Bevins also sees specific, clearly articulated, democratically determined demands as key to realizing a movement’s objectives. The South Korean Candlelight Revolution can be “marked as a success,” he writes toward the end of the book, in large part because its goal—to oust then-President Park Geun-hye for her part in a corruption and bribery scandal—was “clear and achievable.” The U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s also achieved “limited successes,” Bevins implies, because its leaders articulated a clear and specific set of demands, such as the ability to exercise voting rights.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/10/why-havent-the-protest-movements-of-our-time-succeeded/

Using this multi–rule systems approach, we found that the CCP is seeking, with the help of its state, to expunge the ‘illegitimate’ realm of social organising, to change the rules for determining passage into the ‘legitimate’ realm, and to plan and manage the ‘legitimate’ realm dynamically through tangible and intangible means. We roughly conceptualise this as the Party’s pursuit of a ‘command civil society’. Just as a command economy is characterised by its attempt to suck away all space for markets to determine prices and allocate goods and services, the project to build a ‘command civil society’ attempts to suck away space for the operations of any actors and actions that do not fit within its planned and regulated sphere.

The pursuit of a ‘command civil society’ is operationalising Party-and-state joint documents and Party documents alongside state laws and regulations to target the social norms—the ‘survival wisdom’ (Deng 2011)—formed over past decades by social organisers and state administrators. The Party is using its characteristically Leninist penetration of societal and state entities to create rules for tech companies and universities to undermine means for SOs outside the state’s regulatory purview to exist.

This pursuit is not only about tearing down and suppressing; it is also about building a civil society that works reliably in the service of the preferences of the CCP, on the assumption that it knows what is best for society. It seeks to gatekeep access to legitimate identity as a ‘social organisation’ and to influence those SOs which do manage to enter the ‘legitimate’ realm using the Party’s presence in their decision-making mechanisms, the Party’s influence over their leadership makeup, and the Party’s sculpting of the discursive environment in which they operate (in turn influencing the projects they can design, the fundraising strategies they can pursue, and so on).

https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/13/towards-a-command-civil-society/

"When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual"

Engels, the condition of the working class in England. 1845.

Umwelt

The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe. 

[...]

At the risk of overtaxing the reader’s appetite for figures, it is worth spelling out the enormity of what China is doing. The China Electricity Council says the country will add 210 GW of solar this year, twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date.

It is not going to stop there. Carbon Brief says China’s output of solar panels was 310 GW in 2022; it will be 500 GW in 2023; and 1000 GW in 2025 – four times the total installation of new solar worldwide last year.

[...] The point to remember about Xi is that he was green long before it became fashionable. He wrote a weekly column twenty years ago as Zhejiang party chief warning that China’s “energy-intensive and high-polluting” economic model was unsustainable.

He defied the orthodoxy of break-neck industrialisation and GDP worship, launching a radical ‘Green GDP’ programme in Zhejiang in 2004. It called on local governments to subtract ecological damage from the raw GDP figures.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/21/chinas-carbon-emissions-falling-xi-jinping-net-zero/

Breaking news. Shocking, bewildering, befuddling, bamboozling news: Javier Milei, first anarchocapitalist president in history, part of an ideology that essentially claims that there's no social interaction worthy of attention outside of market interactions and no right to be protected aside from property rights, is a compulsive plagiarizer and has stolen works from other people over and over again to then present said work as his own, sometimes directly profiting off of it.
Hold on to your jaws dear fellas, for it appears that the far-right compulsive liar who embraces an ideology for the sake of not caring about any other human being but himself and who embraces all branches of thought that justify acting as a sociopath does not, in fact, care that much about the ridiculously low line (property rights) that he and others had embraced as the basis for an incoherent framework for living in society.
Oh and it also shows that anarchocapitalism is not an even remotely respected position in academia because no economist with some basic knowledge of this social science would ever embrace such an idiotic ideology. On the contrary, there are a lot of socialist economists. Go figure!

