It would be really nice if the ‘liberal democracies’ could work together for the actual common good (rather than a corprate version of Plato’s cave) and -at the very minimum – address the crass excesses like multi-billionaires’ phallic boy toys, which in addition to the sheer vulgarity feed Elysium illusions that there is a planet B for prosperity Jesus’s chosen elite… Sickening.
I keep a hard copy of the ’87 edition of that, along with several thousand volumes from my previous pre internet reading past.. Those are slowly giving up their shelf space as I secure non DRM digital copies so I can expand the monographs, art books etc that are impossible to find online.
In nature and culture, I believe firmly in protecting the great natural places and the grand cultural traditions as we find in the well run national park systems and the most impactful intellectual traditions.
I work with research institutions and tire of hearing revisionist garbage theories (thankfully my information systems consultant role allows me to simply ignore them).
There are great natural places and there are grand cultural traditions. The fact that the Medici were a crime family takes not one iota from the works of Michelangelo, Raphael and DaVinci. The national parks must be protected as sanctuary for nature, this allows neither commerce’s camel nose nor strident calls to ‘interpret’ them..
I suppose I am a radical conservationist in that sense.. The radicalism of the current crop of troglodytes who go by the term ‘conservative’ should be buried and the place of internment salted.
“In the grand tradition of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers comes this provocative history of world democracy, which begins with the ancient Myceans and ends in our fractious present. Overturning long-cherished notions, John Keane poses challenging questions: Did democracy actually begin in ancient Greece or earlier in Mesopotamia? Do the American and British systems actually live up to their democratic ideals? Why is there a bad moon rising over the world’s democracies?
Written by a leading political theorist, this book presents readers with a counterintuitive look at democracy’s past, present, and future, which Keane argues lies not in the West but in the turbulent democracies of the East, especially in India. Keane, avoiding the triumphalism of global democracy’s most boisterous pundits, cautions that democracy today is more fragile than ever and that, unless major corrective measures are taken, we may be sleepwalking our way into even deeper trouble."
Oh- but we couldn’t possibly take a break from endangering pedestrians while entertaining ourselves with our SUV infotainment, contributing to the type 2 diabetes epidemic in front of our big screens and most of all filling our minds with hate and rage from the antisocial media in our pocket prosthesis fondle slabs to, horror of horrors, um, READ BOOKS.
Anywhoo, even if BO’s current victims can’t figure out just how pointless it is to debate a troll spewing science-y nonsense for no purpose other than seeing just how much it can provoke and enrage, most people will have read this particular McFadden ’toon by now :)
The Politico report on think tanks tied to the Koch Bros is a fun read to see why think tanks are in the ‘verify before trusting’ category – in stark contrast to the R1 universities.
The obvious candidate for other organizations here are what are colloquially referred to as ‘think tanks’, with the obvious caveat that as in unaccredited, unranked and unregulated organizations, the potential for bias (think State Policy Network) is huge..
It would be really nice if the ‘liberal democracies’ could work together for the actual common good (rather than a corprate version of Plato’s cave) and -at the very minimum – address the crass excesses like multi-billionaires’ phallic boy toys, which in addition to the sheer vulgarity feed Elysium illusions that there is a planet B for prosperity Jesus’s chosen elite… Sickening.