TBF
TBF's JournalThe Data of Hate
(Interesting article here - the author analyzes the young membership of Stormfront. It begs the question of what communists can do to reach youth).The Data of Hate
JULY 12, 2014
Oped by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
I recently analyzed tens of thousands of the site’s profiles, in which registered members can enter their location, birth date, interests and other information. Call it Big Hatred meets Big Data. Stormfront was founded in 1995 by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Its most popular “social groups” are “Union of National Socialists” and “Fans and Supporters of Adolf Hitler.” Over the past year, according to Quantcast, roughly 200,000 to 400,000 Americans visited the site every month. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report linked nearly 100 murders in the past five years to registered Stormfront members.
The white nationalist posters on Stormfront have issues with many different groups. They often write about crimes committed by African-Americans against whites; they complain about an “invasion” of Mexicans; and they love to mock gays and feminists. But their main problem appears to be with Jewish people, who are often described as super-powerful and clever — the driving force, generally speaking, behind the societal changes they do not like. They sometimes call the Holocaust the “Holohoax.”
Stormfront members tend to be young, at least according to self-reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join the site is 19. And four times more 19-year-olds sign up than 40-year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not nearly that young ...
Entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-the-data-of-hate.html?_r=0
The Monetary System
Not a long article - just a tidbit from the Venus Project facebook page this morning. To be clear Fresco is not a Paulite, he is an engineer who has tirelessly advocated for moving beyond capitalism to a resource based economy. More about Venus Project Here: http://www.thevenusproject.com/about/resource-based-economy
The Venus Project - Global
Wednesday, July 16 at 7:00am ·
"People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture." - Jacque Fresco
Why I’m Not a Liberal
Why I’m Not a Liberal
7.15.14 ~ by Robin Marie Averbeck
To many liberals, injustice is a product of misunderstanding, the result of faceless processes that no one really benefits from.
I was standing in the National Mall, surrounded by nearly a quarter million people, when I realized I wasn’t a liberal. I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents. The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you. This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”
< snip>
Yet lost in all of these festive roastings of the Tea Party was the fact that the right-wing “crazies” were closer to the truth than the liberals. After all, as many a leftist columnist pointed out and celebrated, Mandela did at one point advocate the use of violence as a means to liberation, did participate in communist politics, and was, at least earlier in his career, a radical.
< snip >
Remaining undisturbed, however, is the assumption that the solution to poverty is to push as many poor people as possible into the job market — to “fix” poor folks rather than restructure the economic institutions that place them in such a quagmire. The fact that this charade of a debate often involves yelling creates the illusion that a fundamental difference is being discussed — but it’s merely the means that are being disputed. At the same time, identifying fundamental disagreements that do exist becomes extremely difficult when one cannot even name what is being struggled over — power. For at the root of the liberal denial of conflict is the liberal denial of power. And on this falsehood, all attempts to honestly confront conflict run afoul. To say that liberals struggle with the concept of power is so familiar that it seems like a truism at this point. Indeed, even liberals themselves – on their leftmost flank, at least – often engage in this critique. Yet as G.E. Lessing once wrote, even those who mock their chains are not always free, and even self-conscious liberals still continually ignore or downplay power ...
Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/why-im-not-a-liberal/
Marinaleda
Marinaleda: the village where people come before profit
By Liam Barrington-Bush and Jen Wilton ~ July 15, 2014
In the south of Spain, the street is the collective living room. Vibrant sidewalk cafes are interspersed between configurations of two to five lawn chairs where neighbors come together to chat over the day’s events late into the night. In mid-June the weather peaks well over 40 degrees Celsius and the smells of fresh seafood waft from kitchens and restaurants as the seasonably-late dining hour begins to approach. The scene is archetypally Spanish, particularly for the Andalusian region to the country’s south, where life is lived more in public than in private, when given half a chance.
Specifically, this imagery above describes Marinaleda. Initially indistinguishable from several of its local counterparts in the Sierra Sur southern mountain range, were it not for a few tell-tale signs. Maybe it’s the street names (Ernesto Che Guevara, Solidarity and Salvador Allende Plaza, to name a few); maybe it’s the graffiti (hand drawn hammers-and-sickles sit happily alongside encircled A’s, oblivious to the differences the two ideologies have shared, even in the country’s recent past); maybe it’s the two-story Che head which emblazons the outer wall of the local sports stadium.
