1,094 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2015
    1. But my favorite part was the “get ahead” part of this answer. Because, to me, it demonstrates how Clinton — as a Presidential candidate — thinks about public education in America. Education is a scarce resource that helps some poor kids individually “get ahead,” but only if they demonstrate talent and ambition. Educating the poor is not a thing Clinton believes benefits the nation, it’s just a thing that individual kids can do to enrich themselves.

      This is in response to Hillary Clinton's comment during the Democratic debate on Saturday, 19 December:

      “I don’t believe in free tuition for everybody. I believe we should focus on middle-class families, working families and poor kids who have the ambition and the talent to go to college and get ahead.”

      I haven't heard anyone mention that we can provide more education without paying an extra dime of tuition to any college. Neither schools nor teachers are necessary for learning and demonstration of knowledge.

    1. The DNC rents access to its master voter list to campaigns, which augment the data with their own information. The firewalls are supposed to block campaigns from spying on their rivals.

      An audit released by the Clinton campaign showed the breach was more extensive than the Sanders campaign described, with at least 24 occasions when the Sanders campaign "saved" lists of Clinton data, from four different users.

      Josh Uretsky, the Sanders campaign staffer fired for accessing the voter file, told MSNBC that his intent was to document and understand the scope of the problem so it could be reported. "To my knowledge, we did not export any records or voter file data that were based on those scores,” he said.

    1. Today, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz issued the following statement:   “The Sanders campaign has now complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them. Based on this information, we are restoring the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter file, but will continue to investigate to ensure that the data that was inappropriately accessed has been deleted and is no longer in possession of the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign has agreed to fully cooperate with the continuing DNC investigation of this breach. The fact that data was accessed inappropriately is completely unacceptable, and the DNC expects each campaign to operate with integrity going forward with respect to the voter file.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7m-nnl7LSQ

      https://twitter.com/DWStweets/status/678083696390512640<br> https://twitter.com/DWStweets/status/678083869661360128

      This smells. I want to see a 3rd-party investigation.<br> And I think DWS should resign as DNC chair.<br> (On the other hand...)<br> https://twitter.com/JudyReardon/status/678045914435596288<br> "Jeff Weaver keeps on saying Sanders staff who accessed Clinton data<br> were young staffers. Josh Uretsky is 39 and has a Ph.D."

    1. Thirdly, rather incredibly, the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information, information which is the lifeblood of any campaign. This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. It is our information, not the DNCs.

      Bernie Sanders says the Democratic National Committee is denying his campaign access to their own data, after failing to keep the data that belonged to different campaigns separate.

      https://twitter.com/TheDemocrats<br> https://twitter.com/DWStweets<br> Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz<br> Chair of the Democratic National Committee

    1. Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It's terrible, but people are happy and go like "it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. And getting government grants to do that, because they do PR well.

      Interview with Peter Sunde, co-founder of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. (He was incarcerated for one year after they were convicted of assisting copyright infringement.) "We have already lost." he says. "Well, we don't have an open Internet. We haven't had an open Internet for a long time."

      I'm not as pessimistic. But we are too complacent. A free Internet will contribute to a free society and democracy. A closed Internet will contribute to oppression and plutocracy. We need to fight the tendency toward devices that give the user little control. We need more open source hardware, nonprofit maker spaces, and cooperatives. We need to work on alternative Internets.

    1. Populism has both positive and negative definitions.

      The positive sense is synonymous with democracy -- the belief that government should be for and by the people.

      The negative sense is the tool of demagogues -- appealing to fears and prejudices. An ideology that "pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous 'others' who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity, and voice" (Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell)

    2. And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.
    3. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

      This accelerated hard with Ronald Reagan. The theory that lower taxes and deregulation will be good for everyone sounds sensible. But the wealthy don't care about the common welfare. They only care about amassing more wealth and power.

