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Links tagged with “politics”

  1. Francis FitzGibbon · Short Cuts · LRB 23 October 2014

    Interesting about exactly how much or little the Human Rights Act, which the Tories want to repeal, constrains the British government.

  2. The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

    This was good. More about the case for having a discussion about the case for reparations. It was more affecting to me than, say, ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, which was too easily put in the “that’s just history” or “one person’s experience” buckets.

  3. Perry Anderson · The Italian Disaster · LRB 22 May 2014

    Not for most of the article, but for the first 7+ paragraphs outlining the, er, legal difficulties, of those in political power across Europe. We are terrible.

  4. Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now by Mark Danner | The New York Review of Books

    This series of articles on Rumsfeld is a good read. But this, the first article, is the only one that’s available to non-subscribers.

  5. How Britain exported next-generation surveillance — Matter — Medium

    Finally got round to reading James’s piece on Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. It’s odd to think of this vast network of vision and computation churning away monitoring live and historical movements of people, invisibly.

  6. A nation of slaves

    Charlie Stross on the Conservatives’ target of “full employment”. I hate their (and Labour’s) “hardworking families” rhetoric as if work, any work at all, no matter how it’s achieved or what the alternatives might be, is an end in itself.

  7. Politics doesn’t change anything

    Examples of the many things changed by politics in the UK, as opposed to market-led “disruption”. (via Paul Mison)

  8. Lottie Dexter should quit - and take the Year of Code board with her - Adrian Short

    This all sounds like such a horrible, shallow farce led by people who feel “entrepreneurship” is the sole thing that should be encouraged in children. Fuck that.

  9. Where will we live? by James Meek (LRB)

    Linked to by everyone, for good reason. A good, long piece about the UK’s history of council and social housing, the architecture and planning, and where we are now. As with so many policy areas, I wish one of the main parties wanted to do something bold, different and good.

  10. Planespotting

    James Bridle, spotting and tracking the private coaches and planes that are deporting immigrants in our name. Good, difficult stuff.

  11. WHAT THE FLUCK!

    I know many people roll their eyes at Adam Curtis, but no one writes these wide-ranging stories like he does, illustrated with video. (Even if I can’t watch the video because it’s Flash.)

  12. Anatomy of a failed rendition

    James, better than ever, digging into the network to track the plane, hired by the Home Office, that failed to deport a hunger striker, too weak to see or stand, from the UK. “…climbing and banking to avoid thunderheads and moral accountability.”

  13. Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries | TechCrunch

    The sort of logical endpoint for the worst of Silicon Valley geekdom. (via @GreatDismal)

  14. Arresting the Unjustly Homeless while they Learn to Code — Weird Future — Medium

    Good stuff, on that well-intentioned but myopic vanity project to help a homeless man to code. Hey, why not use your energy to change the system? Even less chance of success and glory, but if enough of you do it you might just make a sodding difference you. Gah, angry.

  15. Watch this (4 minutes) and recall that every one… - Fresser.

    So many people are idiots. Really, idiots. I wish this clip showed more of the interviewees being told Obamacare and The Affordable Care Act are the same.

  16. Jonathan Coe reviews ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson’ edited by Harry Mount · LRB 18 July 2013

    Very good on the futility, even dangerousness, of political satire and dismissing politicians as corrupt buffoons.

  17. Slavoj Žižek · Trouble in Paradise: The Global Protest · LRB 18 July 2013

    “To demand consistency at strategically selected points where the system cannot afford to be consistent is to put pressure on the entire system.”

  18. 10 questions about Cameron’s ‘new’ porn-blocking | Paul Bernal’s Blog

    All this. Censoring illegal content is one thing, assuming it can be done, but anything else is a slippery slope into a whole can of mixed metaphors.

  19. RSS commission new research into public perceptions of statistics | RSSeNews

    The British public thinks it lives in Daily Mail fantasy horror world. (via @wonderlandblog)

  20. Getting Nearer and Nearer by David Cole | The New York Review of Books

    Just for the bit about how the courts’ “job is to enforce the law, even if, and especially when, public opinion is against it. … Democracy is not particularly good at protecting the rights of minorities. … [Courts] will sometimes make decisions that result in short-term backlash.”

  21. The Taste for Being Moral by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books

    For the six types of moral response and the description of how conservatives emphasise all of them in their appeal, but liberals only, relying also on reason. Which is why conservatives tend to appeal most to most people.

  22. The rapidly increasing ideology of the US Republican Party

    A chart showing the changing political positions of US political parties since 1789. I’d love to see something similar for the UK. (via Kottke)

  23. Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

    Really nice visualisation of how different states have voted over time. (via The Functional Art)

  24. James Meek · How We Happened to Sell Off Our Electricity · LRB 13 September 2012

    Plenty of people linked to this at the time, but I forgot. Now I am. A good read on who now owns the UK’s power.

  25. Boris Johnson: brilliant, warm, funny – and totally unfit to be PM | Max Hastings | Comment is free | The Guardian

    I did like Hastings’ article on Johnson. Although it doesn’t exactly hold out hope for there being any better politicians either.

