Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In his new book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” Yale professor Jason Stanley warns about the dangers of normalizing fascist politics, writing, “What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”
In the past week or two Trumpsters gave climate defenders new reasons to take the Administration to court—of either the legal or public opinion variety.
In our new podcast series, The Response, we aim to share a perspective that isn’t extensively covered in the mainstream media. Specifically, we ask the question: how do communities come together in the aftermath of disasters — often in the face of inadequate official response — to take care of each other?
Normalizing fascism is a global crisis. But through active municipalism, Coalizione Civica (Civic Coalition) is challenging Italy’s far-right lurch.
We are now challenged to fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth to shift from a mainly exploitative, destructive and degenerative impact to becoming co-creative collaborators with the wider community of life in the healing of our ecosystems and the regeneration of the Earth and our communities. Life itself is a regenerative community!
Despite their valiant efforts, Barrett contends that organizers today have yet to secure the “wide-reaching, concrete accomplishments of earlier movements.” In this interview, he expands on why this is the case, what particular campaigns have done to win meaningful victories in recent years, and where he sees glimmers of hope today.
The book demands that one navigate between several modes of consciousness in order to face the reality of human input into the “weather on steroids” that is routine these days. How the World Breaks takes us on a long tour, but not one launched with vacation or adventure in mind; rather it books us in at one disaster site, then another, and another.
The Right to the City is a core ingredient in the radical municipalist movement now spreading across cities worldwide, driven by local issues.
If climate change is anything, it must be the greatest failure of the imagination in the history of the world. Perhaps K’s paper might offer some illumination as to why our response isn’t happening fast enough?
We humans are constantly modeling the world around us to find patterns that will help us. But sometimes we forget that our models are just that, tentative outlines of how the world seems to work. Getting stuck on just one model with no flexibility is often the result of vested interests pushing that model. We need to be smarter than that to solve the problems we now face as individuals and as a global society.
Understanding climate anxiety, and how to incorporate psychology into our plans for tackling climate change is growing, but only slowly.
‘New Thinking for the British Economy’ – a new eBook published today by openDemocracy – brings together leading thinkers to outline the broad pillars of a new post-neoliberal agenda, and the type of policies that are needed to get us there.
