During a recent six-hour grilling, a new reality emerged: Attitude now gives license to punish others — a way of being that re-concretizes a pigmentocracy’s values.
—R. Wayne Branch, PhD
President Zelensky suggests Trump's election can strongly affect war.
The result of the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election can "very strongly" influence the course of Russia's war against Ukraine, President Zelensky said during a press conference on Dec. 19.
#Fascism isn’t an ancient relic or an outdated term; it has returned as a living, breathing process transforming and weaponizing the state against its people.
Few remain from the generation that watched the #ideology take hold and mutate and unfold its horrors the first time, and without that living memory, we are challenged to explain what fascism was and how it worked.
As GOP voters seem increasingly “meh” on culture war rhetoric, it’s bad news for the politician who has most publicly positioned himself as an anti-woke warrior.
During a recent six-hour grilling, a new reality emerged: Attitude now gives license to punish others — a way of being that re-concretizes a pigmentocracy’s values.
—R. Wayne Branch, PhD
McConnell: Border talks not done, quick vote would ‘not succeed’
There is a “lot of very technical work on drafting which takes time to get right,” McConnell wrote in a note to Republican senators. #AureFreePress#News#GOP#Politics#USA#Biden
"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
A very interesting article on the "re-emergence" of Franco in Spain: "Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar" by Francisco Ferrándiz (#OpenAccess, 2021).
WHITE SIGHT. Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness by Nicholas Mirzoeff (The MIT Press, 2023).
"White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence".
During this time of year when we’re supposed to be celebrating (insert holiday), I can’t stop thinking about the fact that my nephew is going to soon be deployed overseas on his first tour with the U.S. Army in the current geopolitical climate.
I can’t.
I keep having flashbacks of how my friends from high school enlisted and deployed to go over to Iraq/Afghanistan (early 2000’s)
When Liz Cheney and Rachel Maddow join forces to nationally broadcast an urgent plea about a "five alarm fire" in America's democracy... well I for one listen.
What to do, from this nursing home and with no donation 💸? Then kismet - an ACLU ad comes on telly. Went to site, found these (1/2 down, left side) all free, all easy to unsub:
STAY INFORMED - newsletter
GET INVOLVED - action groups (fun!)
FIND YOUR LOCAL ACLU - chapter
"Dark MAGA: The Latest Cycle in the Far-Right Aesthetics Laundromat" by Tim Squirrell (2022).
"Many people reading about the latest development in right-wing extremist aesthetics might think little of it or find it laughable – after all, Dark MAGA attempts to make a septuagenarian former President look cool and edgy. The problem with this reaction is that it both writes off the movement as fundamentally unserious – which it is not – and allows for further amplification by journalists and others who cover Dark MAGA as light news."
Your twice weekly reminder that the fight is between those who want to “Terminate the Constitution” and those who do not. Everything else is distraction.
Can anyone share a reference (any discipline) to a definition or use of 'politics' / 'political' in the non-technical/metaphorical sense (i.e., not about government) to refer to ideological (or other?) underpinnings?
@serenissimaj
In Spain (and not only in Spain), politicians use the word "political" a lot to refer to "ideological" decisions. Both words (politics and ideology) have ended up having a negative meaning: fantasy, falsehood, partisan interests, etc. And there is no doubt that this way of using these words is contributing to the deterioration of political life.
Obviously, any opinion or decision about how things should be is political and ideological. The definition I like best is that of Chantal Mouffe (On the political, 2005, p. 9):
"I distinguish between 'the political' and 'politics': by 'the political I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by 'politics' I mean the sets of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political".
The construction of political power has always implied the need to generate a continuous flow of artefacts and actions. This matter is brilliantly analysed by Burke in The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992). The construction of the king’s public image, linked to a sacred dimension, was the result of an unceasing collective production by painters, sculptors, engravers, poets, choreographers, masters of ceremonies, musicians, architects and tailors, among many others (all of them coordinated in a complex system organised by several ministers).
When An AI Thinks About Politics: It Might Be Food for Thought
We have taken on the challenge of asking AI (an artificial intelligence machine) uncomfortable questions and seeking answers that are both honest and insightful.