#politics (122 links)
As airports fell into chaos in the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order this weekend, border agents confronted targeted travelers with an unusual request:…
- Self-segregation: how a personalized world is dividing Americans theguardian.com
Self segregation: ‘what Facebook does do is mirror a trend that’s been unfolding in the US for the last 20 years’.Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters I t’s a…
- Indivisible Guide indivisibleguide.com
A practical guide For resisting the Trump agenda
Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.
‘Marshall McLuhan saw in Canada the raw materials for a dynamic new conception of nationhood.’Illustration: Jacqui Oakley A s 2017 begins, Canada may be the…
- Who Will Command The Robot Armies? idlewords.com
Idle Words > Talks > Who Will Command The Robot Armies? This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney.…
- Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency - The New Yorker newyorker.com
The prescription that some offer, which is stop trade, reduce global integration, I don’t think is going to work,” he went on. “If that’s not going to work, then we’re going to have to redesign the social compact in some fairly fundamental ways over the next twenty years. And I know how to build a bridge to that new social compact. It begins with all the things we’ve talked about in the past—early-childhood education, continuous learning, job training, a basic social safety net, expanding the earned-income tax credit, investments in infrastructure—which, by definition, aren’t shipped overseas. All of those things accelerate growth, give you more of a runway. But at some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.
- Playtime is over - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
So I've had a week now for the outcome of last Tuesday's US election to sink in, and I've been doing some thinking and some research, and my conclusion is that…
The story of the referendum is usually told through geography: areas that had been left behind by globalisation voted to Leave. But this tells us only so much,…
- When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism the-american-interest.com
Getty Images And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two. W hat on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise…
- Divided by meaning medium.com
Divided by meaning Cleveland, OH We are a divided country , split along race and class. We are also divided by education. Front row kids, many with post…
‘Elite neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the…
- Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy? markmanson.net
In the attention economy, people are rewarded for extremism. They are rewarded for indulging their worst biases and stoking other people’s worst fears. They are rewarded for portraying the world as a place that is burning to the ground, whether it’s because of gay marriage, or police violence, or Islamic terrorism, or low interest rates. The internet has generated a platform where apocalyptic beliefs are celebrated and spread, and moderation and reason is something that becomes too arduous and boring to stand.
- Belief in homeopathy is a moral test politics.co.uk
Everyone enjoys a laugh at homeopathy supporters. It brings us all together. It's a way for smug, intellectual people to be all smug and intellectual. So there…
Want to migrate to Canada? Hop on a canoe with prime minister Justin Trudeau.Photograph: Sean Kilpatrick/AP In the wake of Brexit and with the rise of Donald…
- WHO, IF NOT YOU? unitedagainstracism.org
A classmate makes a racist joke. Do you step in? A Muslim woman is insulted in a shop. Should you bother? A homosexual couple is bullied on the street. Do you…
- Nick Barber, Tom Hickman and Jeff King: Pulling the Article 50 ‘Trigger’: Parliament’s Indispensable Role ukconstitutionallaw.org
In this post we argue that as a matter of domestic constitutional law, the Prime Minister is unable to issue a declaration under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty…
- 🇬🇧🇪🇺 Escape the Brexit escapethebrexit.com
- "Tomorrow belongs to me" - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
Okay, so the idiots did it; they broke the UK. This is a book launch month and I should really be blogging about "The Nightmare Stacks" but British politics has…
- Why I’ve Voted To Remain In The EU facebook.com
I wanted to put down my thoughts and reasoning behind my decision in the upcoming EU referendum. It’s too late for some people (many have voted by post already,…
- Is the EU really dictating the shape of your bananas? theguardian.com
Boris Johnson leaves an ice cream parlour on the outskirts of St Austell, Cornwall.Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters Launching the Vote Leave battlebus with an…
- How Boots went rogue | Aditya Chakrabortty theguardian.com
T ony was talking about how he wound up getting paid to care less – less about his sick patients, less about the specialism that demanded years of study, less…
- Why expat Americans are giving up their passports | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
But I think that it is wrong to present this as a taxation issue. I would be fine with paying a percentage of my income in taxes. There are some benefits to…
Generally the phrases knocking around in my head at this time of year are of a cheery, convivial nature – “Merry Christmas”; “Happy New Year”; “Another Baileys?…
- Petition: Reconsider the new Dividend Tax for small businesses petition.parliament.uk
The govt want to stop business owners being paid via dividends to reduce tax bills. This flies in the face of risk & reward for running a business &…
Are we nearly there yet? No, the journey towards good universal childcare and nursery education is proving long and winding. But one of the encouraging…
- The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman theguardian.com
- Our Comrade The Electron - Webstock Conference Talk static.pinboard.in
I'm not saying we can't have the fun next-generation Internet, where everyone wears stupid goggles and has profound conversations with their refrigerator. I'm just saying we can't slap it together like we've been doing so far and expect everything to work itself out.
