Reading

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Wed, 26/04/2023 - 14:23
A selfie in front of a Saab 340 turboprob aeroplane on the apron at Broken Hill [BHX] airport
Leaving Broken Hill

Here I go again - visiting the home of my first 20 years, Cornwall.
I went this time last year as soon as the flights had resumed after all that covid bullshit. I flew home and caught covid at the Blue Anchor. I had never been as sick …

Created
Wed, 26/04/2023 - 09:38

TheAnalysis discussion April 21 2023,  Debt and the Collapse of Antiquity – Michael Hudson, By Colin Bruce Anthes   Colin Bruce Anthes Welcome to theAnalysis. I’m Colin Bruce Anthes. In a minute, we’ll be taking a first look at Michael Hudson’s new book, The Collapse of Antiquity. Michael Hudson When the emperors cancelled the debts, it was largely Continue Reading

The post Balancing Individualism with Egalitarianism first appeared on Michael Hudson.
Created
Wed, 26/04/2023 - 09:00
Neither does right wing chutzpah: The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature. Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before. In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed. On Feb. 3, 2023, two state senators issued a formal proclamation commemorating April 2023 as and encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of this State.” One of the signers is Senate Speaker Randy McNally, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor; the other is Sen. Mark Pody from Lebanon.
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Wed, 26/04/2023 - 07:30
If you have any question as to whether DeSantis is fit to be president of the United States, his decision to hire this man should answer it. He either did it because he actually believes that the COVID vaccines are dangerous, which makes him a moron or he did it out of a cynical desire to appeal to anti-vax voters. Either way, it was a disgraceful decision and should disqualify him from ever having higher office of any kind: Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document. Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.
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Wed, 26/04/2023 - 06:35
— Blessed Be the Name of the Market? On the intellectual origins of market society and how the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith became an icon of American capitalism. A recorded conversation between Glory M. Liu, Jacob Soll, and Brad DeLong. The discussion builds on Liu’s new book Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became […]
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Wed, 26/04/2023 - 06:00

In what is an important reflection on the political stakes for wider Marxist Feminist theory, Cinzia Arruzza has counselled against the fashionable conflation of racial and patriarchy oppressions within capitalism. Asserting the intersectionality of race, gender, and class is simply not enough in attempting to unpack such oppressions as features of capitalism. Equally an emphasis on relationality can become bland without the capacity to decide on where a relation begins or ends. Significant logical and historical questions can then arise. Is gender oppression a structurally necessary feature of capitalism? Is discrimination based on race in-built into the reproduction of racial capitalism? These are knotty issues that come to prominence and utility when assessing Nancy Fraser’s new book Cannibal Capitalism, the latest text completed in the Past & Present Reading Group.

The post Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Created
Wed, 26/04/2023 - 06:00
Speaking of fascism, TNR made a handy list of “the 10 most fascist things Fox’s top host said on air”: 1. He has promoted the “great replacement theory.” Carlson has repeatedly pushed the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.” He has argued that Democrats want to replace white people so they can control the country. 2. He said Vladimir Putin wasn’t so bad. 3. He said the desire to procreate has been “subverted” by birth control and abortion. 4. He complained about “the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men.” Carlson has insisted that masculinity is supposedly on the decline in the United States. While both the theory and his suggested solution—tan your testicles—are ridiculous, they stem from a right-wing belief that attacks on masculinity upset the social order. 5. He said white supremacy is not a real problem. 6.
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Wed, 26/04/2023 - 04:59
The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted. Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 26/04/2023 - 04:58
The kind of strategic study Australia needs, to preside over this kind of defence staff college scribble, is one which gives a sense of our civil society’s capacities, needs, aspirations — and our neighbourhood. The Flippingbook is an entirely inappropriate, narrow minded, chauvinistic, militaristic thing that belongs in a country practising for fascism, the submergence Continue reading »