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Celerity
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Celerity's Journal
April 2, 2024
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/baltimore-bridge-dei-mayor-governor/
https://archive.is/HdSvd
Silly me: I wanted to believe the overt, in-your-face racism that I saw growing up in segregated South Carolina was ancient history. I was wrong. Unapologetic racism is back, thanks to the anything-goes MAGA permission structure and the echo-chamber amplification of social media. This fact was brought home on the morning of March 26, shortly after a massive cargo ship struck and collapsed the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge spanning the entrance to Baltimore harbor.
Mayor Brandon Scott, who had raced to the scene, went before television cameras to give an update on the “unthinkable tragedy,” as any mayor would have done. But Scott is African American — and for MAGA trolls on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, that means he can’t be seen as just any mayor. “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge,” one such troll posted, along with a clip of Scott’s remarks, to his more than 275,000 followers. “It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.”
“DEI” is shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion. For decades, since the triumph of the civil rights movement, those concepts have been lauded in our public discourse as virtues. For the unhinged far right, however, “DEI” has come to mean “any Black or Brown person who holds a position of authority that we think should have gone to a White man.” Scott’s anonymous attacker drew amens from a like-minded crowd on X. “He looks like your average street criminal,” wrote one. “Dude just looks like someone who was there as an eye witness lol,” offered another.
Okay, you could argue that this might be more stupid than racist. Mayors don’t get their jobs through DEI hiring practices; they earn them through a process called democracy. Scott, 39, was elected in 2020 in a landslide, winning more than 70 percent of the vote. In a city whose population is more than 60 percent African American, according to Census Bureau figures, it should surprise no one that the mayor might happen to be Black. One of Scott’s MAGA critics on X, however, took these facts into account and still tried to delegitimize him: “DEI: Who cares when your city is going to sh-t because of drugs, increased crime, defunding police and poor infrastructure when you have a Mayor that ‘looks like you’, WINNING!!!!!”
snip
'DEI mayor' insults prove that unapologetic racism is back
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/baltimore-bridge-dei-mayor-governor/
https://archive.is/HdSvd
Silly me: I wanted to believe the overt, in-your-face racism that I saw growing up in segregated South Carolina was ancient history. I was wrong. Unapologetic racism is back, thanks to the anything-goes MAGA permission structure and the echo-chamber amplification of social media. This fact was brought home on the morning of March 26, shortly after a massive cargo ship struck and collapsed the iconic Francis Scott Key Bridge spanning the entrance to Baltimore harbor.
Mayor Brandon Scott, who had raced to the scene, went before television cameras to give an update on the “unthinkable tragedy,” as any mayor would have done. But Scott is African American — and for MAGA trolls on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, that means he can’t be seen as just any mayor. “This is Baltimore’s DEI mayor commenting on the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge,” one such troll posted, along with a clip of Scott’s remarks, to his more than 275,000 followers. “It’s going to get so, so much worse. Prepare accordingly.”
“DEI” is shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion. For decades, since the triumph of the civil rights movement, those concepts have been lauded in our public discourse as virtues. For the unhinged far right, however, “DEI” has come to mean “any Black or Brown person who holds a position of authority that we think should have gone to a White man.” Scott’s anonymous attacker drew amens from a like-minded crowd on X. “He looks like your average street criminal,” wrote one. “Dude just looks like someone who was there as an eye witness lol,” offered another.
Okay, you could argue that this might be more stupid than racist. Mayors don’t get their jobs through DEI hiring practices; they earn them through a process called democracy. Scott, 39, was elected in 2020 in a landslide, winning more than 70 percent of the vote. In a city whose population is more than 60 percent African American, according to Census Bureau figures, it should surprise no one that the mayor might happen to be Black. One of Scott’s MAGA critics on X, however, took these facts into account and still tried to delegitimize him: “DEI: Who cares when your city is going to sh-t because of drugs, increased crime, defunding police and poor infrastructure when you have a Mayor that ‘looks like you’, WINNING!!!!!”
snip
April 2, 2024
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/millennials-capitalism-security-retirement/
https://archive.is/hwyEw
Demonstrators calling for Congress to take bold actions to fight global warming are seen outside the Capitol in February 2023. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
I was at an event recently where several top business executives were perplexed about why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism. What could they do to restore trust in our economic system? My suggestion was simple: Treat workers better. This wasn’t the answer they wanted. Many rushed to tell me how generous their pay raises have been, how easy it is to go from an entry-level job to management at their company, and how they have diversified their workforce. These are all welcome efforts, but they miss the bigger picture. Young people in America have come of age during the Great Recession, the sluggish recovery that followed and then the coronavirus pandemic. Unemployment has been 10 percent or higher twice in the past 15 years. Young workers have seen how expendable they are to companies and how quickly financial security can evaporate.
Millennials have had such a tumultuous start in the workforce, they have been nicknamed the “unluckiest generation.” They are struggling to navigate the most unaffordable housing market since the early 1980s. And that’s before anyone talks about the larger challenges of climate change, wars and political partisanship and paralysis. No one expects business leaders to solve all these problems. But they need to start acknowledging how dramatically the relationship between workers and employers has changed in the past half-century. People no longer work for the same company for the bulk of their careers. There are benefits to job-switching: It usually leads to bigger pay raises. But it has made many other aspects of people’s financial lives more complicated and less secure. Each new job has a unique, complex benefit package. Workers are now largely on their own to figure out — and fund — their retirement, plus a growing share of their health care and educational training. It is even more complicated for the millions of people in gig, freelance or contract jobs who are entirely on their own.
