ONTD Political

But Guyz Corporate Democrats Can Still Win by Leading with their Values.

How Rojava-inspired women's councils have spread across Europe

Could this little-known system provide a way forward for real democracy – from the bottom up – in our failing neoliberal political systems?

Every time I speak at public meetings in Britain about the gender equality and direct democracy experiment being carried out in Rojava, Northern Syria, I am invariably asked by an inspired audience what we can learn from there – and how can we implement it here.
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Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in the Heart of the Deep South
Cooperation Jackson is trying to build an alternative economy for the city’s majority-black residents.

On November 9, people across the left woke up and wondered, “What do I do now? Under total Republican control, how does one fight for progressive change?”
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The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning Local Elections
Campaigning for economic and social justice, they are winning municipal races in states like Illinois and Georgia.

Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council members—leading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas.
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Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Russians are becoming poorer

In Russia, governmental statistics show that the country is facing the worst poverty figures in 10 years. The country has been undergoing a recession since 2014, and it is the middle class who is suffering the most as a result of the economic crisis.


Julia Beliakov Photo : Radio-Canada/Alexey Sergeyev
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Julia Beliakov and her husband almost lost everything last year when both of them lost their jobs.

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OP: Gross.

Does anyone think we'll get Russian government trolls, I wonder, since this is a critical post?

The Problem With the March for Science

Hundreds of thousands of self-professed science supporters turned out to over 600 iterations of the March for Science around the world this weekend. Thanks to the app Periscope, I attended half a dozen of them from the comfort of my apartment, thereby assiduously minimizing my carbon footprint.

Mainly, these marches appeared to be a pleasant excuse for liberals to write some really bad (and, OK, some truly superb) puns, and put them on cardboard signs. There were also some nicely stated slogans that roused support for important concepts such as reason and data and many that decried the defunding of scientific research and ignorance-driven policy.

But here’s the problem: Little of what I observed dissuades me from my baseline belief that, even among the sanctimonious elite who want to own science (and pwn anyone who questions it), most people have no idea how science actually works. The scientific method itself is already under constant attack from within the scientific community itself and is ceaselessly undermined by its so-called supporters, including during marches like those on Saturday. In the long run, such demonstrations will do little to resolve the myriad problems science faces and instead could continue to undermine our efforts to use science accurately and productively.

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A web of secret online identities connects the creator of the misogynistic Red Pill forum to a New Hampshire state representative.



Last November, voters in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region re-elected to the state house of representatives a man who appears to be one of the secret architects of the internet’s misogynistic “Manosphere.”

The homegrown son of a preacher, 31-year-old Robert Fisher is a Republican who represents New Hampshire’s Belknap County District 9. In addition to his legislative duties, Fisher owns a local computer-repair franchise, and in his spare time, seems to have created the web’s most popular online destination for pickup artistry and men’s rights activists, The Red Pill, according an investigation by the Daily Beast.

An investigation into Fisher’s online aliases found a trail of posts linking the lawmaker to the username Pk_atheist, the creator of The Red Pill—an online Reddit community of nearly 200,000 subscribers that promotes itself as a “discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.”

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SOURCE

The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.

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The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.( Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of gunshot injuries and medical/surgical proceduresCollapse )

Source: HuffPost

I know this is pretty long, but I found it fascinating and learned a tremendous amount from it about things I knew a lot less about than I thought I did. Ymmv.

Is Uganda the world’s best place for refugees?

Once refugees themselves, Ugandans look to ‘return the good’ to people fleeing war in South Sudan by offering land and help


Nyumanzi resettlement camp in northern Uganda. Photograph: Isaac Kasamani/AFP/Getty Images
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A mix of Afrobeat and South Sudanese folk music resounds over the jumbled stalls and makeshift corrugated iron shops that form the trading centre of Nyumanzi, a sprawling refugee settlement in northern Uganda.
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OP: Sad news, but the world doesn't seem to care... (Although Ugandans could teach rich western nations a thing or two.)

The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think

How did big media miss the Donald Trump swell? News organizations old and new, large and small, print and online, broadcast and cable assigned phalanxes of reporters armed with the most sophisticated polling data and analysis to cover the presidential campaign. The overwhelming assumption was that the race was Hillary Clinton’s for the taking, and the real question wasn’t how sweeping her November victory would be, but how far out to sea her wave would send political parvenu Trump. Today, it’s Trump who occupies the White House and Clinton who’s drifting out to sea—an outcome that arrived not just as an embarrassment for the press but as an indictment. In some profound way, the election made clear, the national media just doesn’t get the nation it purportedly covers.

What went so wrong? What’s still wrong? To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

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source is politico

America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People

A new book by economist Peter Temin finds that the U.S. is no longer one country, but dividing into two separate economic and political worlds

You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from “burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less about what exactly is emerging in its place.
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The Rich Are Living Longer and Taking More From Taxpayers

Social Security is becoming a much better deal for the wealthy.

We’re living longer and longer. Well, some of us.

Age 100 is now an imaginable goal for young people around the world with good health care. The average woman in Japan is already living to 87. Yet many Americans are dying younger and younger. Based on the latest year of data, the Society of Actuaries last fall dropped its life expectancy estimates for 65-year-olds in the U.S. by six months. The health of middle-aged non-Hispanic white Americans is deteriorating fastest.
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Sorry for the late shenanigans! Hope everyone had a great weekend!