identity, one need not be American. Conflating these two identities causes us to miss the mark in performing both.

    2. To assume that one side works on behalf of God while the other works in rejection of Divine order is a perversion of the unity that could exist in, at least, recognizing shared spiritual ideals. That spiritual unity cannot exist when we suggest that true Christians either wear red hats and carry “Don’t Tread on Me” flags or do not.

      The Spirit unites us through our shared commitment to Jesus the Messiah as our Lord. When we see political opponents as our divinely sanctioned enemies due to their holding contrary views, we reject the divine word concerning our neighbor and thereby commit the sin of blasphemy.

  16. Sep 2022
    1. In 1990, 15.1 percent of the poor were residingin high- poverty neighborhoods. That figure dropped to 10.3 percent by 2000,rose to 13.6 percent for 2010, and then fell to 11.9 percent for 2015.

      Is there a long term correlation between these rates and political parties? Is there a potential lag time between the two if there is?

    1. Even our ability to detect online manipulation is affected by our political bias, though not symmetrically: Republican users are more likely to mistake bots promoting conservative ideas for humans, whereas Democrats are more likely to mistake conservative human users for bots.
    1. quote "half the US coast" is a fabrication, the person in the video said "half the coast of a large continent, which we may not like due to its aggressive policy" the "US coast" is not mentioned, nor does it contain a "chilling warning to West" Just a strange presentation of military equipment and capabilities to a large group of children.

  17. Aug 2022
    1. Class discussion reflected onthe emphasis on “family values” in recent news coverageof politicians looking for issues near election time.Perhaps you were stimulated by what the pundits had tosay. Or maybe you were offended by the superficiality ofthe “soundbites” – after all, you had just read Odysseustelling Agamemnon in Book Eleven that “empty wordsare evil.”

      What a fantastic juxtaposition!

  18. Jun 2022
    1. It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.

      an interesting twist to American cultural life

    2. FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.

      What drives the attendance at churches like this? Socializing, friends, family? Is it entertainment, politics, solely the religious part, or a conflagration of all of these? A charismatic minister?

    1. in the book i 00:14:51 tried to stay away from politics mainly because what i found was if you don't understand the concept of collective illusion if your first introduction to it is something very polarizing that issue tends to just be the all the thing you 00:15:04 can think about right so it's like you want your head around the actual concept but what's interesting from the political standpoint is not surprisingly our national politics are driving a lot of these illusions and it's happening on 00:15:17 both sides um but it's it's really leading to both both seeing the other side as very extreme when it's not really true but most importantly and even more damaging 00:15:30 we're seeing within any one political party the misunderstanding of our own party

      Introducing the concept of collective illusion within highly polarized context tends to reduce its conceptual understanding. The political impact of collective illusions is that it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that drives further entrenchment, misunderstanding of one's own ingroup as well as the outgroup.

  19. May 2022
    1. A global ceasefire could be declared for between 2022 and 2030 to enable all nations to undertake an emergency hyper-response.

      State level government officials would need to undergo some kind of global open Deep Humanity type education to begin to shift their inner worldviews, paradigms and value systems, along with business leaders, as the close ties between the influence of business lobbies on governments has a very powerful controlling influence.

      Of course, this would be easier if there were a concerted global effort to nominate proactive, empathetic ecocivilizationally and social justice minded women to positions of power.

    1. pretty much all the arguments that we would be making too if we've met a bunch of Jesuits fear right of kings and reveal the faith and it's actually it's 00:41:37 the indigenous sort of looking rationally

      Perhaps summarizing Graeber and Wengrow too much here, but..

      The Enlightenment came to us courtesy of discussions with Indigenous Peoples from the Americas.

    1. Frank Wilhot's: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/
    2. Libertarianism is notionally grounded in the idea of self-determination and personal responsibility, but in practice, powerful libertarians routinely trade off (others') freedom for (their own) tax savings.

      An intriguing thesis.

      Too often we trade away others' freedom(s) for small benefits to ourselves. This pattern has got to stop. The system should be closed in such a manner that the small trade-offs are balanced out across all of society.