“The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution has been, for most people, a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty,” BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter published last week. Many Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement on their own in 401(k)s and other individual plans. And when they do retire, they struggle to know how much to spend, because no one knows whether they will need their nest egg for a few more years — or decades. Pension plans took care of this uncertainty by guaranteeing a monthly payment for as long as someone lived. The risks were on the company. Fink was refreshingly blunt that it’s not hard to figure out why millennials and Gen Z workers are economically anxious. “They believe my generation — the Baby Boomers — have focused on their own financial well-being to the detriment of who comes next. And in the case of retirement, they’re right,” he said.
While Fink correctly identified a key problem, his proposed solution wasn’t to bring back pension plans. It was a new BlackRock product that helps people better manage their retirement spending. In other words, it’s a way for BlackRock to likely make more money. It’s a shame that Fink didn’t use his bullhorn to call on business and political leaders to shore up Social Security. It’s hugely popular and the country’s most successful policy to keep people out of poverty. Young people have seen the headlines that, if nothing changes, Social Security will start having to reduce benefits in 2034. It’s another reason to worry. Fink calls for raising the retirement age. That’s probably part of the solution. But a better way to ensure that Social Security will be there for younger generations is to raise taxes slightly on corporations and the wealthy. It wouldn’t take much to restore this critical source of financial security for millennials and Gen Z.
snip
Here's why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/millennials-capitalism-security-retirement/
https://archive.is/hwyEw
Demonstrators calling for Congress to take bold actions to fight global warming are seen outside the Capitol in February 2023. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
I was at an event recently where several top business executives were perplexed about why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism. What could they do to restore trust in our economic system? My suggestion was simple: Treat workers better. This wasn’t the answer they wanted. Many rushed to tell me how generous their pay raises have been, how easy it is to go from an entry-level job to management at their company, and how they have diversified their workforce. These are all welcome efforts, but they miss the bigger picture. Young people in America have come of age during the Great Recession, the sluggish recovery that followed and then the coronavirus pandemic. Unemployment has been 10 percent or higher twice in the past 15 years. Young workers have seen how expendable they are to companies and how quickly financial security can evaporate.
Millennials have had such a tumultuous start in the workforce, they have been nicknamed the “unluckiest generation.” They are struggling to navigate the most unaffordable housing market since the early 1980s. And that’s before anyone talks about the larger challenges of climate change, wars and political partisanship and paralysis. No one expects business leaders to solve all these problems. But they need to start acknowledging how dramatically the relationship between workers and employers has changed in the past half-century. People no longer work for the same company for the bulk of their careers. There are benefits to job-switching: It usually leads to bigger pay raises. But it has made many other aspects of people’s financial lives more complicated and less secure. Each new job has a unique, complex benefit package. Workers are now largely on their own to figure out — and fund — their retirement, plus a growing share of their health care and educational training. It is even more complicated for the millions of people in gig, freelance or contract jobs who are entirely on their own.
“The shift from defined benefit to defined contribution has been, for most people, a shift from financial certainty to financial uncertainty,” BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink wrote in his annual letter published last week. Many Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement on their own in 401(k)s and other individual plans. And when they do retire, they struggle to know how much to spend, because no one knows whether they will need their nest egg for a few more years — or decades. Pension plans took care of this uncertainty by guaranteeing a monthly payment for as long as someone lived. The risks were on the company. Fink was refreshingly blunt that it’s not hard to figure out why millennials and Gen Z workers are economically anxious. “They believe my generation — the Baby Boomers — have focused on their own financial well-being to the detriment of who comes next. And in the case of retirement, they’re right,” he said.
While Fink correctly identified a key problem, his proposed solution wasn’t to bring back pension plans. It was a new BlackRock product that helps people better manage their retirement spending. In other words, it’s a way for BlackRock to likely make more money. It’s a shame that Fink didn’t use his bullhorn to call on business and political leaders to shore up Social Security. It’s hugely popular and the country’s most successful policy to keep people out of poverty. Young people have seen the headlines that, if nothing changes, Social Security will start having to reduce benefits in 2034. It’s another reason to worry. Fink calls for raising the retirement age. That’s probably part of the solution. But a better way to ensure that Social Security will be there for younger generations is to raise taxes slightly on corporations and the wealthy. It wouldn’t take much to restore this critical source of financial security for millennials and Gen Z.
snip
April 2, 2024
In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy
https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south
In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report, Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment. Although controversial, Roosevelt’s comments were historically accurate. The president’s well-read and highly educated young southern advisors had convinced him that the South’s political problems were partially a result of ‘economic colonialism’ – namely, that the South was used as an extractive economy for the rest of the nation, leaving the region both impoverished and underdeveloped. Plantation slavery had made the planters rich, but it left the South poor.
Unlike the industrialising North and, eventually, the developing and urbanising West, the high stratification and concentrated wealth of the 19th-century South laid the foundations for its 20th-century problems. The region’s richest white people profited wildly from various forms of unfree labour, from slavery and penal servitude to child indenture and debt peonage; they also invested very little in roads, schools, utilities and other forms of infrastructure and development. The combination of great wealth and extreme maldistribution has left people in the South impoverished, underpaid, underserved and undereducated, with the shortest lifespans in all of the United States. Southerners, both Black and white, are less educated and less healthy than other Americans. They are more violent and more likely to die young.
Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Georgia. June 1941. Photo by Jack Delano/Library of Congress
Now, 86 years after Roosevelt’s report, the South has returned to historically high levels of economic inequality, lagging behind the rest of the US by every measurable standard. The plight of the South is a direct result of its long history of brutal labour exploitation and its elites’ refusal to invest in their communities. They have kept the South in dire poverty, stifled creativity and innovation, and have all but prevented workers from attaining any kind of real power. With the rapid industrialisation spurred by the Second World War, the South made great economic strides, but never quite caught up with the prosperity of the rest of the US. While the South’s gross domestic product has remained around 90 per cent of the US rate for dozens of years, deindustrialisation of the 1990s devastated rural areas. Since then, hospitals and medical clinics have closed in record numbers, and deaths of despair (those from alcohol, drugs or suicide) have skyrocketed, as has substance abuse. Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.
