a better story


from the article:
The first observation is the least original. It is the realisation that it is not strong leaders or parties that dominate politics as much as powerful political narratives.

. . .

I came to the second, more interesting, observation with the help of the writer and organiser George Marshall. It is this. Although the stories told by social democracy and neoliberalism are starkly opposed to each other, they have the same narrative structure. We could call it the Restoration Story.

. . .

Then – again with Marshall’s help – I stumbled into the third observation: the narrative structure of the Restoration Story is a common element in most successful political transformations, including many religious revolutions. This led inexorably to the fourth insight: the reason why, despite its multiple and manifest failures, we appear to be stuck with neoliberalism is that we have failed to produce a new narrative with which to replace it.

Read more »

Posted

transforming a broken economic system


from the Scott Santens article the tweet links to:

The State of the Union: 2015


for more on Universal Basic Income (UBI), see #basicincome as well as the HuffPost author page for Scott Santens and his own website

# # #




Posted

under whose shade



This is a copy-paste from a screen shot of a preview of one of the books returned from a search of Google Books. The top search result was the book itself, but there is no preview for that.

Anyhow,

The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

That is all.
Posted

the Nordic model

“It puts more pressure on the state—which is presided over by the 1 percent—to step in more and more forcefully, with the middle class saying, ‘We care about order. We don’t want chaos,’ ” he said. “That’s what happened in Germany. It was a strengthening of the state. This happened in Italy as well. That’s what the game plan was for fascists in Norway and Sweden. It didn’t work. It didn’t work because the left didn’t play their game. They didn’t allow themselves to be baited into paying attention to them, doing street fighting.”

“Instead, [what was done] in the civil rights movement we would have called ‘they kept their eyes on the prize,’ ” Lakey said. “They knew the prize was to push away the economic elite, get rid of its dominance, so they can set up a new economic system, which is now called the Nordic model. What they did was: massive strikes, massive boycotts, massive demonstrations. Not only in the urban areas, which is what you expect, but also in the rural areas. During the Depression [in Sweden and Norway], there were lots of farmers who had their farms foreclosed on. Farmers are perennially in debt and had no way of repaying that debt. When the sheriff came, farmers in that county would come to join them and collectively not cooperate—not violently, but very strongly—in such a way that the sheriff couldn’t carry out the auction.”

“Remember who is actually running things, and we keep our focus on them both politically and economically,” Lakey said.

Posted

fentanyl explainer


from the Guardian article the tweet links to:

Fentanyl is a powerful pain-relieving drug, 50 times more potent than morphine, and was originally synthesised by Belgian chemist Paul Jannsen. The drug has medical applications, for example, in anaesthesia and relieving pain from major surgery or cancer.

The drug interacts with the same opioid receptors as morphine and heroin and is therefore called an opioid, even though it is chemically unrelated to opiates (drugs derived from opium poppies). Opioid receptors are part of the body’s reward pathway. Chemicals are released in our body to make us feel good as a reward for activities that help us survive and procreate, such as eating, drinking and sex. Increasing the presence of feelgood chemicals in our body is why opiates and opioids can be so powerfully addictive.

see also:


Posted

your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins

image source: BBC story on the fire

excerpt from 2011 Guardian article by George Monbiot:

Last week, on an internet radio channel called The Fifth Column, I debated climate change with Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, one of the rightwing libertarian groups that rose from the ashes of the Revolutionary Communist party. Fox is a feared interrogator on the BBC show The Moral Maze. Yet when I asked her a simple question – "do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – I saw an ideology shatter like a windscreen. I used the example of a Romanian lead-smelting plant I had visited in 2000, whose freedom to pollute is shortening the lives of its neighbours. Surely the plant should be regulated in order to enhance the negative freedoms – freedom from pollution, freedom from poisoning – of its neighbours? She tried several times to answer it, but nothing coherent emerged which would not send her crashing through the mirror of her philosophy.

Modern libertarianism is the disguise adopted by those who wish to exploit without restraint. It pretends that only the state intrudes on our liberties. It ignores the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free. It denies the need for the state to curb them in order to protect the freedoms of weaker people. This bastardised, one-eyed philosophy is a con trick, whose promoters attempt to wrongfoot justice by pitching it against liberty. By this means they have turned "freedom" into an instrument of oppression.

see full article, linked to in tweet, and see especially reference to Isaiah Berlin essay: Two Concepts of Liberty

Read more »

Posted