The good news is, it's a design problem! You're all designers here - we can make it fun! We can build an Internet that's distributed, resilient, irritating to governments everywhere, and free in the best sense of the word, like we dreamed of in the 90's. But it will take effort and determination. It will mean scrapping permanent mass surveillance as a business model, which is going to hurt. It will mean pushing laws through a sclerotic legal system. There will have to be some nagging.
- The Early Days of a Better Nation: Use of Calculators kenmacleod.blogspot.com
However friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane.
- George Lakoff: 'Conservatives don't follow the polls, they want to change them … Liberals do everything wrong' theguardian.com
This is what he believes it would take to refashion the progressive mindset: the abandonment of argument by evidence in favour of argument by moral cause; the unswerving and unembarrassed articulation of what those morals are; the acceptance that there is no "middle" or third way, no such thing as a moderate (people can hold divergent views, conservative on some things, progressive on others – but they are not moderates, they are "biconceptual"); and the understanding that conservatives are not evil, unintelligent, cynical or grasping. Rather, they act according to the moral case as they see it. If they happen to get rich, and make their friends rich in the process, that is just the unbidden consequence of wealth being the natural reward of the righteous, in their moral universe.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
- Scotland is going it alone – regardless of the referendum theguardian.com
The more influential ministers in the coalition ache above all to radically challenge the role of the state, to achieve the reverse of the 1945 Labour government. Remarkably, given that they rule in a hung parliament, they have found the space to pursue their radical ambitions. Few in England voted for a revolutionary overhaul of the NHS, the near privatisation of universities, a further decline in the power of local government, a framework for education that paves the way for a return to selection and the introduction of profit-making schools, but that is what they are getting. In their fervent disdain for the state as a mediating agency, ministers focus with special energetic intensity on areas over which they happen to have no powers in Scotland.
As a result Scotland becomes more markedly different than ever. In Scotland the NHS is spared the haphazard revolution in England. The education secretary, Michael Gove, is powerless to impose his resolute will on schools in Scotland and the same applies to his other more evangelical colleagues moving England rightwards. Without doing very much Scotland becomes more different because of what is happening in England. The limited powers handed over to the Scottish parliament are precisely the ones that partly protect it from the ideological mission of the Westminster government.
Thatcherism left Britain politically, economically and regionally divided, a state that was meant to be proud that it stood for something in the world again, even as Thatcherism warned that the state was the enemy of freedom and not to be relied upon. No one could bring in change of the shape, speed and size that Thatcher did, and not expect any flaws or problems to emerge. To say that she's responsible for the country's recent triumphs, but not for any of its woes, defies all logic.
- The New Atlantis » The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks thenewatlantis.com
- The Shard: beacon of the left's skyline guardian.co.uk
- Invaders from Mars - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people. [...] We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.
Via kevan.
- Ken MacLeod – Socialism and transhumanism aeonmagazine.com
- Degrowth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
- The Tory nightmare: don't say you weren't warned | Ian Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
"The reason this government's moving so quickly to divide the NHS into privatised contractual fiefdoms for its mates, and to divert education budgets into "free" schools for its mates' children, is because it can. Resistance has been atomised. Working-class rage, once articulated by powerful unions representing people doing proper jobs, has dissipated." Developers: unionise!
- Republicans: we don't need no regulation guardian.co.uk
Taking this tack has allowed the renaissance right to do a very remarkable thing: to pretend to be an enemy of big business, on the grounds that big business is insufficiently capitalist.
"For all its wit, "Hooligan"—written at a time of really horrible racial tension in Britain—had a serious purpose: to urge readers in 1982 to avoid moral panic and a rush to historically-illiterate judgement. Its lessons hold just as true today."
Via blech.
- Colbert vs. Kyl and spread of 'misinformation' - CNN.com edition.cnn.com
Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.
- Colbert vs. Kyl and spread of 'misinformation' - CNN.com edition.cnn.com
Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.
- Scripting News: WikiLeaks on the run scripting.com
Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
In the longer term the odds are stacked against secrecy, particularly in countries that practise openness in other areas. One reason is that though individual jurisdictions often prevent a specific libel, privacy breach or copyright infringement, a story with a global reach will get out somewhere. Short of imposing Chinese-style firewalls and censorship, free countries cannot consistently stop their citizens finding out what their enemies tell them, including tales of the shadowy, sordid or sensational deeds done in their names.
This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."