    4. Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.
    5. It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

      He is commenting on "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945" by Milton Mayer

    6. What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.
    1. When Bernie Sanders talks about a 'revolution' in America, he's talking about getting millions of people deeply involved in the political process. I think he's also talking about getting millions of people personally involved, in their communities, in building solutions that don't need government involvement, such as volunteer-based tutoring, mentoring and learning organizations.
    1. To be very, very clear: Donald Trump is a bigot. He is a racist. He is an Islamophobe and a xenophobe. He profits off the hatred and stigmatization of traditionally oppressed groups in American society. That makes him, and his European peers, and racists in other eras in American history, a threat to crucial values of equality and fair treatment, and a threat to the actual human beings he's targeting and demonizing.
    2. So if Donald Trump isn't a fascist, what is he? Well, he's a right-wing populist. And while fascists are rare in 2015, right-wing populists are not. In fact, it's kind of weird that America hasn't had a real one before now. The UK has the UK Independence Party (UKIP); France has Marine Le Pen and the Front National; Germany has Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the anti-Muslim Pegida movement; Sweden has the Sweden Democrats; the Netherlands has the Party for Freedom and its leader, Geert Wilders.
    3. Of course, many fringe fascists themselves like Donald Trump and view him as the best they're going to get on a national scale. They argue he's sparking a big spike in activity around and interest in white nationalism. "Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that," Stormfront founder Don Black told Politico recently. But that does not make Trump himself a fascist.
    4. To be blunt: Donald Trump is not a fascist. "Fascism" has been an all-purpose insult for many years now, but it has a real definition, and according to scholars of historical fascism, Trump doesn't qualify. Rather, he's a right-wing populist, or perhaps an "apartheid liberal" in the words of Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism.

      Good article on the definition of fascism.

      Quotes from scholars:

      • The Nature of Fascism, Roger Griffin
      • The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton
      • Fascism: Comparison and Definition, Stanley Payne
      • A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, Stanley Payne

      And historical fascists:

      • Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
      • The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini
    1. After being awarded a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) for her thesis on quantum chemistry,[31] she worked as a researcher and published several papers.

      Gosh, I wonder when the United States will elect someone with an equally good analytical background.

  2. cityheiress.sfsuenglishdh.net cityheiress.sfsuenglishdh.net
    1. Earl, nor Marquess, nor Duke,

      Earl: "Anglo-Saxon England: a man of noble birth or rank, esp. as distinguished from a ceorl or freeman of the lowest class" (OED) Marquis: "a nobleman ranking below a duke and above a count" (OED) Duke: "In some European countries: A sovereign prince, the ruler of a small state called a duchy" (OED)

  3. Nov 2015
    1. Morales was born into the Aymara indigenous ethnic group in the Andean highlands, a group of people who tend to back roads, industry and economic development, said Tegel. But indigenous populations in the tropical part of the country, generally speaking, don’t want that, he said. “They want to a certain degree to be left alone. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want economic development, but they want a different model and they want it done much more at a community level.” Economics is a huge issue in Bolivia — one of the poorest countries in Latin America — and a major driver in policy decisions, Tegel said. “That tension between his indigenous and environmental discourse and some of the projects he actually wants to do, including increasing mining in the country, is at the very least a paradox and something his critics are calling hypocritical.”
  4. Oct 2015
    1. EV: Decolonization means a lot to me, it means recuperating… our own path, something which we’ve been forced to lose, this [indigenous] path, this wisdom, this knowledge has been devalued, minimized as though it weren’t knowledge at all. And so now we are recuperated this, and we’re doing so in our own way. This for us is decolonization, a process which is done via the state but also via the social organizations, because this is an issue of how to organize, how to speak of our ancestral technologies. Yes, many things have been modernized, but in many cases we have a necessity to recuperate our own principles and values as indigenous peoples. 
    1. If Barack Obama was capable of muscling through the sort of laws that the labor movement—and Barack Obama—would like to see enacted, he would not have to give labor leaders a summit. He could give them political victories. But that does not seem to be the reality of the moment. So we all got invited to the White House instead, to talk about “outreach strategies” and to “#StartTheConvo” on labor issues. I did not get the impression that the conversation needed more starting. We all seemed pretty well decided on what we wanted. Left unspoken was the fact that the working class will not be getting what it wants, any time soon.

      Hurts to read.

    1. I like to suggest that thisnew urbanity, the city-inside-out, not only it exhibits a profound processof exclusion, it also generates new dynamics of publicness that can haveimportant implications for social and political mobilization in terms ofwhat I have described as “street politics” and “political street”

      with new anything comes consequences/change.. it is to decide whether or not these consequences/changes have a beneficial or negative impact on society's well being.. is exclusion a consequence of capitalism?

  5. Sep 2015
  6. www.schooljournalism.org www.schooljournalism.org
  7. Aug 2015
    1. So perhaps a simpler way of putting the conclusion is that the Republican Party is motivated by a general philosophy while Democrats are motivated by specific policies they want to achieve.