The American South is typically defined as the states of the former Confederacy, stretching north to the Mason-Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania, and west to Texas and Oklahoma. Today, one-fifth of the South’s counties are marred with the ‘persistent poverty’ designation, meaning they have had poverty rates above 20 per cent for more than 30 years. Four-fifths of all persistently poor counties in the nation are in the states of the former Confederacy. The data is clear that most Southern states continue to be impoverished and politically backwards. Whether measured in terms of development, health or happiness, the region is bad at everything good, and good at everything bad. The recent popularity in liberal circles of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) to explain the region’s exceptionalism has slowed in recent years. The NHC emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, as one historian wrote, by claiming ‘slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.’ It seems likely that during the post-Cold War triumph of capitalism, a subset of historians began trying to tie much of the past to the term – with the most extreme instance being the insistence that slavery was the key to American capitalism. While the NHC scholars rarely define terms like ‘capitalism’, the problems with their theories are more than academic. Unfortunately, presenting enslavers as cunning, profit-driven businessmen not only obscures important features about the past, it also downplays immense regional differences in economic development.
snip
The Southern Gap: Underdevelopment in the American South
In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy
https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south
In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report, Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment. Although controversial, Roosevelt’s comments were historically accurate. The president’s well-read and highly educated young southern advisors had convinced him that the South’s political problems were partially a result of ‘economic colonialism’ – namely, that the South was used as an extractive economy for the rest of the nation, leaving the region both impoverished and underdeveloped. Plantation slavery had made the planters rich, but it left the South poor.
Unlike the industrialising North and, eventually, the developing and urbanising West, the high stratification and concentrated wealth of the 19th-century South laid the foundations for its 20th-century problems. The region’s richest white people profited wildly from various forms of unfree labour, from slavery and penal servitude to child indenture and debt peonage; they also invested very little in roads, schools, utilities and other forms of infrastructure and development. The combination of great wealth and extreme maldistribution has left people in the South impoverished, underpaid, underserved and undereducated, with the shortest lifespans in all of the United States. Southerners, both Black and white, are less educated and less healthy than other Americans. They are more violent and more likely to die young.
Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Georgia. June 1941. Photo by Jack Delano/Library of Congress
Now, 86 years after Roosevelt’s report, the South has returned to historically high levels of economic inequality, lagging behind the rest of the US by every measurable standard. The plight of the South is a direct result of its long history of brutal labour exploitation and its elites’ refusal to invest in their communities. They have kept the South in dire poverty, stifled creativity and innovation, and have all but prevented workers from attaining any kind of real power. With the rapid industrialisation spurred by the Second World War, the South made great economic strides, but never quite caught up with the prosperity of the rest of the US. While the South’s gross domestic product has remained around 90 per cent of the US rate for dozens of years, deindustrialisation of the 1990s devastated rural areas. Since then, hospitals and medical clinics have closed in record numbers, and deaths of despair (those from alcohol, drugs or suicide) have skyrocketed, as has substance abuse. Southerners in general are isolated and lonely, and wealth and power are heavily concentrated: there are a few thousand incredibly wealthy families – almost all of them the direct descendants of the Confederacy’s wealthiest slaveholders – a smaller-than-average middle class, and masses of poor people, working class or not. The South, with few worker protections, prevents its working classes from earning a living wage. It’s virtually impossible to exist on the meagre income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially since the US has no social healthcare benefits.
The American South is typically defined as the states of the former Confederacy, stretching north to the Mason-Dixon line separating Maryland from Pennsylvania, and west to Texas and Oklahoma. Today, one-fifth of the South’s counties are marred with the ‘persistent poverty’ designation, meaning they have had poverty rates above 20 per cent for more than 30 years. Four-fifths of all persistently poor counties in the nation are in the states of the former Confederacy. The data is clear that most Southern states continue to be impoverished and politically backwards. Whether measured in terms of development, health or happiness, the region is bad at everything good, and good at everything bad. The recent popularity in liberal circles of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) to explain the region’s exceptionalism has slowed in recent years. The NHC emerged in the 2000s and 2010s, as one historian wrote, by claiming ‘slavery as integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.’ It seems likely that during the post-Cold War triumph of capitalism, a subset of historians began trying to tie much of the past to the term – with the most extreme instance being the insistence that slavery was the key to American capitalism. While the NHC scholars rarely define terms like ‘capitalism’, the problems with their theories are more than academic. Unfortunately, presenting enslavers as cunning, profit-driven businessmen not only obscures important features about the past, it also downplays immense regional differences in economic development.
snip
April 1, 2024
TRACKLIST:
00:00 - Anima & Martin Magal - Planet
05:45 - Frannz - Lost In The Space
10:00 - Weekend Heroes - Elevate
14:15 - Cherry - Euphoria
19:00 - Miss Monique - All I Got
25:00 - GUGGA [BR] - Space Castle
31:30 - Perpetual Universe - No Future
37:30 - Silver Panda & Skapi - Breakout
42:00 - Miss Monique - Four Hills
47:45 - Austin Pettit - Labyrinth
53:00 - Andrewboy - Forever
59:00 - Alex Sol - My Side
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Monique
Miss Monique, stage name of Olesia Arkusha (Олеся Аркуша in Cyrillic alphabet), born 1992, is a Ukrainian DJ and producer. She became known in the electronic music world due to the creation of the YouTube channels called "Mind Games" and "MiMo Weekly", but also due to releases on labels such as Black Hole Recordings or Bonzai Progressive.