      Cory Doctorow also highlights the recent Texas abortion law which targets abortion providers. Rich Republicans who have backed this law will still have the power and flexibility to drive or fly to another state for their abortions when desired. There are no consequences for them because they're not in a closed system. If abortions were illegal everywhere and anyone getting one were to be prosecuted regardless of where they got their abortion, then the system would be more "closed" and without loopholes they could use. As a result, laws like this would never be passed because they would apply equally to those who were making them. Legislators and judges should think more about walking a mile (or a lifetime) in another person's shoes more often.

      For lack of a better term let's use the idea of "political calculus" to describe this. Calculus is the mathematical study of small changes. So a small change to an individual isn't a big thing, but in the aggregate it can have profound and destructive effects on large swaths of the people.

      In large part, this is how institutionalized and structural racism flourishes. We take small bites of powerless individuals which in aggregate causes far more harm.

      This is all closely related to the idea of "privatizing profits and socializing losses".

    1. What did Franklin himself think about abortions? In 1728 during his early years as a printer, he generated controversy over something he would end up doing himself. According to “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson, he “manufactured” an abortion debate, largely because he wanted to crush a rival, but his own opinions may not have been too strong about it. Franklin wrote a series of anonymous letters for another paper to draw attention away from Samuel Keimer’s paper: The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His initial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.

      Benjamin Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America to help sell his newspapers and to crush a rival.

    1. lationship (offset) to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). (This is distinct from some usage in scheduling applications where a local time and location may be known, but the actual relationship to UTC may be dependent on the unknown or unknowable actions of politicians or administrators. The UTC time corresponding to 17:00 on 23rd March 2005 in New York may depend on administrative decisions about daylight savings time. This specification steers well clear of such considerations.
  20. Apr 2022
    1. Member States

      Perhaps this should be addressed not just to Members States, but, more explicitly to educational stakeholders. In many cases, for example the UK (2022), the "Member State" does not really have the means or the disposition to take seriously any of these recommendations. It is down to institutions and professionals within the territory of the Member State to take the lead, and therefore they are the ones to whom this recommendation should be addressed to.

    1. Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD [@PeterHotez]. (2021, December 15). Many thanks @Finneganporter while i predicted some of this, a part that caught me off guard in the pandemic was the rise of contrarian intellectuals from conservative think tanks or even Harvard Stanford so desperate for relevance they aligned themselves with far right extremists [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1471100070250508288

    1. Amy Maxmen, PhD. (2020, August 26). 🙄The CDC’s only substantial communication with the public in the pandemic is through its MMW Reports. But the irrelevant & erroneous 1st line of this latest report suggests political meddling to me. (The WHO doesn’t declare pandemics. They declare PHEICs, which they did Jan 30) https://t.co/Y1NlHbQIYQ [Tweet]. @amymaxmen. https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1298660729080356864

  21. Mar 2022
    1. Posting a new algorithm, poem, or video on the web makes it a vailable, but unless appropriate recipients notice it, the originator has little chance to influence them.

      An early statement of the problem of distribution which has been widely solved by many social media algorithmic feeds. Sadly pushing ideas to people interested in them (or not) doesn't seem to have improved humanity. Perhaps too much of the problem space with respect to the idea of "influence" has been devoted to marketing and commerce or to fringe misinformation spaces? How might we create more value to the "middle" of the populace while minimizing misinformation and polarization?

    1. This is what free societies converging on an idea looks like.

      Or political pressure being applied to every company (from people, not the government). Suspending business in Russia costs less than the repetitional hit of continuing there.

      Though arguable that's the same as a "free convergence on an idea" -- since such pressure only exists when many people agree on something.

    1. This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

      This is the critical observation - everything is interconnected. It is a nexus of problems that requires that we deal with all dimensions of the problem simultaneously.

      Putin is the nexus of so much that is wrong with the world. He is like an octopus that has its arms in multiple crisis of the planet.

