#politics (122 links)
- Uncle Sam thinks your time is worth nothing economist.com
- Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026 culture.ghost.io
Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure.
Cultural-political mic-drop.
It is the systematic loss of responsibility, reflection, and intuition. These habits do not stop at the level of the individual. They scale. They become culture. And culture, eventually, becomes politics.
- Scotland just showed us how to keep wealth in local communities. betterfuturemedia.substack.com
A new Scottish law will quietly shift how wealth circulates – and who actually benefits from economic growth.
- Did baby boomers eat all the pies? John Lanchester on the truth about the generation gap theguardian.com
It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market
- The unraveling of fictions - by Azeem Azhar exponentialview.co
These fictions were functional adaptations to real constraints. The job, the credential, the expert, each solved a genuine problem in a high-friction world. But the constraints changed. And now the adaptations are decaying.
Via leebryant.
- You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism 404media.co
More and more, debates are shaped by a mindset that sees the world as a fixed pie—where one person’s or one group’s gain is another’s loss. That mindset is known as zero-sum thinking. And it is crucial to understanding the politics and economics of America today.
- Earnestness versus Cynicism: Fashion, then Politics culture.ghost.io
The majority of thinking people continue to find “fashion” beneath serious analysis, which is ridiculous because so much of human life is conventional. Ideologies come in and out as a byproduct of social dynamics. The most important thing to understand here is the directionality: This nihilistic aesthetic is not the result of a right-wing conspiracy. The fundamental mechanics of fashion elevated the nihilistic aesthetic and turned it right-wing.
- You can never truly go back garbageday.email
But because of how information works in our new world run by digital platforms, the difference between the illusion of power and the real thing is vanishingly small. And in an attention economy, they effectively become the same thing over time.
“The national insurance rise, minimum wage increase and employment rights bill suggest the government is prioritising getting more people into higher quality jobs rather than just seeking to increase employment at all costs in the short run,” Aveek Bhattacharya, research director at the Social Market Foundation said.
Interesting take.
In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. Homo typographicus would be followed by Homo interneticus. His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, interneticus would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.
- Why did Silicon Valley turn right? programmablemutter.com
The "pounded progressive ally" thesis has limits
From three friends in high places to essentially zero is quite the feat of statecraft. Britain is now outside its own regional club and exposed to a protectionist America and having to defrost its relationship with China after a period of mindless neglect.
- The growing peril of national conservatism economist.com
Liberalism’s great strength is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements broke apart the idea that some people counted more than others. Socialist arguments about fairness and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about liberty and efficiency led to freer markets and a limit on state power. Liberalism can adapt to national conservatism, too. Right now, it is falling behind.
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future.
There’s a reason to be optimistic about Britain. The nation is completing a seven-year therapy treatment that worked. True, it’s been an expensive exercise in…
- The French Are in a Panic Over 'le Wokisme' theatlantic.com
- Functionalism (international relations) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
Functionalism is a theory of international relations that arose during the interwar period principally from the strong concern about the obsolescence of the state as a form of social organization. Rather than the self-interest of nation states that realists see as a motivating factor, functionalists focus on common interests and needs shared by states (but also by non-state actors) in a process of global integration triggered by the erosion of state sovereignty and the increasing weight of knowledge and hence of scientists and experts in the process of policy-making.
- Oikos vs polis: a new (but old) axis on the political map interconnected.org
Being able to say: “aha, that is an example of oikos common cause” has been enormously illuminating to me. It has never been about populism or nationalism, or right and left; those are just symptoms.
- The antidote to civilisational collapse | The Economist economist.com
“It’s ‘fuck off’ to everything,” says Adam Curtis (pictured below), describing public sentiment today. The British documentarist sees himself as an optimist amid dystopians, and as a classical journalist whose medium happens to be film.
Lengthy interview with Adam Curtis from late 2018.
- The Anti-Capitalist Software License anticapitalist.software
Via Popular.
Via Popular.
- The alternatives to privatisation and nationalisation economist.com
I T SOUNDS VAGUELY elvish, like something from the pages of Tolkien. In fact, the Charter of the Forest is one of Britain’s founding political documents, dating…
Illustration by Ben Wiseman. In the heart of San Francisco, the gig economy reigns supreme. Walk intoa grocery store, and a large number of shoppers you see are…
- Opinion | YouTube, the Great Radicalizer nytimes.com
Jennifer Heuer At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an…
Adapted from “We Are The Very Model Of Modern Humanist Technologists”, a lightning talk given at # foocamp 2017 in San Francisco on Saturday, November 4th,…
- Dude, you broke the future! - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
This is the text of my keynote speech at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017. (You can also watch it on YouTube, but it runs to…
- How the Rohingya Escaped nytimes.com
Start Myanmar says the story of these people is “fake news.” The military says they burned down their own villages, faked massacres, left their own children for…
So: me and bitcoin, you already knew I disliked it, right? (Let's discriminate between Blockchain and Bitcoin for a moment. Blockchain : a cryptographically…
The Federal Communications Commission will announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections Wednesday, according to the New York Times and several other…
- Britain: The End of a Fantasy nybooks.com
Toby Melville/TPX/Reuters British Prime Minister Theresa May on her way to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen’s permission to form a minority government,…
- Google Jobs will break 90 years of welfare policy - here's what the policy response should be blog.memespring.co.uk · Archived on
In 2013, Ian Duncan-Smith said "looking for work should be a full-time job" . This was to be policed through the 'claimant commitment' a document that would…
- The Problem With Facts timharford.com
1. Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America’s leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America’s leading…
- The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked theguardian.com
“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound…
- Grammar schools: back to the bad old days of inequality theguardian.com
A brilliant early summer Saturday in 1967, as I recall. A knock on the front door. A kid who had been in the same class as me at Parr Lane primary school in…
- Tax raid postponed as ministers rush through finance bill theguardian.com
Plan to slash the tax-free dividend allowance from £5,000 to £2,000 from April 2018 could still be introduced if the Conservatives win the election.Photograph:…
- Protest and persist: why giving up hope is not an option theguardian.com
L ast month, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden had a public conversation about democracy, transparency, whistleblowing and more. In the course of it, Snowden –…
- Philip Hammond ditches national insurance rise for self-employed theguardian.com
The chancellor, Philip Hammond, who was criticised by Tory backbenchers over the national insurance rise.Photograph: Dinendra Haria/Rex/Shutterstock Philip…