Originally from Ukraine, she found her vocation at the beginning of the 2010s. Based in Kyiv, Miss Monique gradually made a name for herself and became one of the most recognised DJs in Eastern Europe. Miss Monique is also considered the most recognised female progressive house artist in Europe. Miss Monique is one of the 20 most popular Ukrainian pop stars. and her hit Way of the Wind was ranked the 14th best progressive house song of the year 2021. Some of her videos posted on YouTube routinely reach over 1 million views, with one having over 20 million views.
24 February 2022, Miss Monique and her family spent the first two weeks sleeping in cars on the streets of Kyiv, then had to flee to Vinnytsia in early March, and a few days later out of the country. She described the Russian attack on her country as 'hell', and 'the hardest experience of my life'.
After two months, Miss Monique returned to Kyiv as she felt bringing joy to people with her music was the best way to help her country; although her music did not change, she and her label Siona Records stopped supporting and working with Russian artists (who, to her surprise, seemed to carry on with business as usual as if the war did not exist). On 24 August 2022, Miss Monique and other Ukrainian DJs performed a fundraising rave concert in Vilnius, Lithuania to mark the Independence Day of Ukraine. Miss Monique said: 'This event in Vilnius will help not just to collect money for Ukrainians but remind the world that the war is not over. People are still dying and we must to do something together and stop Russia's terrorism.' Afterwards she stated that pro-Ukrainian support in Lithuania had been "amazing", with many people not just donating for humanitarian aid, but waving flags and wearing national dresses of Ukraine.
Miss Monique (Ukraine) - Siona Records: 3rd Anniversary @ Ibiza [Melodic Techno/Progressive House DJ Mix] 4K
TRACKLIST:
00:00 - Anima & Martin Magal - Planet
05:45 - Frannz - Lost In The Space
10:00 - Weekend Heroes - Elevate
14:15 - Cherry - Euphoria
19:00 - Miss Monique - All I Got
25:00 - GUGGA [BR] - Space Castle
31:30 - Perpetual Universe - No Future
37:30 - Silver Panda & Skapi - Breakout
42:00 - Miss Monique - Four Hills
47:45 - Austin Pettit - Labyrinth
53:00 - Andrewboy - Forever
59:00 - Alex Sol - My Side
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Monique
Miss Monique, stage name of Olesia Arkusha (Олеся Аркуша in Cyrillic alphabet), born 1992, is a Ukrainian DJ and producer. She became known in the electronic music world due to the creation of the YouTube channels called "Mind Games" and "MiMo Weekly", but also due to releases on labels such as Black Hole Recordings or Bonzai Progressive.
Originally from Ukraine, she found her vocation at the beginning of the 2010s. Based in Kyiv, Miss Monique gradually made a name for herself and became one of the most recognised DJs in Eastern Europe. Miss Monique is also considered the most recognised female progressive house artist in Europe. Miss Monique is one of the 20 most popular Ukrainian pop stars. and her hit Way of the Wind was ranked the 14th best progressive house song of the year 2021. Some of her videos posted on YouTube routinely reach over 1 million views, with one having over 20 million views.
24 February 2022, Miss Monique and her family spent the first two weeks sleeping in cars on the streets of Kyiv, then had to flee to Vinnytsia in early March, and a few days later out of the country. She described the Russian attack on her country as 'hell', and 'the hardest experience of my life'.
After two months, Miss Monique returned to Kyiv as she felt bringing joy to people with her music was the best way to help her country; although her music did not change, she and her label Siona Records stopped supporting and working with Russian artists (who, to her surprise, seemed to carry on with business as usual as if the war did not exist). On 24 August 2022, Miss Monique and other Ukrainian DJs performed a fundraising rave concert in Vilnius, Lithuania to mark the Independence Day of Ukraine. Miss Monique said: 'This event in Vilnius will help not just to collect money for Ukrainians but remind the world that the war is not over. People are still dying and we must to do something together and stop Russia's terrorism.' Afterwards she stated that pro-Ukrainian support in Lithuania had been "amazing", with many people not just donating for humanitarian aid, but waving flags and wearing national dresses of Ukraine.
April 1, 2024
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/maxwell-frost-angela-alsobrooks-maryland-endorse_n_6609ac7ae4b03e016eb4f124
Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida progressive and the first Gen Z member of Congress, endorsed Angela Alsobrooks for Senate in Maryland, where she is running to become the state’s first Black female U.S. senator. “We need bold progressive fighters who are going to help make sure that we usher in an agenda of ending gun violence, of defeating the climate crisis and of centering vulnerable communities,” Frost told HuffPost. “When we talk about someone like Angela Alsobrooks, she’s been doing the work time and time again.”
Frost’s endorsement is the latest escalation of the intra-party brawl brewing in Maryland, where there’s a suddenly competitive race for an open seat that should be a shoo-in for Democrats. Alsobrooks, the county executive for Prince George’s County, is pitted against Rep. David Trone in the May contest for the Democratic nomination. Both candidates have rolled out extensive slates of endorsements from different wings of the party, with Frost, a progressive, being the latest get for Alsobrooks, who also has the backing of members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a majority of Maryland’s congressional delegation.
Trone, meanwhile, has a coalition of moderate congressional Democrats behind him, including Rep. Adam Schiff, who is well-positioned to become California’s next U.S. senator in November. Frost, a former national organizing director for the youth-led anti-gun violence group March for Our Lives, was driven to run for office following the 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In 2022, Frost, now 27, became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. Alsobrooks, 53, told HuffPost she shares Frost’s commitment to gun safety measures, including an assault weapons ban.
