Remember, perhaps the most important commodity in politics is attention: mass media failed us this election by focusing on trivia while not doing enough to follow and correctly report huge stories. Our attention was diluted into trivia and gossip and unjustified mass hacks that were actually political sabotage, not whistleblowing, and in some cases misinformation.
Vlast pripada onome ko gospodari vanrednim stanjem.
Britain has changed since 1998.
Back then, it only took workers about three years to save enough money for a down-payment on a house. Now it takes 20 years.
He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap.
London voted against Brexit.
NYC, LA, SF, etc against Trump.
Istanbul, Ankara against Erdogan.
All very deeply divided societies.
My favourite thing about being in the EU. There's a lot to love about being in the EU:
✓ Freedom to move and work
✓ Forming a trading powerhouse
✓ Ensuring consumer rights and safe products
✓ Backing up human rights and rule of law
✓ Maintaining the peace
✓ Creating a Europe-wide solidarity corps
✓ Allowing scientists share research and resources
✓ Eliminating roaming
✓ Erasmus
✓ Health insurance that works anywhere
✓ The right to visit any EU embassy and get help
✓ Education certificates recognised anywhere in EU
✓ Pooling resources to spend more cleverly and work together
But my absolute favourite thing about the EU is the optimism of an incredibly unlikely project. It is easier to divide people than to bring them together. It is easier to tear things down than it is to build them. It is easier to whimper and panic in the face of a challenge than to face it. But that is not what the European Union is about. The EU brings together instead of dividing. The EU builds things when others would tear them down. And more than anything else, the EU faces its challenges with the ambition and determination that the European people deserve.
Happy Europe Day my friends 🇪🇺
The state, and especially an authoritarian state, is constructed like a bank: the minute that citizens-depositors lose faith, they withdraw everything of value.
Fear of personal responsibility? Marginalization of people who think differently? Resignation to fate? Feelings of inferiority toward the rest of the world? These are traits against which the state should be acting. Instead the government strengthens them, because it is useful for it.
Postcolonialist black Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1961 book Wretched of the Earth writes about the volatile relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and the conditions of decolonization. In it, he sharply warns the colonized against reproducing and maintaining the oppressive systems of colonization by replacing those at top by those previously at the bottom after a successful revolution.
I want to say one more thing about politics.
One of the legacies of the counterculture, particularly on the left, is the idea that expression is action. This idea has haunted those of us on the left for a long time.
But one of the reasons that the Tea Party came to power was that they organized—they built institutions. So the challenge for those of us who want a different world is not to simply trust that the expressive variety that the internet permits is the key to freedom. Rather, we need to seek a kind of freedom that involves people not like us, that builds institutions that support people not like us—not just ones that help gratify our desires to find new partners or build better micro-worlds.
The New Communalists believed that the micro-world was where politics happened. If we could just build a better micro-world, we could live by example to create a better world for the whole. I think that's wrong. Our challenge is to build a world that takes responsibility for people not like ourselves. And it's a challenge we won't meet by enhancing our expressive abilities, or improving the technologies of expressive connection.