Marinaleda has been called Spain’s ‘communist utopia,’ though the local variation bears little resemblance to the Soviet model most associate with the phrase. Classifications aside, this is a town whose social fabric has been woven from very different economic threads to the rest of the country since the fall of the Franco dictatorship in the mid 1970s. A cooperatively-owned olive oil factory, houses built by and for the community, and a famous looting of a large-scale supermarket, led by the town’s charismatic mayor, in which proceeds were donated to food banks, are amongst the steps that have helped position Marinaleda as a beacon of hope ...
more here: http://roarmag.org/2014/07/marinaleda-spain-communist-utopia/
Compassion and Empathy the Path to a Peaceful and Just Middle East
Compassion and Empathy the Path to a Peaceful and Just Middle East
by: Cat Zavis on July 14th, 2014
I have been struggling with how to respond to the current crisis in Gaza (and frankly, the craziness of so many things in the world right now – including the horrific reality that Obama is closing our doors to refugee children sending them back to their countries to face horrors unimaginable).
My heart is broken. At Shabbat services Friday night, as we sang a prayer for healing, my thoughts turned to all the victims in Gaza – images of their maimed and murdered bodies (that I had unfortunately seen on the internet) flashed before my eyes, resulting in tears running down my cheeks and sobs of sorrow and grief), just as I mourned the death of the three Israeli teenagers. I sometimes feel a sense of hopelessness at the current situation and know many people don’t have any idea what to do to stop this madness, nonetheless I am now working to expand our Network of Spiritual Progressives to help spread a different worldview and to bring a voice of compassion and empathy to the situation.
Israel, with its overwhelming power, has a moral responsibility to stop bombing Gaza. Israel is killing innocent civilians under the guise of wiping out Hamas when in fact, this sort of attack will only strengthen militant forces and voices in Palestine who will use the attacks to further their position that Israel (and “Jews”) are murderers and only care about controlling all of Israel and Palestine. In addition, this behavior by Netanyahu only perpetuates anti-Semitism and puts Jews at greater risk around the world. When the actions of the State of Israel are equated with the actions of Jews, Jews ultimately suffer.In fact, just today I read about pro-Hamas protesters in Paris trapping hundreds of Jews in a synagogue, chanting “Death to Jews” while throwing rocks and bricks at the synagogue. The police dispersed the crowd. The members left the synagogue – two were lightly injured. Anti-Semitism, like any form of racism, is always illegitimate. But when so many institutions of the organized Jewish communities around the world line up in solidarity with whatever military or political action the State of Israel takes, I can easily see how easy it is for some to equate the activities of the State of Israel with the entire Jewish people (unfair though that is) ...
More here: http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2014/07/14/compassion-and-empathy-the-path-to-a-peaceful-and-just-middle-east/
No Human is Illegal
(this is a story from 2012 that I happened upon today - and still very relevent)
67 Sueños mural, by Pancho Pescador in collaboration with the Community Rejuvenation Project, San Francisco
Source: http://culturalorganizing.org/?tag=no-human-being-is-illegal
An Accidental Activist - Safe Passage Ms. Gordimer
The New York Times - HELEN T. VERONGOS - JULY 14, 2014
Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer whose literary ambitions led her into the heart of apartheid to create a body of fiction that brought her a Nobel Prize in 1991, died on Sunday in Johannesburg. She was 90. Her family announced her death in a statement.
Ms. Gordimer did not originally choose apartheid as her subject as a young writer, she said, but she found it impossible to dig deeply into South African life without striking repression. And once the Afrikaner nationalists came to power in 1948, the scaffolds of the apartheid system began to rise around her and could not be ignored.
“I am not a political person by nature,” Ms. Gordimer said years later. “I don’t suppose if I had lived elsewhere, my writing would have reflected politics much, if at all.” But whether by accident of geography or literary searching, she found her themes in the injustices and cruelties of her country’s policies of racial division, and she left no quarter of South African society unexplored — from the hot, crowded cinder-block neighborhoods and tiny shebeens of the black townships to the poolside barbecues, hunting parties and sundowner cocktails of the white society.
Critics have described the whole of her work as constituting a social history as told through finely drawn portraits of the characters who peopled it ...
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/books/nadine-gordimer-novelist-and-apartheid-foe-dies-at-90.html
Photo: Nadine Gordimer with Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, in Johannesburg in 2005. Credit Radu Sigheti/Reuters
Happy Bastille Day:
(note - yes, we should care about it. But I would go much further and not only talk about our first revolution but also the state of the USA presently)Why Americans should care about the French holiday
Jolie Lee, USA TODAY Network 7:44 a.m. EDT July 14, 2014
July 14th is often thought of as France's Independence Day.
More accurately, it's the French National Day -- called La Fête Nationale in French -- commemorating the day in 1789 when crowds stormed the Bastille, a fortress used as a prison in Paris. The event marks the beginning of the French Revolution.
So what does it have to do with the USA? A lot, actually.
The French royal treasury had essentially run out of money, largely due to the funding it provided to America during its revolution, as well as a French tax system that favored the aristocracy ...
More here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/07/14/bastille-day-explainer-french-independence/12522863/
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