      The political polarization of the US, the ascendancy of the puppet government of Trump and the blatant cognitive dissonance of the extreme right who are impervious to facts is reminiscent of the propaganda imposed upon the Russian people themselves for one reason - it was part of Putin's master plan: https://youtu.be/FxgBuhMBXSA The US population has been split by Putin's information warfare system, the same one he uses on the Russian population.

      The fake news programmed by Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war has worked effectively to mislead the Russian populus: https://youtu.be/kELta9MLOzg The same pattern of psychological manipulation has also had the same impact in the belief system of the typical hardcore Trumpist.

  22. Feb 2022
    1. We also know that theaverage length of TV soundbites has steadily declined over the lastseveral decades (Fehrmann, 2011). During the U.S. presidentialelection in 1968, the average soundbite — that is, any footage of acandidate speaking uninterrupted — was still a little more than 40seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the80s (Hallin 1994) and 7.8 seconds in 2000 (Lichter, 2001). The lastelection has certainly not reversed the trend. Whether that meansthat the media adjust to our decreasing attention span or is causingthe trend is not easy to say.[17]

      Ryfe and Kemmelmeier not only show that this development goes much further back into the past and first appeared in newspapers (the quotes of politicians got almost halved between 1892 and 1968), but also posed the question if this can maybe also be seen as a form of increased professionalism of the media as they do not just let politicians talk as they wish (Ryfe and Kemmelmeier 2011). Craig Fehrman also pointed out the irony in the reception of this rather nuanced study – it was itself reduced to a soundbite in the media (Fehrman 2011).


      Soundbites have decreased in length over time.

      What effects are driving this? What are the knock on effects? What effect does this have on the ability for doubletalk to take hold? Is it easier for doubletalk and additional meanings to attach to soundbites when they're shorter? (It would seem so.) At what point to they hit a minimum?

      What is the effect of potential memes which hold additional meaning of driving this soundbite culture?

      Example: "Lock her up" as a soundbite with memetic meaning from the Trump 2016 campaign in reference to Hilary Clinton.

    2. Our brains work not that differently in terms of interconnectedness.Psychologists used to think of the brain as a limited storage spacethat slowly fills up and makes it more difficult to learn late in life. Butwe know today that the more connected information we alreadyhave, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock tothat information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeedlimited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept

      isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or “latticework of mental models” (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information. That makes it easier not only to learn and remember, but also to retrieve the information later in the moment and context it is needed.

      Our natural memories are limited in their capacities, but it becomes easier to remember facts when they've got an association to other things in our minds. The building of mental models makes it easier to acquire and remember new information. The down side is that it may make it harder to dramatically change those mental models and re-associate knowledge to them without additional amounts of work.


      The mental work involved here may be one of the reasons for some cognitive biases and the reason why people are more apt to stay stuck in their mental ruts. An example would be not changing their minds about ideas of racism and inequality, both because it's easier to keep their pre-existing ideas and biases than to do the necessary work to change their minds. Similar things come into play with respect to tribalism and political party identifications as well.

      This could be an interesting area to explore more deeply. Connect with George Lakoff.

    1. This article is for those who want to keep traveling despite restrictions due to covid. Basically giving tips on how to navigate the multiple governmental restrictions and policies including links to airline or country websites for choosing destinations. Because of this trend in travel advice in covid times, we may see attitudes towards travel shift to travel knowing the risks involved (quarantine, masks requirements, etc.) and hence see tourism rise again. Last minute covid holiday packages. What if the trend for remaining home also stayed the same for next five years and the adventure seekers become the avatars for the folks who want to stay at home.

      The crisis is changing the way how people will enjoy their international holiday, with an extra concern on testing and quarantine expenses and risk taking. That may have an impact on the tourism market, asking the airline companies to provide flexible policies /products and may witness the booming of travel insurance market.

  23. Jan 2022
    1. In an era where funding for good projects can be hard to come by, or is even endangered, we must affirmatively make the case for the study of how to improve human well-being. This possibility is a fundamental reason why the American public is interested in supporting the pursuit of knowledge, and rightly so.

