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Our friends at 270 Reasons are gathering a polyphonic orchestra of brilliant writers, teachers, doctors, filmmakers, artists, and citizens of all kinds to weigh in about their plans to vote this November. These opinion essays run the gamut from advocacy for basic human rights to acutely personal mini-manifestoes. Read the rest over at 270 Reasons.

Because She Supports a Ban on Assault Weapons

My children were six and four years old in 2012, when Sandy Hook occurred. I was horrified to see children, around the same age as my own children, killed. My own children grew up in the age of lockdown drills. They’ve become so desensitized to mass shootings that when another one occurs, they no longer seem shocked by it. When another one occurs, I’m no longer sure that they will even hear about it. They have become used to living in fear so that they have become numb to fear. Perhaps it’s not that they no longer care, but that gun violence has become routine, like the weather. It just happens.

But he’s their lunatic Two weeks from now, Election Day polls will be open. Vanity Fair‘s Bess Levin summarizes what Donald Trump’s been doing with his last days to build a winning coalition. Policy? Did he finally lay out his health care plan after over eight years of promises? Perhaps explain his plan for resurrecting an America he claims Democrats “destroyed”? Did he explain [timestamp 1:05:00] how he’ll “cut your taxes, end inflation, slash your prices, raise your wages,” etc.? (More on raising wages in a moment.) If Trump promised everyone in Greenville, N.C. a pony yesterday, I missed it. “Donald Trump’s closing message to voters appears to be: I’m insane,” read the tweet from Vanity Fair promoting Levin’s take: Instead, he talked about the size a famous golfer’s penis, pretended to be a fast-food worker at a closed McDonald’s, and claimed every single goose in Springfield, Ohio, has has gone missing.

Mansion: Moaning in the middle of the night
Airbnb: Changing the Wi-Fi password to alternate between zero and the letter O, like “00OO0O000O”

Mansion: Shouting, “Get out!”
Airbnb: Giving commands via posters, like EAT or LIVE LAUGH LOVE.

Mansion: Creating panic in their minds over the course of months
Airbnb: Inducing a nagging feeling over the course of hours that they forgot something at home

Mansion: Disappearing before their eyes
Airbnb: Being very responsive until they check in and then ghosting them

Mansion: Moving their possessions around
Airbnb: Storing a colander behind the television and maple syrup in the shower

Mansion: Creating cold spots in the room
Airbnb: Producing hot and cold spots throughout the unit with a broken thermostat

Hens try to hatch golf balls, whales get beached. Getting things wrong seems to play a fundamental role in life on Earth

- by David S Oderberg

Read at Aeon

They might appear to have little in common with statues or obelisks, but graffiti images serve a vital public function

- by Rafael Schacter

Read at Psyche

Conservative leadership favourite Kemi Badenoch is running her campaign from the home of a wealthy Tufton Street donor

This Tuesday report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan. Tourism blight I rarely go down into the tourist areas of Kyoto, that is the most popular areas around Gion and the Yasaka Shrine. I live in North Kyoto and…

In this exclusive Master Plan bonus episode, David Sirota interviews former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, who led the fight against conservatives’ court packing in the early 2000s.

Renowned journalist speaks out about the three regimes of Israel while a child in Gaza speaks out about the loss of her people. A child carries her sister on her back to hospital while the IDF marches Palestinians in Gaza. Media Watch tells more stories that also need to be told, while Lydia Thorpe tells Continue reading »

Earlier today I responded to a comment asking if Armenia and Georgia are next after the Ukraine.

Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this: Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people. Oh there’s great strength in that. And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be. And so let’s not feel powerless. Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment.

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

The selection committee for the Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2024 prize, as voted on by AIPEN members.

The prize will be awarded to the best article published in 2023 (online early or in print) in international political economy (IPE) by an Australia-based scholar.

The prize defines IPE in a pluralist sense to include the political economy of security, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, post-coloniality, gender, finance, trade, regional studies, development and economic theory, in ways that can span concerns for in/security, poverty, inequality, sustainability, exploitation, deprivation and discrimination.

The overall prize winner will be decided from the shortlist by the selection committee, which this year consists of Ainsley Elbra (USyd), Claire Parfitt (USyd), Tim DiMuzio (UoW), Annabel Dulhunty (ANU), and Wenting He (ANU). The winner will be announced in November 2024.

The 2024 shortlist for The Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize is as follows:

A few weeks ago a friend of mine from Nicaragua visited. One aspect of American culture he admired was our lack of corruption.

“Oh dear, Marlon,” I replied. “We are a deeply corrupt nation. The difference between our two nations is that in Nicaragua you have both ‘corruption of the poor,’ such as bribes to police officers, bribes to health inspectors, home inspectors, low level bureaucrats and the like and ‘corruption of the rich’ which is usually institutionalized, a part of the legislative process, includes the corrupt purchase of large scale national rents collection, and is unambiguously unethical. Everyone, in Nicaragua, wets their beak, whereas only the rich and powerful in America participate.”

Today Responsible Statecraft offers up the epitome of American corruption:

That is not an overstatement: In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. “If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal.

Two psychologists explain how we think about freedom.

The post When Do We Have Free Choice? appeared first on Nautilus.

“A man is nothing without his conscience,” the Florida health department’s top lawyer wrote in his resignation letter.

The post State Lawyer Quits Over Ron DeSantis’s Unconstitutional Attacks on Abortion Amendment appeared first on The Intercept.

The experimental world of speculative fiction is like a history of political economy. It explores topics like dystopias, post-scarcity, automation, and AI. But it doesn’t stop there!

The post Political Economy Through Speculative Fiction: The Case of New York 2140 appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).