  26. Is any of us fit to pick up the Olympic baton? | Snowblog

    “I am not alone in detecting a yearning to turn the extraordinary Olympic achievement into an engine for pulling together to deliver Olympic scale achievements with and for the wider Team GB, ourselves no less.” Easier said than done but, yes, this. (via @matlock)

  27. Collective Joy « LRB blog

    Also on the opening ceremony: “It was love as sentiment, a nostalgic cry for what has been lost. And it is lost. There is no party of the left with a different attitude towards the economy, privatisation and cuts in benefits and the NHS.”

  28. Republicans for Revolution by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books

    “People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse.” Also for the definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” half-way through, and the potted history of the origins of neoconservatism.

  29. Killing Our Citizens Without Trial by David Cole | The New York Review of Books

    On drone killings: “As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent — and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos — can we really claim that we live in a democracy ruled by law?”

  30. Theresa May’s Internet History - a Freedom of Information request to Home Office - WhatDoTheyKnow

    Very good. If she’s done nothing wrong, she’s got nothing to hide, so there should be no problem, so they say. (via @gwire)

  31. French expats to get their own MPs | World news | The Guardian

    That’s interesting, dividing the world outside France into 11 constituencies, with an MP for each representing French expats living there.

  32. New Statesman - The tax haven in the heart of Britain

    Not sure why I didn’t save this link at the time, in February. Nicholas Shaxson on the City of London.

  33. Overton window - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    “The Overton window, in political theory, describes a ‘window’ in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on a particular issue.” More extreme ideas can expand the range of the window, making previously unacceptable ideas acceptable. (via Haddock)

  34. BBC - Adam Curtis Blog: The Curae of TINA

    blimey, just caught up with this, and it’s an incredible read. Hayek, Radio Caroline, Thatcher, Institute for Economic Affairs… so many things. I really wish the BBC would get a non-Flash video player though.

  35. BBC News - ‘Occupy’ is a response to economic permafrost

    Good stuff by Paul Mason. “Occupy Everywhere, then, is the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked.” (via Preoccupations)

  36. James Meek · It’s already happened: The NHS Goes Private · LRB 22 September 2011

    Long, good, interesting, righteous-anger-inducing article about the ongoing privatisation of the NHS, and how the service compares to other options. I am struggling not to swear.

  37. BBC News - A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

    John Gray on how capitalism is destroying the bourgeoisie, and how Marx was right about the evils of capitalism, but wrong about communism being the solution. (via Stellar)

  38. My speech to the IAAC | Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent

    Ben’s speech to the UK’s Information Assurance Advisory Council on how the world has and is changing, how two generations see it differently, and what it means for security.

  39. Opinion - Image - NYTimes.com

    Graphs and charts showing how inequality and household debt in the USA have risen since 1980, especially compared to the more equitable period from 1945-80 (even though productivity was still rising then too). (via Daring Fireball)

  40. Stefan Collini · From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities · LRB 25 August 2011

    On the higher education White Paper: The gradual movement of responsibility for higher education within government towards business departments; the tortuous attempts to balance a free market and a command economy; the odd language (“the mission-statement present”, “the dogmatic future tense”); that studying something often isn’t wholly enjoyable; that choosing a university “cannot primarily be price-sensitive, adaptive, feedback-governed consumer behaviour”; the 1963 Robbins Report’s emphasis on intellectual inquiry rather than “meeting the needs of employers.”

  41. Fleet street fox: 43 and never been spanked.

    Other people have made similar points, but it bears repeating over and over. That Gove and co can get away with stealing taxpayers’ money while normal people get months in prison for doing very little is obscene. (via @megpickard)

  42. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich - NYTimes.com

    Billionaire Jim Andrews in ‘Doonesbury’ won’t be pleased when he reads Warren Buffett’s latest article.

  43. The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom – Telegraph Blogs

    I’ve read lots of good things about the many causes of the riots. But I can’t help but think they all come back to this kind of thing. I am fucking angry. (via everyone)

  44. Oslo attacks: Why did so many experts blame Islamic terrorists? - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

    I liked this, simply because of its description of the many varying angles of extremism and how the things they hate contrast and overlap. (Also Slate’s automatic iPad web display is rather nice.) (via Great Dismal)

  45. The Technium: Corporate Long-term-ism

    “There is a strong anti-government attitude at loose in the world (not just in the US) that believes that government can only screw things up. And at the same time, a belief that corporations are the prime engines of all that is socially good.”

  46. Who Is Happy and When? by Thomas Nagel | The New York Review of Books

    Subjective vs objective happiness; day-to-day happiness vs life evaluation; happiness as a measure vs GDP; how inequality affects happiness and, therefore, which aspects of inequality it is right for government to try to change. (Subscribers only)

  47. LRB · James Meek · In the Sorting Office

    A long, interesting look at the problems facing the Royal Mail and how the privatised Dutch and German postal services are managing.

  48. YouTube - The Netizen

    Finally able to transfer my previously Google Video-hosted copy of the 1996/7 Wired TV pilot programme to YouTube. Whatever happened to cyber-rights?

  49. Religious Faith and John Rawls by Kwame Anthony Appiah | The New York Review of Books

    Tracing John Rawls’ changing ideas from “the eternal claims of Christianity,” through ‘A Theory of Justice’s “appealing to the universal truths of reason,” to deriving ideals from the “shared consensus of democratic citizens.” (Subscribers only.)

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