"In giving instructions on how to join the elite rather than critiquing the inequality upon which the idea of an elite is premised, self-help books serve only to normalize existing unjust power structures.

The neoliberal ideas these books mirror have been shipped to Kyrgyzstan like so many copies of The Secret, propagated by the bevvy of pro-business development agencies that have set up shop along the avenues of central Bishkek since the fall of the Soviet Union. Viewed in this context, the self-help guides so popular among young people here serve as apologias for the economic policies and political restructuring for which these agencies are advocates—and which the United States promotes abroad for its own gain."

"How have neoliberal international development agencies “self-helped” Central Asia? Attempts to make Kazakhstan’s education system “more efficient” in the 1990s led to the closure of thousands of preschools and smaller, “inefficient” schools in the countryside. In one of the areas of Tajikistan most affected by the country’s Civil War, the introduction of a steep new fee system for medications left many who were already barely surviving on aid unable to afford direly needed medication. And in Kyrgyzstan, which has adopted more of these types of policies than anywhere else in the region, the privatization of what were formerly collective farms after the Soviet Union’s collapse decimated rural economies and spurred a massive exodus of laborers from the countryside to the capital in search of work. Meanwhile, Bishkek’s move from building social housing to high-rise apartments has forced many of these poor migrants to build their own make-shift homes on the city’s periphery, sometimes adjacent to health hazards. Viewed in this context, self-help books’ exhortations to “think positive” and “practice gratitude” seem like paper swords in a fight against massive and systemic problems."

currentaffairs.org/2020/09/you-can-heal-your-life/

"A recent report on digital infrastructure by Mat Lawrence, Thomas Hanna, Miriam Brett, and Adrienne Buller included the suggestion that the proceeds of spectrum auctions be put into a fund to support local media and journalism. Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism?, has similarly suggested the creation of a trust funded by a number of new taxes that would support independent public media.

In the UK, Tom Mills, Dan Hind, and Leo Watkins have laid out a plan that would see the television license fee replaced with a digital license fee on internet to fund a democratized BBC that actually responds to the public. Their plan would also grant everyone over the age of fourteen an annual voucher they could use to support non-profit cooperative journalism, divided evenly between regional and national media. It would be funded by a tax on advertising or public relations services."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/big-tech-journalism-democratic-socialism-decentralization/

"Countless red flags have sprung up in recent months indicating a creeping authoritarianism coming into full form. Vigilante forms of far right “justice” have become commonplace, as in the high-profile case of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the numerous cases of far right violence and intimidation directed at Black Lives Matter activists since nationwide protests erupted in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in May. The president dog-whistles to his white supremacist base regularly, and may not even accept the election results this November if he loses. This is what it looks like, feels like, when a nation’s social fabric frays, when a society eats itself alive, and the center can no longer hold."

https://truthout.org/articles/life-in-the-us-has-the-hallmarks-of-a-low-grade-war-zone/

"If Alexis de Tocqueville ... were transported into the present, the authors imagine, this is what he would see: an inordinate and grotesque segregation of the population by class; an economy ruled by corporate monopolies, gaining ever-greater power through mergers and acquisitions; workers powerless to negotiate for themselves amid the suppression of labor unions; and reckless corporate managers whose only aim is to make money for their shareholders, acting with little or no regard for any public interest. He would see the transmutation of corporate financial power into inordinate political power, undermining the machinery of democracy and leading to a pervading disillusionment among the citizenry"

"In the early 1970s, the Italian government began to devolve many of its powers down to the local level; [...] sought to determine which parts of Italy were adapting best to the new challenge. [...] political systems in the south were vertical in nature—extremely top-down—whereas Italian cities in the north distributed power more horizontally—which is also to say, much more democratically. Putnam called the arrangements he found in northern Italy the “civic community.”

"they also trace a decline beginning in the 1970s. [...] it was not Ronald Reagan who brought the long period of liberal rule to an abrupt halt, but rather the baby-boomers of the 1960s who, turning from the communitarian idealism of the early part of the decade toward a more self-oriented direction, set off a chain reaction that ended up blowing the whole Progressive-liberal order to smithereens."

This article is very much liberal (and it shows everytime they talk about socialism), but still interesting enough.

https://newrepublic.com/article/159276/the-upswing-book-review-robert-putnam-shaylyn-romney-garrett

#books

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/modern-housing-feminist-city-bauer-leslie-kern/

"Two “red years” of strikes in 1919–20 known as the “biennio rosso” had horrified Italian bankers, industrialists, and landowners; their response was to finance the recently formed fascist paramilitary troops to destroy the powerful labor movement."

"The Italians used industrial killing methods (mustard gas) that are more commonly associated with Hitler’s and Stalin’s soldiers than with Mussolini’s rank and file . . . Indeed, the slaughter in Ethiopia was so out-of-keeping with the Italians’ self-perception as the more “humane” dictatorship that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until 1995, the Italian government and former combatants . . . denied the use of gas in East Africa.
On December 23, 1935 the Italians dropped barrels that broke up upon hitting the ground . . . projecting a colorless liquid . . . and a military officer comments, “a few hundred of my men were hit, their feet, their hands, their faces, were covered with blisters . . . I did not know how to fight this rain that burned and killed” . . . By the end of January, 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were systematically sprayed with gas."

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/mussolini-italo-ethiopian-war-fascism-salvemini/

"A bombshell report released last week by the RAND Corporation revealed an astonishing upward redistribution of $47 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. In their paper, authors Carter Price and Kathryn Edwards argued that if the country’s economic gains over that time period had been distributed as they were in the postwar era—that is, prior to the explosion of a bipartisan free market mania that slashed taxes, hobbled unions, and eviscerated public programs—median worker pay today would be about twice what it is."

https://newrepublic.com/article/159478/rich-people-hilariously-freaked-biden-presidency

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/25/surveillance-sim-cloning-protests-protect-phone/ #SimLock #InfoSec #OpSec #Security

TL;DR #SimLock #Security #OpSec

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/25/surveillance-sim-cloning-protests-protect-phone/