      This is also the source of so much hate toward Republicans spouted by Democrats. It's not uncommon to hear about Republicans who "vote against their own interest". However, voting against one's own interests is a radical and amazing thing to do. If everyone who held significant privilege and power voted against their own interests we might have a more equitable world.

    2. The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It's a hoax, so we shouldn't do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It's happening, so we should do something about it. The "centrist" position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it's happening but we shouldn't do anything about it. That's not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.

      The worst possible outcome.

    3. There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

      The two paragraphs that follow are spot on. Nerds think government doesn't do anything right and they see government as this monolith thing apart from themselves rather than something they can and should work to affect, rather than circumvent.

      One thing I got out of reading Graeber's "Democracy Project" was the idea that it is not rational people that inhabit the middle of the political spectrum. Most people are more radical than the media makes it seem. The media reinforces the narrative that if you hold strong political opinions you are a radical. Your neighbors think you're crazy. You should probably just follow the herd, more.

      While there are definitely fundamentalists at the political extremes, there are also great thinkers.

  8. Jul 2015
    1. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse. Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.

      Interesting conjecture. Seems accurate.

    1. The internet has become the nervous system of the 21st century, wiring together devices that we carry, devices that are in our bodies, devices that our bodies are in. It is woven into the fabric of government service delivery, of war-fighting systems, of activist groups, of major corporations and teenagers’ social groups and the commerce of street-market hawkers.

      Precisely why I consider the various "Pirate Parties" to be extremely relevant in modern politics!

    1. It’s the nature of Twitter to not research further, we all know, but if that nature is influencing the way we run museums, school lectures, and conferences, the future might be more bleak than any of us dared to predict.

      It would be worth interrogating what it is about "the nature of Twitter" that makes this so.

      I think it has to do with the intersection of a number of things:

      • 140 character limit
      • Broadcast and re-broadcast that de-couples the Tweet from the authorial context
      • Sub-tweeting and shaming as attire and slacktivism

      I'm sure that's only the surface.

  9. Jun 2015
    1. Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

      The only counter-argument that comes to mind for me didn't form itself until I had read this last paragraph a few times.

      If your identity marker connotes tolerance then it hopefully has the opposite effect. Insofar as the experience of marginalization promotes empathy such identities might be good evidence for intelligence, and I do think individuals who feel oppressed or marginalized tend to empathize with others who suffer for different, marginalized identities.

      These identities will only breed stupidity if the individual feels a competition for scarce resources that overwhelms their empathy, whence the perniciousness of the belief in zero sum attention economics as a greater threat to activism than inaction, ignorance, and exhaustion.

  10. May 2015
    1. Gridlock

      I find myself thinking here about intersectionality, and about a certain critique of identity politics which seems to target those whose identities are marked. White men e.g. can critique and transcend the grid, while those whose positions in it are sites of political organizing are accused of reifying the grid. Not sure if Massumi is even in that neighborhood...

  11. Apr 2015
    1. “Honestly,” said Wiener, “it is perplexing to me why people are so insistent that local communities should not have control. The behavior we see on (our) street is a very localized issue. We should be able to address it.

      Our local communities passed sit-lie, Scott. Not only that, but on the very same ballot was a measure that would increase foot patrols.

      We can't, from one side of our mouths, say that we should have local control, and then from the other side that police don't get discretion in how they address use of public space but instead must enforce a law like sit-lie.

      Our local community got it wrong. If we can get it right at the state level, then fine.

      I don't care at which level it happens, I care that our laws encode compassion.

  12. Feb 2015
    1. "We provide half a billion dollars (annually) to the District. One would think they would be much more compliant with the wishes of Congress," Rep. Andy Harris, a Maryland Republican and one of the most vocal pot opponents, said in an interview Thursday.

      It's almost unbelievable to me that a representative can say something like this. It really speaks to how comfortable we've gotten with money politics.

  13. Jan 2015
    1. We were supposed to be saving the world by helping to promote democracy, but it seemed clear to me that many people, even in countries like Belarus or Moldova, or in the Caucasus, who could have been working on interesting projects with new media on their own, would eventually be spoiled by us.

      Applies to these activities wherever undertaken, including any country in the West, he just so happens to be interested in former Soviet Block countries

    2. If you’re trying to figure out how a non-neoliberal regime can function in the twenty-first century and still be constructive towards both environment and technology, you have to tackle these kinds of questions. There’s no avoiding them.

      Inter alia neo-liberalism is reactionary.

