If you thought that 2016 was not a great year, well The Economist does not seem to optimistic about the year to come. Indeed, in its "The Year in 2017" cover, the publication  predicts death and turmoil in a dark occult context, using tarot cards and cryptic symbolism.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

As new research reveals, right wingers understand far better than liberals how cyberspace can connect like-minded souls [...]

One's first reaction to Professor Albright's maps, after the sharp intake of breath at the scale and intensity of the online activity implied by them, is to ask what would the comparable leftwing ecosystem be like? His tentative answer is that it appears to be significantly smaller and much less interconnected than the "alt-right" ecosystem.

In 2015 the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, was graced with a new public monument: a giant gold-plated sculpture portraying the country's president on horseback. This may strike you as a bit excessive. But cults of personality are actually the norm in the "stans," the Central Asian countries that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of which are ruled by strongmen who surround themselves with tiny cliques of wealthy crony capitalists.

Americans used to find the antics of these regimes, with their tinpot dictators, funny. But who's laughing now?

We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself; remember, his "charitable" foundation spent a lot of money buying a six-foot portrait of its founder. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he's in office. I don't think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?

I continue to be struck by this quote from Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

 

   "This method [of infallible prediction] is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator's prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive - since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it...In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies."

Arendt, a German-born Jewish philosopher, wrote these words trying to make sense of Hitler's Germany. The ways in which they resonate in today's U.S. context is chilling. Arendt's analysis here reminds me why fascism--including nascent neo-fascist forms--can't be fact-checked.

ExtraNewsFeed - Yonatan Zunger - Tolerance is not a moral precept

The title of this essay should disturb you. We have been brought up to believe that tolerating other people is one of the things you do if you're a nice person -- whether we learned this in kindergarten or from Biblical maxims like "love your neighbor as yourself" and "do unto others."

But if you have ever tried to live your life this way, you will have seen it fail: "Why won't you tolerate my intolerance?" This comes in all sorts of forms: accepting a person's actively antisocial behavior because it's just part of being an accepting group of friends; being told that prejudice against Nazis is the same as prejudice against Black people; watching people try to give "equal time" to a religious (or irreligious) group whose guiding principle is that everyone must join them or else.

Every one of these examples should raise your suspicions that something isn't right; that tolerance be damned, one of these things is not like the other. But if you were raised with an intense version of "tolerance is a moral requirement," then you may feel that this is a thought you should fight off.

It isn't.

Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. .....

Reports on the rise of fascism in Europe was not the American media's finest hour

How to cover the rise of a political leader who's left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition "normal," because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mussolini's success in Italy normalized Hitler's success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him "the German Mussolini." Given Mussolini's positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid '20's to early '30's, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a "nonsensical" screecher of "wild words" whose appearance, according to Newsweek, "suggests Charlie Chaplin." His "countenance is a caricature." He was as "voluble" as he was "insecure," stated Cosmopolitan.

The trouble is that Livingston's "Fuck Work" falls prey to an impoverished and, in a sense, classically Liberal social ontology, which reifies the neoliberal order it aims to transform. Disavowing modern humanity's reliance on broadscale political governance and robust public infrastructures, this Liberal ontology predicates social life on immediate and seemingly "free" associations, while its critical preoccupation with tyranny and coercion eschews the charge of political interdependence and caretaking. Like so many Universal Basic Income supporters on the contemporary Left, Livingston doubles down on this contracted relationality. Far from a means to transcend neoliberal governance, Livingston's triumphant negation of work only compounds neoliberalism's two-faced retreat from collective governance and concomitant depoliticization of social production and distribution.

However (These writers in the first line doesn't refer to the essay above):
The Rich Already Have a UBI | Jacobin -

Among other things, these writers dislike the fact that a UBI would deliver individuals income in a way that is divorced from working. Such an income arrangement would, it is argued, lead to meaninglessness, social dysfunction, and resentment.

One obvious problem with this analysis is that passive income  --  income divorced from work  --  already exists. It is called capital income. It flows out to various individuals in society in the form of interest, rents, and dividends. According to Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (PSZ), around 30 percent of all the income produced in the nation is paid out as capital income.