      Keep in mind that they're asking this in an anti-science and post-fact political climate. Is progress studies the real end goal, or do we need political solutions? Better communication solutions? Better education solutions? Instead? First?

      Are they addressing the correct question/problem here?

  24. Dec 2021
    1. For Europeanaudiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to thesystem, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, oncedisclosed, could hardly be ignored.

      Indigenous peoples of the Americas critiqued European institutions for their structures and lack of freedom. In turn, while some Europeans listened, they created an evolutionary political spectrum of increasing human complexity to combat this indigenous critique.

    2. Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured bythose on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by thoseleaning left

      Relative political positions of Hobbes and Rousseau.

    3. After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way itmight have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration ofcapital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, aword like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed toencourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagineoverthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’snot clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kindof inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would peoplehave to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminatedinequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problemsappropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume fromthe outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on thetable.

      A major problem with fighting to "level the playing field" and removing "inequality" is that it doesn't have a concrete feel. What exactly would it mean to eliminate inequality? What measures would one implement? To fix such a problem the issue needs to be better defined. How can the issue be better framed so that it could be fought for or against?

    1. Peruvian letters which was supposedly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France and they're commenting on French society and this is later remembered it 00:50:03 comes out in his late 1740s um it's later remembered as the first book which suggested the idea of the welfare state

      The 1747 book Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess, is remembered as the first book to suggest the idea of the welfare state.

    2. sort of classic banned tribe chief state hierarchy that 00:26:00 archeologists anthropologists still apply

      Traditional hierarchy used by many archaeologists and anthropologists:

      • band
      • tribe
      • chiefdom
      • state
    3. there's a great literature in 00:21:37 anthropology about the way that hunter-gatherer societies and many other societies action flip and alternate between very different kinds of political 00:21:49 arrangements depending partly on the time of year so one will have periods of great economic abundance let's say when the Bison or the deer or the woolly mammoth if we're in the Pleistocene 00:22:03 europe are coming through the valleys and you'll have extremely elaborate social measures put in place to make sure that hunting is successfully completed and during those periods you 00:22:17 might have a very authoritarian kind of political organization but once it's all over the society changes shape Marcel Mauss actually used the term social morphology I think to describe this 00:22:30 society moves and transforms

      Marcel Mauss defines social morphology as a way that societies flip or alternate between social structures depending on the seasons based on availability of food and potentially other factors.

      Perhaps to be found in Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology #

    4. evolutionary theorists like Christopher berm whose book hierarchy in the forest he's a primatologist is quite explicit about 00:11:27 this and says well this is precisely what makes human politics different from the politics of say chimpanzees or bonobos or orangutangs is what he calls our actuarial intelligence which I 00:11:39 believe what he means by this is the fact that we can in fact imagine what another kind of society might be like

      Primatologist [[Christopher Boehm]] argues in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior that humans are different from our primate ancestors because homo sapiens possess actuarial intelligence, or the ability to imagine what other kinds of society might look like.

    1. OK, maybe the road was longer and more tortuous than the traditional narrative suggests, but didn’t all humans end up embracing agriculture, and a form of social life characterised by hierarchy and inequality with it, eventually?

      Another good question to look for clues in the text.

    1. what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements?
    2. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
    3. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

      This might be the case if the tools drove the people, but isn't it more likely the way in which different people use the tools?

      Which direction gives rise to more complexity?

  25. Nov 2021
    1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

      Evangelical Christians have been held together more by political orientation and sociology than they have by a common theology. This has set them up for a schism which has been exacerbated by Donald J. Trump, COVID-19, and social changes.

      Similar to Kurt's quote, "We go to church to see and be seen", too many churches are focused on entertainment and being an ongoing institution that they aren't focusing on their core mission. This is causing problems in their overall identity.

      Time at church and in religious study is limited, but cable news, social media, and other distractions are always on and end up winning out.

      People are more likely to change their church because of politics than to change their politics because of church.