    3. It’s primarily from data and not their algorithms that powerful companies currently derive their advantages, and the only way to curb that power is to take the data completely out of the market realm, so that no company can own them. Data would accrue to citizens, and could be shared at various social levels. Companies wanting to use them would have to pay some kind of licensing fee, and only be able to access attributes of the information, not the entirety of it.

      Yes, well at present the security services are complicit with the present economic and legislative model, and this makes imagining any change to existing structures very difficult because such changes will be resisted by the rather shadowy security services. Cameron does a deal with them, he makes a point somewhat in support of their agenda in return for which he bigs up his position on security with the cost of looking an idiot - not a huge cost for a politician it seems.

    4. But if you turn data into a money-printing machine for citizens, whereby we all become entrepreneurs, that will extend the financialization of everyday life to the most extreme level, driving people to obsess about monetizing their thoughts, emotions, facts, ideas—because they know that, if these can only be articulated, perhaps they will find a buyer on the open market. This would produce a human landscape worse even than the current neoliberal subjectivity. I think there are only three options. We can keep these things as they are, with Google and Facebook centralizing everything and collecting all the data, on the grounds that they have the best algorithms and generate the best predictions, and so on. We can change the status of data to let citizens own and sell them. Or citizens can own their own data but not sell them, to enable a more communal planning of their lives. That’s the option I prefer.

      Very well thought out. Obviously must know about read write web, TSL certificate issues etc. But what does neoliberal subjectivity mean? An interesting phrase.

    5. On the one hand, we can foresee these companies extending their reach ever further into everyday life, to a point where it would become difficult to even articulate why you would want a different model, since our use of these technologies and the politics embedded in them also permits or restricts our ways of thinking about how to live.

      The indoctrinated future - probably closer than we think.

  14. Nov 2014
    1. When we get to the point where someone sees the mere existence of a political conflict that requires us to criticize allies as a no-win scenario, something has gone very wrong. For the actual work of politics– convincing people to come over to our side in order to make the world a more just and equitable place– those politics have utterly failed. We have been talking about privilege theory for 30 years. We’ve been talking about intersectionality for 25 years. We’ve been getting into cyclical, vicious Twitter frenzies for a half decade. This is not working. And I doubt hardly anyone actually believes that this is working. They’re just having too much fun to stop.

      I've recently decided, for myself, that Twitter is not a viable platform for political discussions. I simply can't do it anymore. I spend more time getting derailed by confusion stemming from trying to be terse when discussing subtleties than I do actually discussing the issues I wanted to discuss.

  15. Aug 2014
    1. Of course, the radical feminist position that masculinity is natural and healthy, and femininity artificial and harmful, is also inherently sexist

      Of course. That's an important theme. It's as though it's being suggested here that radical feminists chose this view, when I think it's more correct to say that they are reacting to it.

    2. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

      Might one argue that since these feminists feel their fight has been co-opted and, despite the many ways trans individuals are less assured of their safety and rights than cis women, the radical feminist is actually the more oppressed insofar as identity politics has left them behind? In which case, might we celebrate that time is given to this minority rather than criticize the piece for being one-sided?

    3. frequently providing physical descriptions

      I count only three instances, none of which are offensively dwelling on appearance in the way that media often is scrutinizing women's bodies. One of these descriptions is particularly well meaning: it is given only to color the story of abandoned transition with the image of hormone-induced stubble. To mention that there are physical descriptions of any of the activists in the piece here is obvious pandering.

  16. Feb 2014
    1. In addition to broad economic trends affecting domestic politics evenly, Fisher also notes the uneven distribution of effects stemming from intellectual property rights (1999, Sect. II. C.). The positive effects of intellectual property rights accrue strongl y to a small number of rights - holders (the paper assumes that there are no significant negative effects to rights - holders); for this reason, rights - holders have significant motive (and potentially greater means) to overcome the significant barriers to acti ve political lobbying.
  17. Jan 2014
  18. Oct 2013
    1. The political speaker will also appeal to the interest of his hearers, and this involves a knowledge of what is good. Definition and analysis of things "good."

      Sounds like a politician, always telling people what they want to hear.

    1. we should know the moral qualities characteristic of each form of government, for the special moral character of each is bound to provide us with our most effective means of persuasion in dealing with it

      I didn't know that different types of government had different moral characteristics. With the type of politicians we elect I feel like we should be pretty low on the list.

  19. Sep 2013
    1. I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.

      here rhetoric is dependent on audience? Rhetoric primarily meant for politics?