#politics (83 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.
- 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.
- China’s Age of Malaise newyorker.com
- 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
- Indivisible Guide indivisibleguide.com
<blockquote>A practical guide For resisting the Trump agenda
Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen.</blockquote>
- Obama Reckons with a Trump Presidency - The New Yorker newyorker.com
<blockquote>“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.”</blockquote>
- Is It Just Me, Or Is the World Going Crazy? markmanson.net
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
- The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman theguardian.com
- Our Comrade The Electron - Webstock Conference Talk static.pinboard.in
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
- The Early Days of a Better Nation: Use of Calculators kenmacleod.blogspot.com
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
- George Lakoff: 'Conservatives don't follow the polls, they want to change them … Liberals do everything wrong' theguardian.com
<blockquote>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. </blockquote>
<blockquote>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?</blockquote>
- Scotland is going it alone – regardless of the referendum theguardian.com
<blockquote>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. </blockquote>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
- 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
<blockquote>"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."</blockquote>