      The dichotomy of maleness and femaleness compound the cultural issues of the evangelical church.

      Southernization of the Church

      Pastors leaving the profession due to issues with a hostile work environment. Some leaving because parishioners are organizing and demanding they be fired.

      Peter Wehner looks at the rifts that are appearing in the Christian evangelical movement in America, some are issues that have been building for a while, while others are exaggerated by Donald J. Trump, the coronavirus, the culture wars, political news, political beliefs, and and hypocrisy.

    2. Teaching people how to think biblically would help, Dudley added, as well as teaching people how to disagree with one another biblically. “There is a lot of disagreement in the New Testament, and it gives us a template for how to listen to each other to understand rather than to argue,” he said.

      On the other hand, there's also the example in the bible of ultimate power (Rome) just killing their annoying enemy just because they can. Which side are these Christians taking when politics wins out over religion? It would seem the answer is the Roman perspective.

    3. How is it that evangelical Christianity has become, for too many of its adherents, a political religion? The historian George Marsden told me that political loyalties can sometimes be so strong that they create a religiouslike faith that overrides or even transforms a more traditional religious faith.
    1. But what gives anyone the conviction that such a measure is necessary? Or that “keeping students safe” means you must violate due process? It is not the law. Nor, strictly speaking, is it politics. Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative. According to one recent poll, 62 percent of Americans, including a majority of self-described moderates and liberals, are afraid to speak their mind about politics. All of those I spoke with are centrist or center-left liberals. Some have unconventional political views, but some have no strong views at all.

      Is cancel culture a right/left political issue? Some have indicated that it is though Anne Applebaum shows that the victims don't show such bias.

      This is worth exploring in more depth to untangle the justice needed from the political debate cesspool and political polarization which seems to be occurring in America.

  26. Oct 2021
    1. The people are the judges of the laws and of plays; but they can never be the makers of them.

      Everybody wants all this accountability & responsibility, but nobody has the time / expertise; if division of labor specialization works in economic matters (broadly), does it also not work in matters of social organization & political economy?

    1. The Bauhaus began with the metaphor of a church and the Lyonel Feininger depiction of a modern cathedral as a symbol for a new faith in the synthesis of art and technology.

      The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.

      We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.

      We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.

    1. Social: learned helplessness (individuality)Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)

      The neoliberal world order is designed to serve a colonial system of capitalist extraction that only benefits the 1%.

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    2. accountability, reparations, and radical social change

      The mechanisms of our compliance with the dominant system are designed into the system:

      • Social: learned helplessness (individuality)
      • Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
    1. Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place

      “Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”

      The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).


      The Design Problem

      Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.

      Figure 1: The Design Problem

      (Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)

      The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.

      • Figure 1: The Design Problem
      • Figure 2: A Country
      • Figure 3: The World
    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

    1. This is the abuse of the power of the state to enforce the abuse of power of a tactical military police force to enforce an unlawful provincial court injunction in breach of Indigenous, Canadian, and international law.

      The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

      • Social: learned helplessness
      • Economic: trained incapacities
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence

      Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

      If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

      The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

      A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

      It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

      The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

      Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

      We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

      However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

      We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

      We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

      We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

      We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

      We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

    1. The big difference between the political right, centre ground and left in economic terms comes down to how they think markets work. They are either true believers, naive optimists or non-believers. That’s all you really need to remember.
  27. Sep 2021
    1. Steven Brust's (quoted in my novel Walkaway): "Ask what's more important, human rights or property rights. If they say 'property rights ARE human rights' they're on the right." https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/
  28. Aug 2021
  29. Jul 2021
    1. One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packag­ing of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the mini­mum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed ac­ceptably without having had to think.

      This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

      People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

      I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

    1. Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈. (2021, July 12). One reason the right-wing outrage machine is focused on attacking Biden’s plan for door-to door outreach isn’t because they actually fear confiscation of guns or Bibles. It’s because they don’t want poor people to have access to life-saving vaccinations. Https://t.co/GnZMmlBfqK [Tweet]. @leahmcelrath. https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1414660179061264388

  30. Jun 2021
    1. Horseshoe Theory

      In case you didn't know here is a definition.

