Documenting Life

“Typically the left’s answers to this are “protests” and “political advocacy” and “persuasion in all of its forms.” These are all great and valid techniques. But a quick glance at the state of the world tells us that they are insufficient for balancing out the power on the other side of the equation from us, which consists of all the billionaires and all the corporations and all the guns. Is there a form of direct power that we can wield, that will be effective in this radically skewed battle? Yes. It is organized labor power. That is it, my friends. That is the left’s power vector. That is where our focus needs to be”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/theres-no-justice-without-power

“He may well have been from the land we call Wales – but he wasn’t Welsh because Welshness hadn’t been invented yet. The man we know as Patrick was Romano-British, a mix of class status and ethnic group that no longer exists, and which messes with the internet’s sense of how colonialism works by merging both culture and probably genes of coloniser and subject. Trying to map this onto anything that exists today is madness”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-identity

“People had that look on their face, like an animal that has just come out of hibernation. They were sitting on walls, closing their eyes and facing up – that very specific Spring awareness of warmth, before you’ve started to take it for granted. Everyone looked beautiful: radiant, happy, alive. We’d survived another winter. We made it through”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/reasons-to-be-cheerful

“You need to control institutions in order to win at politics, so almost by definition you need institutionalists. You need people who are comfortable making compromises and doing boring stuff. But you also need to energize and mobilize people, and the institutionalists tend to be bad at that because they’re busy making compromises and doing boring stuff. So for that you need activists.

Ideally, you want these two tendencies to co-exist. There will be tension between them, but they ought to operate within certain limits. Instead, what we’re seeing right now is essentially a battle of institutionalists versus activists. But that is ultimately self-defeating – because, to repeat, you need both to win. What the Democrats really need are leaders who can synthesize both necessities and build a solid movement. And for that, they need better leaders.

https://amerex.substack.com/p/democrats-need-some-better-leaders

“The First World War dominates the culture of the time. It echoes down to us in poetry, literature and film. The flu pandemic which followed infected a third of the global population and killed anywhere up to 100 million people and yet you never really see anything about it. It never comes up. Apart from one informational film, which survives in the BFI National Archive, the 1918/19 pandemic doesn’t appear in British film at all”

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-to-read-this