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Created
Tue, 02/04/2024 - 00:00
You are better off now than four years ago I took a cue ten days ago from the Bulwark and every morning began posting the New York Times front page from four years ago. Remember those grim headlines? The GOP’s idiotic attempt at campaigning in 2024 on “Are you better off?” relies on Americans having short memories and on our collective PTSD from the COVID-19 pandemic. We’d rather blot out images of empty store shelves, 6-ft distancing stickers, bodies in refrigeration trucks, mass graves, daily infection and death plots, etc. At one point, I was tracking how many preachers who claimed they were protected by the blood of Jesus had died of COVID. I stopped counting at 50 about this time four years ago. Donald Trump and the GOP want to play “Are you better off”? I’m happy to oblige. On this April Fools’ Day, the Associated Press is running a series of articles highlighting the miriad ways Americans can be fooled.
Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 23:00

Do Say: “Whoa, where is Uncle Tony?”
Everyone will be saying this, so you’ll fit right in.

Don’t Say: “He’s in a better place now.”
Ordinarily, this would be a fine thing to say at a wake, but the context will make this land a little different. Yes, odds are, wherever his remains are now is a better place than this funeral home, which is rife with tension (because of the missing body). But right now, any speculation about where he is should be practical (e.g., “he could be in his truck”), not theoretical (e.g., “he is in a better place”).

Do Say: “Where was the last place you put him?”
Obviously, the answer will be the casket, but did anyone actually check the casket for clues? Sometimes, in times of chaos, someone needs to state the obvious to get things moving in the right direction.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 22:34

Χωρίς απαγορευμένες ή υπαγορευμένες ερωτήσεις. Χωρίς ταμπού θέματα ή προσυμφωνημένες ατζέντες. Συνεντεύξεις όπως πρέπει να γίνονται. Η Αναστασία Γιάμαλη κάνει «σκληρό μαρκάρισμα» στον Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη. Με την απάντηση στο ερώτημα αν θεωρεί τον εαυτό του καλό πολιτικό ξεκινά η κουβέντα του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη με την Αναστασία Γιάμαλη στο Σκληρό Μαρκάρισμα. Όχι δεν θεωρώ τον εαυτό […]

The post «Σκληρό Μαρκάρισμα» : Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης – Αναστασία Γιάμαλη (σεζόν #2, επεισόδιο #3) appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 22:23

“I never planned to be a politician. Never. Not in my wildest nightmares,” the economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said the other day. He was fighting his way toward the exit at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall, where he’d just spoken at a conference on sustainable development. A man blocked his path: […]

The post NEW YORKER magazine: Has Capitalism Been Replaced by “Technofeudalism”? appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 22:12

Yanis Varoufakis’s new film series explains how elites used the financial crisis to terrorize Europe’s populations into submission. In this interview, he tells Jacobin why the anti-austerity movement failed and why the center is converging with the far right. Debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity: unpleasant, and essential.” Speaking in his new documentary […]

The post Greece, EU elections, Palestine & the International Order – JACOBIN interview with David Broder appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 21:58

One reason women avoid the field of economics is the male chauvinist pig standing at its center, masquerading as the model of rationality. No sensible woman recognizes herself in Homo economicus, who always gets what he likes and likes what he gets. ATHENS – Economics has an intractable “women problem.” High-school girls avoid it. Female undergraduates abandon it. And […]

The post Economics is Irredeemably Sexist – Project Syndicate appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 21:09

At the beginning of April 1649, a political group calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’ began a colony at St. George’s Hill near Cobham, Surrey. They set about tilling and sowing the fields, attempting to enact the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley’s central idea: the earth as ‘a common treasury for all, without respect of persons.’ They […]

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 20:51
Unlike anthropologists … economists simply invent the primitive societies we study, a practice which frees us from limiting ourselves to societies which can be physically visited as sparing us the discomforts of long stays among savages. This method of society-invention is the source of the utopian character of economics; and of the mix of distrust […]
Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 19:13

In the not-too-distant past, many Marxist philosophers were weighed down by a shared despair. Capitalism, they feared, had become so totalizing, so all-consuming, that there was no longer any possibility of overthrowing it. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it,” Karl Marx famously wrote in 1845, […]

The post “It’s hard to read this book and deny its power” – WASHINGTON POST review of TECHNOFEUDALISM appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 19:03

A meme is spreading: capitalism is dead. We’re toiling around in its carcass. Nothing appears as it seems in this zombie state of affairs. But why didn’t we notice? There’s confusion all over. Climate, Covid, Ukraine, Gaza. Is history accelerating, or, rather the opposite, stagnating, even regressing? In his latest book Techno Feudalism, Yanis Varoufakis states that […]

The post TECHNOFEUDALISM reviewed by Geert Lovink appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 18:40

Does Australia really want to become entangled in a war (Cold or Hot) between the US and China motivated by the clash of the world’s two super cloud fiefs?

The post Does Australia know what it is getting into viz. the US-China New Cold War? GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA podcast appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 18:25

In this age of self-referential bubbles, of performative mutual demonisation and of siloed ideological camps that make debate impossible, it was a breath of fresh air to spot two reviews of my TECHNOFEUDALISM by conservative publications: The Washington Free Beacon and The European Conservative. Disagreeing agreeably must surely be a major improvement to unreasoned, mutually […]

The post Two reviews of TECHNOFEUDALISM by Conservative Publications ‘Free Beacon’ & ‘The European Conservative’ appeared first on Yanis Varoufakis.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 13:35

This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.

Created
Mon, 01/04/2024 - 13:35

This food timeline started as a way to explore the revolution in Australian food that has occurred during the baby-boomers’ lifetime, but has since expanded to include more about the previous decades (and century) as well. Also included are overseas events and trends that had an impact here. The entries are brief, but there are lots of links if you want more information.

Dubai chocolate