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@protoslacker / protoslacker.tumblr.com

I read posts online that interest, infuriate, stimulate, inspire, or otherwise move me. I'll share short snippets. Mastodon Shuffle

The pandemic is exposing the big lie of industrial agriculture and its claim that this is the only way to feed the world. When one big supply chain runs everything, the entire system becomes fragile. The reality is that smaller and more diverse networks of agriculture are the most resilient.

Raj Patel quoted in an article by Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept. THE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN IS NOT YET IN DANGER — BUT THE WORKERS WHO KEEP US FED ARE

Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

#food #politcs #supply chain #book

For along with Trump’s personal frailties is a series of political characteristics that underpins his anomie. He is a misogynist, a racist, a xenophobe and a nationalist. Those are not psychological descriptors but political ones, fortified by systems and ideology.

Gary Younge in The Guardian. Donald Trump’s sanity is not the question. The real issue is how he got into office

To reduce his presidency to a frail mind is to ignore the fact he’s an emblem of free-market, white supremacist nationalism

#white supremacy #liberal democracy #capitalism #empire #politcs

Mueller was, maybe inevitably, a disappointing witness—far from the deus ex machina a great many liberals had counted on. But in a way, it didn’t matter that much. The hearings showed you can create a damning spectacle for this president by doing little more than saying out loud the things he did that we already know to be true.

Dan Friedman in Mother Jones. Robert Mueller Is Human. But He Delivered For Democrats.

Mueller helped paint a devastating picture of Trump, even if it took some coaxing.

#mueller testimony #donald trump #politcs

A large part of the desperation that members of the conservative intellectual class mobilized in order to “get to yes” with Kavanaugh was because the case against him almost immediately morphed from one individual accusation of assault to a broad and very well-supported indictment of their entire class. What was revealed was not that Kavanaugh the man was individually monstrous but that he was a product of a monstrous milieu. The case against Kavanaugh was the case against the culture of Georgetown Prep, of fraternities at elite colleges, of the entire social world that produced the entire conservative elite. So the more we learned about its horrors, the more urgent it became to find Kavanaugh innocent and to join him in safeguarding the sacrosanct life chances and career achievements to which he was—and they were—entitled.

Alex Pareene in The Baffler. Teenage Pricks

Trumpism’s brand of boy power

#racism #white supremacy #bigotry #politcs

Overhauling the fossil-fuel economy will represent a true loss, but its sacrifices will be nowhere near the alternative.

Rachel Riederer in The New Yorker. The Other Kind of Climate Denialism

#the great dying #grief #global climate change #politcs #pyschology

Citizens and political leaders opposed to Donald Trump, for example, can’t win by articulating the most artful and sweeping condemnation of Trumpism. He is not an ideology or a political platform, but the expression of a system that seeks to degrade human beings, first by desecrating the truth, and then by degrading life itself. The opponents of Trump must “live within the truth,” and offer citizens a positive program that affirms the aims of life, which are hope, love, family, adventure, art, work, religion and everything else that is inexplicable and wondrous in the human experience.

Robert Fay at 3 Quarks Daily. Vaclav Havel’s Guide to Politically-Dangerous Times

#politcs #positive solutions #vaclav havel

If we don’t have an international connection against the imperial forces that are coming at us, we’re going under.

Cornel West in interview with Sharmini Peries at The Real News Network. Dr. Cornel West on the Global Shift Right

From Trump in the U.S. to Bolsonaro in Brazil, ordinary people in large democracies are discontented and shifting right, what can progressives do about it? Cornel West in conversation with Sharmini Peries

#empire #fascisim #world society #politcs

The problem is that women who allege abuse by men still often face male-dominated institutions that do not thoroughly and honestly investigate their claims. That problem is not new; it is very old. What is new is that this injustice now sparks bitter partisan conflict and upends long-standing courtesies. Rape survivors yell at politicians in the Senate halls. The varnish—the attractive, glossy coating that protected male oppression of women—is coming off. Brooks, Collins, and Flake may decry the “tension” this exposes. But, as King understood, the “dark depths of prejudice” can’t be overcome any other way.

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic. Civility Has Its Limits

The conflict over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination centered not on tribalism, but on a lack of justice.

#ideology #politcs #metoo

So, bearing in my mind how difficult it is to see around the next corner when history is intent on moving in an impetuous zig-zag, here is my prediction for the coming years: If Trump remains as unpopular as he is today, the conservative Supreme Court will skew the playing field even further to the Republicans’ advantage through a series of rulings on gerrymandering, voter fraud, and felons’ enfranchisement. But the court will not play along with a full assault on the independence of other institutions or with attempts to undermine how free (as opposed to how fair) elections are. If Trump, however, should somehow become significantly more popular than he is now—or do much better in the midterms than widely expected—the Supreme Court might change as radically over the next two years as the Republican-dominated Congress has over the past two.

