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Varje höst håller your truly sedan fler år tillbaka en introduktionskurs i nationalekonomi för blivande gymnasielärare i samhällskunskap. Förutom några av mina egna böcker, står även Klas Eklunds Vår ekonomi på litteraturlistan. Vår ekonomi kom år 2020 ut i sin senaste (15:e) upplaga. Imponerande och i sig ett bevis på bokens många förtjänster, inte minst […]
Whatever happened to those pink pussyhats? Over at Anand Giridharadas’ The Ink this morning, Anat Shenker-Osorio emphasizes the need for the left to adopt and use symbols the way MAGA uses hats. Or rather, the way abortion rights activists in Argentina use green bandanas not only to signify their movement’s cause, but to provide people not in the movement with social proof. “It’s one of the most persuasive tools in our arsenal,” Giridharadas writes. Shenker-Osorio explains (subscription req’d): The thing is, people need to see, “Oh, that’s what my kind of a person thinks.” Humans are social creatures. We’re tribal. We want to find cues in our environment that tell us what our category subscribes to. That is, what do people like me think? Or as Girdharadas explains below, what do people like me wear? Shenker-Osorio continues: So while I think there is some symbology on the movement side of the left, there isn’t enough. On the Democratic side, I think it’s very hard to maintain.
by Dave Rollo
Vermont takes its name from the French Monts Verts, or Green Mountains, the state’s rolling hills that host maple, birch, and beech forests in the south and spruce and fir in the north. Quaint towns and farms, many retaining their historic structures, are nestled in the mountain valleys. Lakes, streams, and wetlands are plentiful. And farms are everywhere: Vermont consistently ranks as one of the top states in the nation for local food production.
The post Growth Battles in Chittenden County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
A modern economy is a very complicated system. Since we cannot conduct controlled experiments on its smaller parts, or even observe them in isolation, the classical hard-science devices for discriminating between competing hypotheses are closed to us. The main alternative device is the statistical analysis of historical time-series. But then another difficulty arises. The competing […]
In a New Yorker piece published five days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American critic and public intellectual Susan Sontag wrote, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” Sontag’s desire to contextualize the 9/11 attacks was an instant challenge to the narratives that President George W. Bush would soon deploy, painting the United States as a country of peace and, most importantly, innocent of any wrongdoing. While the rhetorical strategies he developed to justify what came to be known as the Global War on Terror have continued to this day, they were not... Read more
Itmar Ben-Gvir perceives all Palestinians in the West Bank as potential terrorists, the same way that Israel’s ‘moderate’ President Isaac Herzog perceives all Gazans as “responsible” for Hamas’ actions.
The post Israel’s Ben-Gvir Sees West Bank Opportunity in Gaza Genocide appeared first on MintPress News.
Some illiteration about the mad king U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan adjourned E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against Donald “91 Counts” Trump in New York City on Monday after one of the jurors became sick. Trump himself is expected to take the stand this afternoon. The mad king was using his thumbs about it again last night. If Trump’s Truth Social account is any indication of his state of mind, hoo-boy (The New Republic): Trump made 42 posts about Carroll (and one pushing falsehoods about the House January 6 investigative committee) on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes. Many of his posts included photos or clips of interviews that he has previously shared about Carroll. Trump’s posting rate is so fast that the former president must have some prescheduled, some drafts saved for constant reuse, someone else posting for him, or some combination of all three. His Truth Social account shared media interview clips and social media posts that appear to come from Carroll, all stripped of context so as to paint her as some sort of sexual deviant.
As fake grassroots organisations continue their culture war – we need to fight back, writes Otto English
There’s a voyeuristic quality to so many of the discussions of Anne’s rise and fall, since it was allegedly her sexual allure that made her queen and her sexual licence that led to her death. The compulsion to clothe the bare facts of historical evidence in sumptuous layers of invented emotion frequently brings the descriptions close to caricature.
To write about gay men in Britain in the 19th century should be to write about them as sons, brothers, friends, lovers, husbands, fathers, grandparents, members of a social class, employees, employers, thinkers, readers, politicians, imperialists and so on; as part of the world, not as apart from it.
You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no inspectors, no languages. You couldn’t talk to him on days he was painting clouds, his wife said.
The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic remains. At its best, watching a game of snooker is like watching a kind of exquisitely delayed explosion.
Johnson’s HouseThe hopeless, who hadNowhere else to go, he packedInto his house. SoLoneliness took onThe look of home, duty grewUseful, like tea-cups.TrialsThey go like lightningOver jumps,...
The gruelling, often grotesque nature of the Italian campaign is reason enough to remember it, but it’s been overlooked, idly regarded as filler between the defeat of Rommel and the Normandy Landings.
Populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the US Capitol. Everything is now political, and society increasingly resembles a ‘permanent Dreyfus Affair’.
In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build a life that is illegible to her.
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right.
Moving the Sanskrit epics ‘from mythology to history’ turns out to mean the obliteration of an archaeological site by a construction site. This is the kind of historical reckoning which India’s present government endorses.
Democracy means sharing space with people whom we find annoying, and who sometimes deliberately annoy us. But like it or not, we have to have the right to get in each other’s faces.
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)
There’s no boredom in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and no pulse of adrenaline either. To be in orbit, after all, is to be held in a balance of forces. Any acceleration would nudge things out of kilter.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 3 (Friday 26 January 2024)