“I have spent now a good portion of my career working to keep families safe,” Alsobrooks said, adding she and Frost “share in common a philosophy, which is that you don’t get to sit on the sidelines.” “I also know that the congressman was spurred to action based on his concern for safety, and that’s literally how I got into elective office in 2010. I was concerned about the world that my daughter was growing up in,” she said. “Gun violence in our country at this point is an epidemic, and I think in order to solve it, we need a broad coalition working on it.” Alsobrooks served two terms as the state’s attorney for Prince George’s County in suburban DC before becoming its county executive in 2018.
snip
Gen Z Rep. Maxwell Frost Endorses Maryland Democrat Angela Alsobrooks
Frost, the youngest member of the U.S. House, is the latest high-profile Democrat to get behind Alsobrooks in Maryland's Senate primary.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/maxwell-frost-angela-alsobrooks-maryland-endorse_n_6609ac7ae4b03e016eb4f124
Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Florida progressive and the first Gen Z member of Congress, endorsed Angela Alsobrooks for Senate in Maryland, where she is running to become the state’s first Black female U.S. senator. “We need bold progressive fighters who are going to help make sure that we usher in an agenda of ending gun violence, of defeating the climate crisis and of centering vulnerable communities,” Frost told HuffPost. “When we talk about someone like Angela Alsobrooks, she’s been doing the work time and time again.”
Frost’s endorsement is the latest escalation of the intra-party brawl brewing in Maryland, where there’s a suddenly competitive race for an open seat that should be a shoo-in for Democrats. Alsobrooks, the county executive for Prince George’s County, is pitted against Rep. David Trone in the May contest for the Democratic nomination. Both candidates have rolled out extensive slates of endorsements from different wings of the party, with Frost, a progressive, being the latest get for Alsobrooks, who also has the backing of members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a majority of Maryland’s congressional delegation.
Trone, meanwhile, has a coalition of moderate congressional Democrats behind him, including Rep. Adam Schiff, who is well-positioned to become California’s next U.S. senator in November. Frost, a former national organizing director for the youth-led anti-gun violence group March for Our Lives, was driven to run for office following the 2018 shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. In 2022, Frost, now 27, became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. Alsobrooks, 53, told HuffPost she shares Frost’s commitment to gun safety measures, including an assault weapons ban.
“I have spent now a good portion of my career working to keep families safe,” Alsobrooks said, adding she and Frost “share in common a philosophy, which is that you don’t get to sit on the sidelines.” “I also know that the congressman was spurred to action based on his concern for safety, and that’s literally how I got into elective office in 2010. I was concerned about the world that my daughter was growing up in,” she said. “Gun violence in our country at this point is an epidemic, and I think in order to solve it, we need a broad coalition working on it.” Alsobrooks served two terms as the state’s attorney for Prince George’s County in suburban DC before becoming its county executive in 2018.
snip
April 1, 2024
For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience
https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-stieglers-philosophy-on-how-technology-shapes-our-world
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?
snip
Our tools shape our selves
For Bernard Stiegler, a visionary philosopher of our digital age, technics is the defining feature of human experience
https://aeon.co/essays/bernard-stieglers-philosophy-on-how-technology-shapes-our-world
It has become almost impossible to separate the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences. Reality is parsed through glowing screens, unending data feeds, biometric feedback loops, digital protheses and expanding networks that link our virtual selves to satellite arrays in geostationary orbit. Wristwatches interpret our physical condition by counting steps and heartbeats. Phones track how we spend our time online, map the geographic location of the places we visit and record our histories in digital archives. Social media platforms forge alliances and create new political possibilities. And vast wireless networks – connecting satellites, drones and ‘smart’ weapons – determine how the wars of our era are being waged. Our experiences of the world are soaked with digital technologies.
But for the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, one of the earliest and foremost theorists of our digital age, understanding the world requires us to move beyond the standard view of technology. Stiegler believed that technology is not just about the effects of digital tools and the ways that they impact our lives. It is not just about how devices are created and wielded by powerful organisations, nation-states or individuals. Our relationship with technology is about something deeper and more fundamental. It is about technics.
According to Stiegler, technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible, whether that is a state-of-the-art brain-computer interface such as Neuralink, or a prehistoric flint axe used to clear a forest. But don’t be mistaken: ‘technics’ is not simply another word for ‘technology’. As Martin Heidegger wrote in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954), which used the German term Technik instead of Technologie in the original title: the ‘essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ This aligns with the history of the word: the etymology of ‘technics’ leads us back to something like the ancient Greek term for art – technē. The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
This is Stiegler’s legacy. Throughout his life, he took this idea of technics, first explored while he was imprisoned for armed robbery, further than anyone else. But his ideas have often been overlooked and misunderstood, even before he died in 2020. Today, they are more necessary than ever. How else can we learn to disentangle the effects of digital technologies from our everyday experiences? How else can we begin to grasp the history of our strange reality?
snip
April 1, 2024
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/supreme-court-justices-decisions-ethics/
https://archive.is/V8O9n
Supreme Court observers frequently refer to its right-wing majority of six as a single bloc. However, differences among those six have become more apparent over time. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas’s extreme judicial activism, partisan screeds and ethics controversies put them in a category unto themselves. Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has demonstrated surprising independence.
Watch Justice Barrett.