If passive income is so destructive, then you would think that centuries of dedicating one-third of national income to it would have burned society to the ground by now.

...

If you have a problem with this, but not the current arrangement where capital income is paid out in huge sums to small fractions of our society, then your issue is not really with passive income. It can't be.

While I accept that the theoretical case for a job guarantee is stronger than for an universal basic income proponents of the latter tend to overstate their case. Yes work provides a community, as Yves argues in the introduction to the Ferguson piece but it also destroys them. How many families fail because work eats too many hours of the day to keep them functioning? It is also true that a properly constructed job guarantee would improve people's skillsets. But badly constructed one would just increase the number of bullshit jobs. There is also the risk that the Job Guarantee could be turned from everyone can get a job to everyone has to get a (specific) job or face starvation. The strongest point for UBI is that it is dead simple. Everyone gets money, no questions asked.

"Are you a strong woman?"

The camera crew wanted a snappy answer. We were filming a short news segment on the beach in Brighton, with a frigid wind gusting around the boom mic and seagulls circling overhead, screaming for chips. I didn't know how to reply.

The issue of strength comes up a lot these days--for me it's one of the standard questions I've come to expect when people ask me about feminism. That day, however, it stung. The fact was that I'd barely made it out of the house to meet the very nice people from Swiss TV, because I'd spent the previous three hours trying and failing to get out of bed, in a pit of seasonal depression darkened by political despair, somewhere in between where the showering stage ends and the stage in which old Placebo records start to really speak to you. I didn't have the structural integrity to be my usual snowflake self.

"I think that's the wrong question to ask," I said, trying to speak clearly, and letting my eyes drift towards the horizon in an effort to pass off bewilderment as profundity. I've never thought of myself as a strong person, in any sense--I'm small, sensitive, prone to anxious overthinking; moved to anger, I'm far more likely to cry than throw a punch. It used to mystify me when people told me how strong I must be, until I realized that it's always after I am harassed in public, which is something that happens to me on the regular, as it does to most women who dare to express political opinions online. When the abuse leaves me broken and wondering how to go on, I am told how strong I am, usually by people who care and want to reassure themselves that there's sense and meaning to what's happening to me.

When I fight back, though, when I continue to write about injustice in the face of the bullying campaigns that are daily life for every female activist I have met, precisely when I feel strongest--that's when I'm told I'm weak. A crybaby. Special snowflake. Whiner. Virtue-signaling, I am told, by people who seem to believe that virtue never exists as a standard to strive towards, only as a set of empty signs.

As politics turn darker, these slurs have become weaponized. Something bigger is going on.

this is a great essay

keep to the Fen Causeway

urope has not been doing well. Just this year, GDP per capita for the Eurozone as a whole finally returned to pre-crisis levels. It is claiming victory in Spain--even though unemployment remains near 20% and youth unemployment is more than twice that--simply because things are better today than they have been since the euro crisis began a half decade ago. Greece remains in a severe depression. Growth for the Eurozone over the past year has been an anemic 1.6%, and that number is twice the average growth rate from 2005 to 2015. Historians are already speaking of the Eurozone's lost decade, and it's possible they'll soon be writing about its last decade, too.

The euro was introduced in 2002, but the cracks in the single currency arrangement, which began in 1999, became evident with the 2008 global financial crisis. Economists had predicted that the test of the euro would occur when the region faced a shock, and Europe was unlucky in facing such a big shock coming from across the Atlantic so soon after its creation. By 2010, the euro crisis had become full blown, with interest rates on the sovereign debt of the "periphery"--Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal--soaring to unheard-of levels. But a closer look at the Eurozone shows imbalances building up from the very beginning--with money rushing into the periphery countries in the misguided belief that eliminating exchange rate risk had somehow eliminated all risk.

This illustrates one of the key flaws in the construction of the Eurozone: It was based on the belief that if only government didn't mess things up--if it kept deficits below 3% of GDP, debt below 60% of GDP, and inflation below 2% per annum--the market would ensure growth and stability. Those numbers, and the underlying ideas, had no basis in either theory or evidence. Ireland and Spain, two of the worst afflicted countries, actually had surpluses before the crisis. The crisis caused their deficits and debt, not the other way around.