"In [Mudde's] view populism is a “thin ideology”, one that merely sets up a framework: that of a pure people versus a corrupt elite. (He contrasts it with pluralism, which accepts the legitimacy of many different groups.) This thin ideology can be attached to all sorts of “thick” ideologies with more moving parts, such as socialism, nationalism, anti-imperialism or racism, in order to explain the world and justify specific agendas." Economist
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This is a good point, something I'd never considered before
"Vacuum packs and other kinds of wrapping do themselves consume energy and resources in their manufacture. But they make more sense than letting food go to waste. Mark Little, who is in charge of reducing food waste at Tesco, points out that every tonne of waste means the equivalent of 3.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are released without purpose. In contrast, a tonne of packaging causes emissions of 1-2 tonnes."
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CW: Child sexual abuse.
Copy-pasted from Toni...
Kind of surprised to see relatively few people in my timeline discussing the stuff in the news about abuse of children in Football from decades ago that is only now coming to light. I agree with a friend who commented that the same mentality that facilitated the mass coverup ('what happens in football, stays in football') probably is also at work in the lack of discussion about it i'm seeing in feminist circles.
The rape culture we fight against in feminism applies to victims who are children, including boys.
Every rich institution where men have had access to children was (and possibly still is to some extent) fucking *rotten* with abuse, because of the unfettered power afforded to certain men, the disgusting tendency of other people to turn the other way, and the complete lack of available options we have when it comes to making people accountable.
The people in the screenshot below will only be the tip of the iceberg, and the real number will translate to countless more victims, so horrifying.
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"We do not see what it is fun about it,", says IKEA spokesperson.
😂😂😂
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Good to know!
"the names [Burma and Myanmar] share a common root. Though the words look radically different in Roman scripts, in Burmese they are pronounced almost identically: with a quick, unstressed first syllable, either “buh” or something like “munn”, followed by a longer “MA”. In neither name is there a hard “r” sound anywhere. It is never pronounced “MAI-an-marr”." Economist
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We have basically avoided nuclear annihilation by pure luck so far. Let's hope it keeps holding out!
"The first Minuteman missiles had already become a great source of stress for McNamara. The control system of the original model had a design flaw: small fluctuations in the electricity entering the command center could mimic the series of pulses required by the launch switch. An entire squadron of fifty missiles might be launched accidentally without anyone turning a key... McNamara insisted that the control system be redesigned, at great expense. The destruction of fifty Soviet cities because of a mechanical glitch, a classified history of the Minuteman program later noted, would be “an accident for which a later apology might be inadequate.”
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Quite an interesting story - how one of the "leading lights" of the US "white nationalist" movements was persuaded he was wrong
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"In hospitals in particular, there are “so many nuisance alarms going off all the time, that people—nurses, doctors—just tune them out,” says Baldwin. “They don’t even hear them anymore.” The statistics say that most of these alarms are not indications of peril. A 2012 review of medical audio alarms found that in one intensive therapy unit, “of 1455 soundings of alarms, only eight were associated with potentially life-threatening problems.”" Atlas Obscura
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97 people arrested for immigration offences, of whom only 14 passed to the National Referral Mechanism (for possible trafficking victims), and yet this is sold as a crackdown on "modern slavery" as opposed to simply targeting migrants. :/
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"...there are four major factors that contribute to a vacation that offers recovery: relaxation, control, mastery experiences and mental detachment from work." TED
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Another person who died this year: An epidemiologist who was essential to the eradication of smallpox.
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Fascinating. How basketball players would rather appear masculine than actually, you know, score points.
"Barry once tutored a poor NBA free throw shooter, whom he will not name, to shoot underhand free throws. “I had him shooting 80 to 90 in practice,” Barry said. “He never had the guts to do it when he went back to the team.”"
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"The authors of “Signalling status with luxury goods: the role of brand prominence”, which appeared in the Journal of Marketing in 2010, do so by dividing the rich into two groups: “parvenus”, who want to associate themselves with other rich people and distinguish themselves from have-nots, and “patricians”, who want to signal to each other but not to the masses. They theorise that more expensive luxury goods, aimed at patricians, will have less obvious branding than cheaper ones. Sure enough, they found that Gucci and Louis Vuitton charge more for quieter handbags and Mercedes slaps bigger emblems on its cheaper cars. People who cannot afford luxury but want to look as if they can (“poseurs”) go for big logos: counterfeiters usually copy louder goods." 1843
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[CN: relatively graphic descriptions of drug use]
Straight from the horse's mouth. A former undercover cop talks about how his entire career essentially causes unnecessary harm to drug users and other innocent people. Just horrifying
“Every year the police get better at catching drug gangs, and the gangsters’ most effective way of fighting back is upping the use of fear and intimidation against potential informants. The most efficient way to stop people grassing them up is to be terrifying. In other words, organised crime groups were getting nastier and nastier as a direct result of what I was doing.” Guardian
Also: Vice
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Was just chatting with Toni about this passage in connection with street harassment. How harassment is upsetting even when it isn't particularly *threatening* (though it often is, of course), because it disrupts a woman's ability simply to *be* and forces her to think of herself as an object of others' perception.
"A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight."
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing
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Important to read this proposal to formally annex 'Area C' as part of Israel alongside an actual map of the West Bank. Areas A and B encompass the major Palestinian population centres, and Area C is the entire *remainder* of the territory (all the white in the map). So annexation would essentially mean the creation of a series of bantustans, each of which is completely surrounded by territory that is formally part of Israel. Horrifying.
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"Planter authority could not be compromised for the sake of the visions of a few eccentric deists, however prominent. At the same time, there was a reason that the Bible was the only book slave-owners allowed to circulate freely on plantations. ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters in fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ,’ states Ephesians, one of many places where the scriptures authorise slavery, and counsel submissive obedience. Slavery was simply more important to US nation-building than secularism." Aeon
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