Not all Republican-appointed judges are the same. In Trump v. Anderson (concerning disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of four-time indicted and former president Donald Trump), for example, Barrett along with Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor criticized the maximalist majority opinion, which held that not only could state courts not determine disqualification but that Congress had to act before any candidate could be disqualified from federal office. Like the so-called liberal justices, Barrett was disinclined to address “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.” The court decided too much, she agreed. Her complaint with the so-called liberal justices was primarily tonal. (“This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”)
Likewise in United States v. Texas (considering the stay on enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 4 immigration law), Barrett along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh offered the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit an opening to take up the case promptly, which it did, rather than wade into a procedural fight over a stay in a case concerning Texas’s constitutionally suspect law. As Supreme Court expert Steve Vladeck put it, “the Barrett/Kavanaugh concurrence went out of its way to nudge the Fifth Circuit — noting not only that the Fifth Circuit should be able to rule on the stay pending appeal ‘promptly,’ but that, ‘If a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this Court.’” In essence, Barrett said the Supreme Court would not meddle in a circuit’s administrative business. But if the 5th Circuit actually allowed this constitutional monstrosity to proceed, she would have a different view.
And in Moore v. Harper (the independent state legislature doctrine), Barrett joined in the chief justice’s majority opinion along with the three Democratic-appointed justices in batting down the radical notion that state courts had no role in determining alleged violations of state election laws (provided they did “not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review”). Beyond her opinions in high profile cases, Barrett also sought to repair the court’s reputation damaged by right-wing partisanship. She has started appearing alongside Sotomayor publicly to insist that the court’s ideological combatants are more collegial than they might appear. Perhaps she is. Barrett is no Sandra Day O’Connor (a true swing justice). Barrett’s stance on Roe v. Wade was just as extreme as the other right-wingers. Nevertheless, her efforts to carve an independent niche on the court should not be ignored.
On the other hand, there is no limit to what Justices Alito and Thomas will do..................
snip
Jennifer Rubin: What we have learned about the Supreme Court's right-wingers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/01/supreme-court-justices-decisions-ethics/
https://archive.is/V8O9n
Supreme Court observers frequently refer to its right-wing majority of six as a single bloc. However, differences among those six have become more apparent over time. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas’s extreme judicial activism, partisan screeds and ethics controversies put them in a category unto themselves. Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has demonstrated surprising independence.
Watch Justice Barrett.
Not all Republican-appointed judges are the same. In Trump v. Anderson (concerning disqualification under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of four-time indicted and former president Donald Trump), for example, Barrett along with Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor criticized the maximalist majority opinion, which held that not only could state courts not determine disqualification but that Congress had to act before any candidate could be disqualified from federal office. Like the so-called liberal justices, Barrett was disinclined to address “the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.” The court decided too much, she agreed. Her complaint with the so-called liberal justices was primarily tonal. (“This is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency.”)
Likewise in United States v. Texas (considering the stay on enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 4 immigration law), Barrett along with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh offered the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit an opening to take up the case promptly, which it did, rather than wade into a procedural fight over a stay in a case concerning Texas’s constitutionally suspect law. As Supreme Court expert Steve Vladeck put it, “the Barrett/Kavanaugh concurrence went out of its way to nudge the Fifth Circuit — noting not only that the Fifth Circuit should be able to rule on the stay pending appeal ‘promptly,’ but that, ‘If a decision does not issue soon, the applicants may return to this Court.’” In essence, Barrett said the Supreme Court would not meddle in a circuit’s administrative business. But if the 5th Circuit actually allowed this constitutional monstrosity to proceed, she would have a different view.
And in Moore v. Harper (the independent state legislature doctrine), Barrett joined in the chief justice’s majority opinion along with the three Democratic-appointed justices in batting down the radical notion that state courts had no role in determining alleged violations of state election laws (provided they did “not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review”). Beyond her opinions in high profile cases, Barrett also sought to repair the court’s reputation damaged by right-wing partisanship. She has started appearing alongside Sotomayor publicly to insist that the court’s ideological combatants are more collegial than they might appear. Perhaps she is. Barrett is no Sandra Day O’Connor (a true swing justice). Barrett’s stance on Roe v. Wade was just as extreme as the other right-wingers. Nevertheless, her efforts to carve an independent niche on the court should not be ignored.
On the other hand, there is no limit to what Justices Alito and Thomas will do..................
snip
April 1, 2024
TRACKLIST:
00:00 Kos:mo - Speak Up (Original Mix)
05:00 Turquoise Music, Sam WOLFE - Hold On (feat. Turquoise Music)
09:21 MOTVS - Dna (Original Mix)
13:40 Danny Avila (ES) - Notre Dame (Original Mix)
18:02 MOTVS - Automa (Original Mix)
22:35 Feyln - Swine (Extended Mix)
27:35 Kos:mo - On My Mind (ORiginal Mix)
31:55 UMEK, Sam WOLFE - Robocop (Original Mix)
36:30 UMEK - Annihilating Rhythm (Original Mix)
41:11 JAVIIS - Stardust (Danzah Remix)
45:50 HNTR - Away Too Long (Original Mix)
50:10 Peku, Bluntac - Leave The World Behind (Original Mix)
53:07 HNTR - Mind Games (Original Mix)
TECHNO MIX 2024 - RAVE NEW WORLD - Mixed by EJ
TRACKLIST:
00:00 Kos:mo - Speak Up (Original Mix)
05:00 Turquoise Music, Sam WOLFE - Hold On (feat. Turquoise Music)
09:21 MOTVS - Dna (Original Mix)
13:40 Danny Avila (ES) - Notre Dame (Original Mix)
18:02 MOTVS - Automa (Original Mix)
22:35 Feyln - Swine (Extended Mix)
27:35 Kos:mo - On My Mind (ORiginal Mix)
31:55 UMEK, Sam WOLFE - Robocop (Original Mix)
36:30 UMEK - Annihilating Rhythm (Original Mix)
41:11 JAVIIS - Stardust (Danzah Remix)
45:50 HNTR - Away Too Long (Original Mix)
50:10 Peku, Bluntac - Leave The World Behind (Original Mix)
53:07 HNTR - Mind Games (Original Mix)
April 1, 2024
https://www.meidastouch.com/news/maga-influencers-falsely-claim-trump-paid-mortgage-for-slain-nypd-officers-family
David Zere, host of the MAGA Real America's Voice show Breaking Point, kicked off a firestorm of social media misinformation Friday when he falsely claimed that disgraced former President Donald Trump had paid off the mortgage for the family of slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller. Trump used the wake for Officer Diller, who was killed at a traffic stop on Monday, as a photo op, posing for cameras in front of a line of NYPD officers and railing against crime in the U.S.