Yascha Mounk at Slate. The Supreme Court Is Now a Partisan Institution

Kavanaugh’s confirmation means Trump controls all three branches of government. There’s only one check left on the president.

#supreme court #politcs #authoritarianism #people power

There’s an old saying that sometimes the worst part of the scandal is what’s legal, and the Russians, to their credit, studied our system and campaign finance laws and they exploited it masterfully. They’ve used pharmaceutical companies and energy companies and financial institutions to pour money into our politics, and we really have no idea the extent of their influence. One thing Vladimir Putin got right was his insistence that American democracy is also corrupt, and I think he’s showing us exactly how corrupt it is. Trump is just the most glaring example, but surely there are others, most of which we know nothing about.

Craig Unger interviewed by Sean Illing at Vox. Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades

Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history.”

#donald trump #politcs #corruption #organized crime

If there can be fruitful common ground across ideologies, it may be in finding ways to rebuild a shared sense of belonging among people who have been isolated from one another by the impact of market forces and technological change.

Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept. How the Trump Era Lays Bare the Tension in the Marriage Between Conservatism and Capitalism

Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization by Peter Kolozi

#capitalism #conservatism #globalization #book #community #politcs

Taking all his testimony together, we see a clear pattern emerge: Brett Kavanaugh has never appeared under oath before the U.S. Senate without lying.

Russ Feingold at HuffPost. We Know Brett Kavanaugh Has Lied Already

#brett kavanaugh #lies #politcs #republicans #law

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, is proposing a "soft fork" that will prevent the attacker from being able to make valid transactions, effectively freezing the funds. The stolen funds are locked in a "Child DAO" and are unable to be moved for another 27 days, Buterin says — giving the community time to debate and adopt a potential solution. "This will later be followed up by a hard fork which will give token holders the ability to recover their ether," Buterin writes. (This solution would not involve any "rollback" or negating any transactions.)

Rob Price at Business Insider. Digital currency Ethereum is cratering because of a $50 million hack

#internet #politcs #blockchain #digital currency #ethereum

The idea that consensus over technical issues can be reached more easily because it only involves objective criteria and factual observations (i.e. something either works or doesn’t) neglects the reality that “stories about standards are necessarily about power and control – they always either reify or change existing conditions and are always conscious attempts to shape the future in specific ways” *(Russell, 2012).

Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin Loveluck. The invisible politics of Bitcoin: governance crisis of a decentralised infrastructure

*Russell, A.L. (2012), “Standards, networks, and critique”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 34(3), pp. 78-80.

P2P Foundation Blog sorted P2P Money category.

#money #politcs #internet governance #bitcoin #internet #technology

And now, a group of scientists who study the “cryosphere” — all the ice and snow in the Earth’s system, at the poles but also in frozen permafrost and mountain glaciers — have unleashed a stark assessment of just how inadequate these currently pledged emissions cuts are (barring a major enhancement of ambitions in Paris). Indeed, they say that if the INDCs are the end of the story, often irreversible changes will usher in that, unfolding over vast time periods, will dramatically raise seas and pour dangerous additional amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Chris Mooney at The Washington Post. Scientists say Paris climate pledges aren’t enough to save the planet’s ice

#global climate change #ice #politcs #cop 21: un climate change conference paris

Had there been more men like Anton Schmid, a sergeant in the German Army who, Arendt writes, gave forged papers and trucks to Jewish partisans—and was executed for it—“how utterly different everything would be today.” To those who would say that such actions are “practically useless”—totalitarian regimes seek to eliminate not merely resistance but any recognition or memory of resistance—Arendt replies: “The holes of oblivion do not exist.” “One man,” she adds, with echoes of Sodom and Gomorrah, “will always be left alive to tell the story.” It’s true that “most people will comply” with tyranny, “but some people will not”—and in that zone of possibility, where an ethical minority chooses to act differently from the rest, stands a chosen people, not of descent but of dissent.

Corey Robin in The Nation. The Trials of Hannah Arendt Many have delighted in judging Hannah Arendt, maybe because they have feared her judgment.

#hannah arendt #ethics #politcs #Israel

It's not your grandchildren. It’s 20 years. In 20 years, it's going to be a really sucky world out there. The reality is so extreme that my saying this makes people think, 'You can't trust Robin because she's gone out of her mind.'

Robin Chase quoted by Nico Pitney at The Huffington Post. A Revolutionary Entrepreneur On Happiness, Money, And Raising A Supermodel

#global climate change #politcs #Robin Chase

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