Tag: rss_source

“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

“The protest checked every “what we should be doing now” box—bringing community members into the streets, speaking out, remaining unswayed in our beliefs, taking action—but it was all playing out in an America where the mood to push the the kid in the wheelchair into the mud and laugh has taken hold. The mean spirit of nihilistic vengeance is momentarily unleashed. We will stuff it back in its box, sooner or later. But not yet”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/a-television-show-called-the-usa

“Enrich estimated that without USAID intervention, more than 16 million pregnant women and more than 11 million newborns would not get medical care; more than 14 million children would not get care for pneumonia and diarrhea (among the top causes of preventable deaths for children under the age of 5); 200,000 children would be paralyzed with polio; and 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. There would be an additional 12.5 million or more cases of malaria this year, meaning 71,000 to 166,000 deaths; a 28–32% increase in tuberculosis; as many as 775 million cases of avian flu; 2.3 million additional deaths a year in children who could not be vaccinated against diseases; additional cases of Ebola and mpox. The higher rates of illness will take a toll on economic development in developing countries, and both the diseases and the economic stagnation will spill over into the United States”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-3-2025

“How does this economy look good when people feel so bad? One reason is that our stats were collected premised on a reasonably equal society that no longer exists. Today, 10% of high earners account for half of consumer spending. That’s insane. There are actually two economies, one with high earners, and then everyone else. But our stats don’t account for that”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-are-we-headed-into

“But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency. I continued using Skype to record The Talk Show until a few years ago, and I can’t say I miss it. But I used Skype to record at least around 400 episodes — which means I’ve spent somewhere around 1,000 hours talking to people over Skype. I can close my eyes and just hear Skype’s kinda clunky but distinctive ringtone. In the early days of podcasting, seemingly every show used Skype because it was so much better than anything else. And it was free! It felt like the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if not for Skype, podcasting would’ve been set back several years”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/28/microsoft-skype-eol

“There are other reasons the “far-right on the march” story might appeal. It’s easier to spot and tell than the one about Die Linke because the results are obvious rather than something you have to drill down into crosstabs to spot. It’s an easier sell to the powers that be, too, because bad news stories are always an easier sell, and also because everybody else is writing them so no one is going to yell at you for missing the real story. The sense of a Europe hovering above the abyss is exciting, too, and a not insignificant proportion of the people who go into journalism are history nerds who always kind of wanted to cover a world on fire”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/the-heart-of-the-problem