“We have to get back to law and order. We have to do a lot of things differently. This is not working. This is happening too often,” Trump said, despite violent crime rates being lower now than they were during his presidency. Zere said in an interview with Jack Posobiec prior to the wake, "The story here is that Trump gave a donation to Tunnels to Towers, I believe he paid off the mortgage for this family." Trump himself never claimed he would be donating to pay off Diller's mortgage, but the lie quickly spread on social media following Zere's interview. Students for Trump Chair Ryan Fournier posted, "[Trump] has a huge heart and I've seen it time and time again."
https://twitter.com/RyanAFournier/status/1773742531370430484
Other MAGA accounts chimed in to praise the former President for his supposed act of charity for the fallen officer's family, calling him a "man of the people" and saying "this is our President who cares."
https://twitter.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1773438105967587538
https://twitter.com/PU28453638/status/1773412739508994214
https://twitter.com/MattZimmerman26/status/1773452742620520942
In reality, Tunnels to Towers Foundation, a non profit that provides "mortgage-free homes to Gold Star and fallen first responder families with young children, and [builds] specially-adapted smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders," quickly announced it would be paying off Diller's mortgage to provide relief for his family. The charity put a button link for the public to donate to Diller's mortgage on the home page of its website:
snip
MAGA Influencers Falsely Claim Trump Paid Mortgage for Slain NYPD Officer's Family
MAGA misinformation takes flight following Trump's photo op at NYPD officer's wakehttps://www.meidastouch.com/news/maga-influencers-falsely-claim-trump-paid-mortgage-for-slain-nypd-officers-family
David Zere, host of the MAGA Real America's Voice show Breaking Point, kicked off a firestorm of social media misinformation Friday when he falsely claimed that disgraced former President Donald Trump had paid off the mortgage for the family of slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller. Trump used the wake for Officer Diller, who was killed at a traffic stop on Monday, as a photo op, posing for cameras in front of a line of NYPD officers and railing against crime in the U.S.
“We have to get back to law and order. We have to do a lot of things differently. This is not working. This is happening too often,” Trump said, despite violent crime rates being lower now than they were during his presidency. Zere said in an interview with Jack Posobiec prior to the wake, "The story here is that Trump gave a donation to Tunnels to Towers, I believe he paid off the mortgage for this family." Trump himself never claimed he would be donating to pay off Diller's mortgage, but the lie quickly spread on social media following Zere's interview. Students for Trump Chair Ryan Fournier posted, "[Trump] has a huge heart and I've seen it time and time again."
https://twitter.com/RyanAFournier/status/1773742531370430484
Other MAGA accounts chimed in to praise the former President for his supposed act of charity for the fallen officer's family, calling him a "man of the people" and saying "this is our President who cares."
https://twitter.com/MJTruthUltra/status/1773438105967587538
https://twitter.com/PU28453638/status/1773412739508994214
https://twitter.com/MattZimmerman26/status/1773452742620520942
In reality, Tunnels to Towers Foundation, a non profit that provides "mortgage-free homes to Gold Star and fallen first responder families with young children, and [builds] specially-adapted smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders," quickly announced it would be paying off Diller's mortgage to provide relief for his family. The charity put a button link for the public to donate to Diller's mortgage on the home page of its website:
snip
April 1, 2024
We should counter the radical right, Robert Misik writes, not with left-wing populism but the power of reason.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-case-for-a-radical-liberal-left
The liberal left seeks to engage diverse individual citizens in dialogue in the public sphere, whereas populists claim to speak on behalf of a homogenised ‘people’ (Henrik Winther Andersen / shutterstock.com)
Today, democracy is threatened almost everywhere by the spirit of illiberalism, anti-pluralism and an authoritarian far right. This has a number of sources. They include a growing climate of pessimism and fear of decline—displacing the feeling of progress associated with the postwar decades in western Europe—as well as counter-reactions to progressive cultural changes over time, such as those associated with tolerance and anti-discrimination. Also at work however has been a dumbing down of discourse. To borrow a phrase from Jürgen Habermas, in a ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ straightforward propaganda has been conveyed through ‘social media’ and the internet in general, the headline culture of the tabloids and media sensationalism. Right-wing extremism operates via exaggeration, simplification and the conjuring up of imagined enemies. Although it is beholden to its rich patrons, it stylises itself as the advocate of regular guys against ‘those up there’, the ‘elites’ and politicians: all are portrayed as bought, corrupt, incompetent, aloof, ‘against the people’, indeed agents of a ‘system’.
