A first lesson is that authenticity cannot be bought from a public relations consultant. There is a truism often repeated in electoral politics and policy advocacy that you must speak authentically to the people you want to represent — that they must feel that you are one of them. And yet, no amount of messaging and polling is enough to make Kamala Harris feel genuine. Hakeem Jeffries has put on hoodies, Nancy Pelosi has knelt in a Kente cloth, Andrew Cuomo took off his tie and filmed himself in a park in Manhattan, but their efforts never seem to achieve what they are seeking to achieve.

What is it that makes someone like Pepe Mujica different? What makes them feel authentic?

Pepe showed that the real substance of authenticity lies in the politics themselves — in the work, the commitments, the choices. Miss that, and you end up with a generation of Barack Obama knockoffs, a parade of shallow imitations.

The second lesson to learn from Pepe is about how to ensure that personal commitments become political outcomes. It is difficult to maintain genuine accountability to the working class and social movements in modern democratic systems. Time and time again, activists have placed allies in office only to see them caving to corporate and neoliberal pressures. Or conversely, they witness leaders trying to establish control over a political system who end up turning toward authoritarianism. There are too few institutional mechanisms that allow elected officials to avoid these paths and assert a consistent progressive mandate, especially when facing sustained resistance from the media, corporate interests, and the political establishment.

Exceptional political talent is not enough. Without structural support, the likelihood of disappointment is high. Without a durable, independent structure behind electoral efforts, accountability cannot be guaranteed.

No doubt Pepe Mujica was an exceptional political talent, but it was the unique structural accountability of the Frente Amplio that allowed him to stay steady and responsive to his base. It stands as a key institutionalized example of a true mass party in Latin America. Through its creation of mechanisms to keep it beholden to the interests and concerns of its grassroots supporters, the Frente is a uniquely valuable instance of participatory politics.

Electoral structures in the United States make this hard to replicate, but activists can take steps in this direction by codifying the internal democracy of organizations that make up the wider ecology of progressive electoral efforts. We can ask: In what ways are these groups — beyond electoral efforts — formalizing their accountability to social movements?

This is a crucial lesson for social movements seeking progressive change: having allies in office, even a president with deep political commitments to regular people, is not enough. Social movements drive political possibility, expanding the Overton window and forcing elected officials to move beyond their comfort zones. Political power, even when wielded by well-intentioned leaders, is constrained by institutional inertia, competing interests, and the limits of political will.

Uruguay’s story underscores the importance of sustained pressure, strategic agitation, and public engagement.

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/pepe-mujica-uruguay-movements-strategy/

what made Lincoln great was that he understood that, in the end, there would be no establishment of the rule of law until justice had been served and slavery abolished. There could be no refusal of violence that would stick, that would be anything more than the blandest sanctimony, the emptiest piety, until the underlying social violence — the combination of the “Negro question” and the “labor question” — was resolved, through concerted action by the state.

What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so formulaic, even feckless, is that they are severed from any sort of action or social awareness. At best, they rest on a studied inattention to the underlying social and economic roots of the problem. At this point, the politicians who speak this way sound like the very abolitionists who were rightly derided as crackpot utopians for their naive belief that moral suasion, without state action, could somehow win the day against slavery.

The difference is that those abolitionists had no power. Many of these politicians do.

https://jacobin.com/2025/09/lincoln-slavery-abolition-polarization-reconciliation/

EU strategy to face narratives against democracy - with a focus on the external dimension

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/754484/EXPO_STU(2025)754484_EN.pdf

Not to be dramatic, but between the far-right media consolidation and the acquisition of Dominion Voting, democracy is dead in the US

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/09/dominion-voting-machines-sold-elections

If we look at not only the energy requirements, but the whole lifecycle of the data centre, including the embodied carbon in their construction and the manufacturing of components, the situation worsens. For the whole world, Morgan Stanley predict that data centre CO2-equivalent emissions will triple by 2030, rising to equivalent of 40% of the US’ total emissions, once account is taken not only of electricity use but also data centre construction. This rapid increase is, they estimate, about three times worse than it would have been without the arrival of AI. Only approximately 60% of the total emissions are due to the operational power requirement, the rest being embodied carbon in the manufacturing and construction of the centres.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64871f9937497e658cf744f5/t/682e0081bd6dc64bb45fcb1d/1747845250339/Data+centres-+how+soaring+demand+threatens+to+overwhelm+energy+systems+and+climate+goals.pdf

For example, after October 7, the army authorized soldiers to kill up to 20 civilians in order to assassinate a suspected low-level Hamas operative, or hundreds of civilians when targeting more senior figures. The vast majority of these assassinations occurred in civilian homes where no military activity was taking place. But for most of the soldiers I spoke to, the mere existence of an alleged military target, even in cases where the intelligence picture was murky, justified virtually any resultant death toll.

In another investigation, a soldier described to me how his battalion used remote-controlled drones to fire on Palestinian civilians, including women and children, as they tried to return to their destroyed homes in an area occupied by the Israeli army, killing 100 unarmed Palestinians over the course of three months. The goal, he explained, was not to kill them for the sake of it, but to keep the neighborhood empty and thus safer for the soldiers stationed there.

Another soldier recounted participating in the shelling of an entire residential block, comprising more than 10 multi-story apartment buildings and one high-rise all packed with families. She knew beforehand that in doing so she and her crew would likely kill some 300 civilians. But the operation, she explained, was based on intelligence suggesting that a relatively senior Hamas commander might be hiding somewhere beneath one of these buildings. Without more precise information, they destroyed the entire area in the hope of killing him.

The soldier conceded that the attack amounted to a massacre. But in her view, this was not the intention; the goal was to hit the commander, who may not have even been there.

This mission-oriented framing played a crucial role in enabling ordinary Israelis to participate in genocide — perhaps more than obedience alone, which is usually assumed to be the primary motivator in such contexts. By understanding each act of violence as a discrete task, from targeting a Hamas operative to securing a perimeter, soldiers could avoid confronting their role in the mass slaughter of civilians.

[...]

The tendency of perpetrators of genocide to invoke “security” as a justification for mass violence is well documented, rationalizing acts of brutality within a broader framework of self-defense. But whatever flimsy excuse is given in each case, Israel’s attacks were undeniably carried out in the full knowledge that they would lead to the destruction of another people. The result is a Palestinian death toll that is thought to exceed 100,000, and the near-total obliteration of the Gaza Strip.

https://www.972mag.com/israelis-logic-gaza-genocide/

COMMISSION STAFF WORKING DOCUMENT- A Chips Act for Europe