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Both parties’ campaigns purporting to “save democracy” ended up burning it down.

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” – Joseph Heller, Catch-22 I’m sorry to be sharing so many pertinent quotes today but it’s about all I’ve got the energy for. If the shoe fits… James Fallows has a good piece today which I don’t think he’ll mind my sharing in full: This time, it was not a fluke. When Donald Trump came to power eight years ago, there were countless what-ifs. What if James Comey had held his tongue? What if Clinton campaign emails, hacked by Russian operatives, had not been published on WikiLeaks just minutes after the Access Hollywood video came out? (And distract attention from “Grab ‘em by…”) What if Clinton emails had not been such a media obsession? What if cable outlets had not found Trump rallies such useful audience draws?

Adaptability is this wild pollinator’s superpower.

The post This Bee Is Thriving appeared first on Nautilus.

Low-rating cable channel, Sky news Australia, has taken a moment out from their Trumpian celebrations to launch a plea to Australian Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, to move further right on his policies. ”Peter needs to stop trying to appease the... Read More ›

Harris refused to distance herself from the Biden administration's support of Israel's war on Gaza. Tlaib railed against it.

The post In Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib Did Nearly Twice as Well as Kamala Harris appeared first on The Intercept.

Both neo-classical and Sraffian theory stand mute when it comes to money and accumulation under capitalist conditions. In both frameworks the central areas of “the theory of money and the theory of capitalist accumulation” are among “the difficult analytical problems” that “remain to be settled” … A profit flows based analysis of an accumulating capitalist […]

Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, has called on the federal Labor government to withdraw Australia from the AUKUS military pact. With a second Trump presidency all but assured as of Wednesday evening, Australia’s commitment to AUKUS and its nuclear-powered war-fighting plans has become even further removed from the interests of the Australian people. “It Continue reading »

The West need not fear a Chussia aligned against it. It instead needs to develop geopolitical strategies to deal with China as the dominant power in Eurasia. For like the United States at the end of the nineteenth century when it consolidated its borders and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, China has consolidated its Continue reading »

We in the West have a propensity noted by the rest of the world, to be rather self-congratulatory about our political and economic systems and our accompanying wish to pressure the rest of the world to try to be more like us. Continue reading »

The changes to Tertiary Education funding announced by the Prime Minister last weekend, mostly benefit former students. Arguably there are other higher priorities to restore the funding of higher education and remove anomalies in the fees charged. Last week started badly for Albanese with allegations about his Qantas upgrades, which he took too long to Continue reading »

A recent timely 4 November article in the ‘Canberra Times’ by John Wilson and Kieran Pender, “If public servants are made ‘silent members of society’ , democracy is worse for it”, highlights growing problems in interpreting and administering the protocols governing public political comment by Australian public servants. The High Court ‘s final rejection in Continue reading »

The Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA) welcomes the final report of the Scope of Practice Review, Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce, which outlines robust solutions to overcoming barriers limiting high-value care across settings. Key reforms highlighted in the report will ensure each discipline’s value is recognised, with safeguards for a safe, high-quality health system Continue reading »

Australia has voted ‘yes’ to a UN resolution mandating the establishment of a research panel on the effects of nuclear war. The L39 resolution has been adopted by a massive majority in the First Committee of the UN General Assembly, with 144 governments voting in favour, 30 abstentions (including the US India, Ukraine and Israel), Continue reading »

One zombie thesis about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that keeps resurfacing is the idea that it was provoked by NATO expansion. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Eugene Doyle reprises this idea, leaning on the views of one ex-CIA analyst, George Beebe. Beebe claimed in 2021 “that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine given the Continue reading »

Public distrust in the reliability of the U.S. nuclear umbrella has sharply increased, with a majority of South Koreans now supporting the development of their own nuclear weapons, a recent survey shows. The survey results released last month reflect a growing belief that the U.S. extended deterrence to the region, often referred to as a Continue reading »

November 5 2024. A date that will live in infamy.

Some of the loudest voices in the US are starting to say the quiet part out loud, reports Chris York

The UK needs a revolution in the way politics and democracy works – starting with proportional representation, writes Neal Lawson

Try, at least Simon Rosenberg offers some advice I’m too obsessed and upset to take. Nevertheless: There will be plenty of time to assess what happened and where we go from here. I am going to go slow and take my time. I suggest you do the same. Take care of yourself and your friends. Take long walks, spend a little more time with your kids, call an old buddy. Return to a hobby you miss. Enjoy life. Enjoy it. Take your time, now, and avoid diving into a world of half-baked hot takes, bad faith commentary, angry Tweets and crowing MAGAs. I wake up this morning with one overarching sentiment – pride in all that you did this election to fight for your democracy and your freedoms. Our family left it all out there on the playing field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I wake up this morning with no regrets, knowing I worked as hard as I could over these few few years. I know many of you feel the same way, and I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.

I admit, it was tricky for me, a white male swing-state voter, to decide who deserved my vote in this election. But in the end, I cast my ballot for Donald Trump along with over seventy million other Americans. And I promise you that decision has nothing to do with my hating women, or Black people, or even Black women. Just yesterday, a Black woman made me my Blonde Vanilla Latte, and I politely thanked her.

Kamala Harris was an okay candidate, I guess. She never said anything about wind turbines causing cancer, but even though Trump may have been wrong about that, at least he has the guts to express an opinion about it. Also, I never heard Harris talk about herself as the only person who could fix the economy, the borders, and all the wars, whereas Trump said he could do all those things. And Harris never attended a confused town hall where she swayed to the music for forty minutes instead of taking questions or pretended to fellate a microphone. She was a flawed candidate, for sure.

Be careful what you wish for, MAGA “Where do we go from here?” Digby asks this morning. She doesn’t know. Nor do I. Just as I don’t know how she had the emotional stamina to write it. All this time, I told friends last night, it seemed as if observers of the MAGA cult were studying the grotesque creatures of Looking Glass World. People such as Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and RFK Jr. Facing a second Donald Trump presidency, with J.D. Vance as heir apparent and a Supreme Court MAGAfied for the rest of my lifetime, it feels this morning as if Looking Glass World was, in fact, studying us. Except the image that came to mind wasn’t from Lewis Carroll, but Rod Serling. IMDB summarizes “Eye of the Beholder” from “The Twilight Zone”: Janet Tyler is in hospital having undergone treatment to make her look normal. It’s her 11th trip to the hospital for treatment and she is desperate to look like everyone else. Some of her earliest childhood memories are of people looking away, horrified by her appearance. Her bandages will soon come off and she can only hope that this, her last treatment, will have done the trick.

Jodie Whittaker's TARDIS from her time on Doctor Who will be up for auction as part of this year's BBC Children in Need charity event.

Far from any natural conservatism, ordinary people in the US have a history of bitter and explosive struggles against exploitation and racism, writes Jacob Starling

The post The US working class—a history of radicalism and resistance first appeared on Solidarity Online.