Perverse revolt
There is though a kernel of good in this—the longing for something completely different, for a politics that is not satisfied with the mere administration of what exists and the management of details. It is a kind of revolt in perverse forms, the desire for a real change in the system. Hence the contention that broad sections of the moderate left have left these rebellious energies to the extreme right. This criticism is sometimes accompanied by a plea for ‘left-wing’ populism. What this is supposed to be is however often not so clear. The British-Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who died a few years ago, was regarded as one of the smartest advocates of left-wing populism. For Laclau, the left had to appeal to the underprivileged—as a resistant ‘we’, against the ‘they’, the established, the rich, the winners, those who created the system to their advantage. Others associate left-wing populism simply with more radicalism or easily understandable demands. In this vein, such demands should be couched in powerful, resonant language, which does not get lost in lifeless exchanges—‘on the one hand’ … ‘on the other hand’—among progressives in government.
Depressing simplifications
Many such arguments not only sound plausible but have a lot going for them. Yet left-wing populism very often leads into a dead end, where a regressive left presents its arguments with a sledgehammer to a world divided into black and white, good and evil. Such Manicheanism ignores the ambiguities of reality and the complexity of every issue. Nor do these depressing simplifications, allied to pseudo-Leninist grandstanding, even lead to success. Among the quite heterogeneous potential electorate of left-wing parties, an unreasoning pitch scares off at least as many as it might attract—particularly among those not ideologically committed to the left side of the political spectrum but amenable to being convinced.
What is sometimes called left liberalism in continental Europe has always been a counter-reaction to a left that thought it could conduct conflicts in a modern world in the guise of a lost past. But, as with left-wing populism, it too has its pitfalls. Left liberalism easily loses itself in such moderation that it no longer achieves anything at all. Worse, it often simply capitulates to ‘realities’, to acceptance of contemporary capitalism. And very often it is reasonable to the point of boredom. If it cannot arouse any passions due to its Realpolitik, the hard left can present a certain ‘unrealism’ as essential in the fight against violence, injustice and social and economic inequality. But left liberalism still has one major advantage over (verbally) radical left-wing populism. The dumbing down of discourse—the petulance, the worn phrases, the omnipresent propaganda—that goes hand in hand with right-wing extremism really gets on many people’s nerves. Trying to compete with the far-right populists on this terrain is the road to nowhere.
Power of the word.............
snip
The case for a radical, liberal left.
We should counter the radical right, Robert Misik writes, not with left-wing populism but the power of reason.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-case-for-a-radical-liberal-left
The liberal left seeks to engage diverse individual citizens in dialogue in the public sphere, whereas populists claim to speak on behalf of a homogenised ‘people’ (Henrik Winther Andersen / shutterstock.com)
Today, democracy is threatened almost everywhere by the spirit of illiberalism, anti-pluralism and an authoritarian far right. This has a number of sources. They include a growing climate of pessimism and fear of decline—displacing the feeling of progress associated with the postwar decades in western Europe—as well as counter-reactions to progressive cultural changes over time, such as those associated with tolerance and anti-discrimination. Also at work however has been a dumbing down of discourse. To borrow a phrase from Jürgen Habermas, in a ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’ straightforward propaganda has been conveyed through ‘social media’ and the internet in general, the headline culture of the tabloids and media sensationalism. Right-wing extremism operates via exaggeration, simplification and the conjuring up of imagined enemies. Although it is beholden to its rich patrons, it stylises itself as the advocate of regular guys against ‘those up there’, the ‘elites’ and politicians: all are portrayed as bought, corrupt, incompetent, aloof, ‘against the people’, indeed agents of a ‘system’.
Perverse revolt
There is though a kernel of good in this—the longing for something completely different, for a politics that is not satisfied with the mere administration of what exists and the management of details. It is a kind of revolt in perverse forms, the desire for a real change in the system. Hence the contention that broad sections of the moderate left have left these rebellious energies to the extreme right. This criticism is sometimes accompanied by a plea for ‘left-wing’ populism. What this is supposed to be is however often not so clear. The British-Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who died a few years ago, was regarded as one of the smartest advocates of left-wing populism. For Laclau, the left had to appeal to the underprivileged—as a resistant ‘we’, against the ‘they’, the established, the rich, the winners, those who created the system to their advantage. Others associate left-wing populism simply with more radicalism or easily understandable demands. In this vein, such demands should be couched in powerful, resonant language, which does not get lost in lifeless exchanges—‘on the one hand’ … ‘on the other hand’—among progressives in government.
Depressing simplifications
Many such arguments not only sound plausible but have a lot going for them. Yet left-wing populism very often leads into a dead end, where a regressive left presents its arguments with a sledgehammer to a world divided into black and white, good and evil. Such Manicheanism ignores the ambiguities of reality and the complexity of every issue. Nor do these depressing simplifications, allied to pseudo-Leninist grandstanding, even lead to success. Among the quite heterogeneous potential electorate of left-wing parties, an unreasoning pitch scares off at least as many as it might attract—particularly among those not ideologically committed to the left side of the political spectrum but amenable to being convinced.
What is sometimes called left liberalism in continental Europe has always been a counter-reaction to a left that thought it could conduct conflicts in a modern world in the guise of a lost past. But, as with left-wing populism, it too has its pitfalls. Left liberalism easily loses itself in such moderation that it no longer achieves anything at all. Worse, it often simply capitulates to ‘realities’, to acceptance of contemporary capitalism. And very often it is reasonable to the point of boredom. If it cannot arouse any passions due to its Realpolitik, the hard left can present a certain ‘unrealism’ as essential in the fight against violence, injustice and social and economic inequality. But left liberalism still has one major advantage over (verbally) radical left-wing populism. The dumbing down of discourse—the petulance, the worn phrases, the omnipresent propaganda—that goes hand in hand with right-wing extremism really gets on many people’s nerves. Trying to compete with the far-right populists on this terrain is the road to nowhere.
Power of the word.............
snip
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: London
Home country: US/UK/Sweden
Current location: Stockholm, Sweden
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2018, 07:25 PM
Number of posts: 43,934