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-11-18/javier-milei-how-the-argentine-presidential-candidate-plagiarized-three-mexican-scientists.html

The basic promise of offsets is that individuals or organizations can balance out their own greenhouse gas pollution by paying others to grow trees, halt logging, or take other steps that may reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But a mounting body of studies and investigative reports has found that these projects can dramatically exaggerate the climate benefits in a variety of ways, often amounting to little more than greenwashing.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/30/1084104/the-university-of-california-has-all-but-dropped-carbon-offsets-and-thinks-you-should-too/

Jacobin's articles on Kissinger:

Kissinger: to die at the right time

Kissinger and the South American Revolutions

Kissinger in Central America

Kissinger in South Africa

Kissinger in Western Sahara

Kissinger in Argentina

Kissinger in Cambodia

Kissinger in Bangladesh

Kissinger in Angola

Kissinger in Cyprus

Kissinger in Vietnam and China

Kissinger in the Gulf

Kissinger in Central America

A new leaked report suggests the Biden administration is undermining efforts to set standards for a global carbon market. Coupled with Joe Biden’s absence at the global climate summit this week, patience with the US's lack of action is wearing thin.

“The U.S. government has trouble delivering climate finance and now basically sees private investment, including [through] carbon markets, as an opportunity to showcase that they are delivering climate finance,” said Sven Harmeling, international climate policy coordinator for the nonprofit coalition Climate Action Network Europe. “But we know that [money via carbon markets] is not climate finance. Climate finance means public funding.”

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/joe-biden-administration-carbon-reduction-global-climate-cop28/

In June 1967, two years before the start of Nixon’s presidency, Israel had achieved a gigantic military victory in the Six-Day War. Israel attacked Egypt and occupied Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, and, following modest responses from Jordan and Syria, also took over the West Bank and the Golan Heights. [...] In 1968, the Soviets made what appeared to be quite sincere efforts to collaborate with the U.S. on a peace plan for the region.

The Soviets proposed a solution based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. Israel would withdraw from the territory it had conquered. However, there would not be a Palestinian state. Moreover, Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War would not return to Israel; rather, they would be resettled with compensation in Arab countries. Most importantly, the Soviets would pressure their Arab client states to accept this.

[...] You can read this in Kissinger’s own words in the records of internal deliberations now available on the State Department website. On October 9, Kissinger told his fellow high-level officials, “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best.”

The U.S. then did send huge amounts of weaponry to Israel, which it used to beat back Egypt and Syria. Kissinger looked upon the outcome with satisfaction. In another high-level meeting, on October 19, he celebrated that “everyone knows in the Middle East that if they want a peace they have to go through us. Three times they tried through the Soviet Union, and three times they failed.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/11/30/henry-kissinger-israel-egypt-soviet-union/

#TechPolicy

Put simply, the bill requires that commercial websites and mobile apps create summary terms-of-service statements.

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-tldr-act-mandated-infrastructure-for-a-consumer-centric-and-transparent-internet/

What Taylor argues in The Age of Insecurity is that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security. We can speak to people’s fears and anxieties. We can’t promise to keep them safe from all of life’s vicissitudes, but we can certainly eliminate many of the “manufactured” insecurities in our society. We can make it so that you don’t have to be afraid that if you need an ambulance, you’ll get an enormous bill. We can make it so that going to school doesn’t leave you indentured for decades afterwards. We can guarantee a job or a basic income. We can protect people against unexpected rent hikes. We can make it so they don’t have to be afraid that if the police come, they’ll shoot the person who called them.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/can-the-left-reclaim-security/

“The financial sector will not be expected to push for market-oriented reforms or even necessarily maximize profit,” he said. “As a program for the financial sector, it is ambitious, disappointing and somewhat ominous.”[...]

“Politics will for sure further dictate China’s finance, effectively moving China even closer to how it was before the reforms started in 1978,” said Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Some of the policy targets set forth in the essay would not be unusual as regulatory goals in the West. For example, it calls for banks to emphasize financial services for the “real economy,” which the party has long interpreted to include ample financing for the country’s industrial base.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/business/china-finance-xi-jinping.html