      And here is one I hadn't heard of, an alt to horseshoe, the fish hook.

      Or to take it to its humorous extreme, the pretzel theory:

    1. Fulwood opens his dedication with a pre-emptive caveat: Hepoints out that Gratarolo’s text was previously allowed to circulate in French translation by theyoung Edward VI and that, more recently, Maximilian II has given the Latin version his fullapproval.6Fulwood, it seems, wants to ensure his readers that this work is“politically appropriate”for Dudley (Delany et al. v)

      talk about the idea of political correctness

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    Annotators

  31. May 2021
    1. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.
    2. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.

      Only rebellion Julia knows, only revolutionary thought of indoctrinated youth

    3. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

      their union is a political act

  32. Apr 2021
    1. Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA. (2021, April 14). With all due respect to @NateSilver538, he is not an expert on the psychology of vaccine confidence. He is a poll aggregator and political pundit. He is not an infectious disease specialist, epidemiologist, vaccinologist, virologist, immunologist, or behavioral scientist. Https://t.co/HBrI6zj9aa [Tweet]. @celinegounder. https://twitter.com/celinegounder/status/1382299663269761024

    1. Indians were not to be appeased—and certainly not brought into British public life.
      • Indians were kept from entering politics or public life
      • After the British gov take over in 1858, the British gov seeked to not only have direct control instead of a company's control, but also direct control instead of letting Indians have control
    2. India Company violated its treaty obligations
      • The East India Company used excuses to violate treaties and conquer more land
      • Ex: In 1856, the British took Nawab Wajid Ali Shah's territory on grounds that he was weak and immoral
    3. The government also decided to collect taxes directly from peasants, displacing the landed nobles as intermediaries.
      • British took taxes from peasants without letting Indian previous positions of power interfere
      • Peasants had to take out loans from moneylenders
      • Peasants who couldn't pay their loans would have to give up their land
    4. This was a new colonial order, but it was not stable.

      Along with peasants, other sectors of the Indian population were not happy with British rule:

      • Indian people who once had much power and property
      • Indian business people who lost a lot of power in the newly British economy
    5. the uprisings were local in scale and vision.
      • The many revolts that made up the 1857 Rebellion were usually for specific villages or small areas for the inhabitants there
    6. e petnte a government of his ow modeling it on the British administration.
      • The peasant Devi Singh made his own gov based on the British way of governing with a peasant army that went after the moneyloaners hated by peasants in debt
      • This may be evidence for the idea that the main sticking point for Indian peasants was the cultural and taxation policies of the British instead of the administrative part
    7. replacing East India Company rule by crown government in 1858,
      • The British government took over ruling India instead of the EIC in 1858
      • Perhaps the British government took over ruling India instead of the East India Company because after the uprising, ruling over colonial states was viewed as a more militant and political task than an economic one.
    8. In return, the Mughal emperor would receive a hefty annual pension.
      • People originally in power in colonized territories striking a deal with the colonizers for their benefit is a common pattern
    9. The East India Company’s Monopoly
      • The British started off trying to control just India's trade by setting trading posts on the ocean
      • Around the early 1800s, the East India Company conquered many areas in India and surrounding areas

      Economic control -> political, military control

    10. revenues in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and to trade free of duties throughout Mughal terri- tory.
      • The East India Company, as a for-profit, wanted to be able to do business without restrictions in India.
      • The best way to guarantee this was to gain political alliances (by paying the Mughal emperor to let them trade), then starting in the second half of the 1700s, control (by later actually conquering areas) of territories.
    11. During the first half of the nineteenth century the British rulers of India had dismantled most of the traditional powers of the nobility and the rights of peasants.

      The first half of the 1800s saw:

      • the disappearance of original Indian positions of power
      • the disappearance of original Indian state boundaries and sovereignties in 1848 by governor-general Lord Dalhousie
  33. Mar 2021