• Shaming, Self-improvement, and Political Action, Wade Lee Hudson. “In “The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld describes the problem: Absent structural change, self-improvement will be limited. A large network of supportive small teams whose members are aware of this problem could be one solution. In itself, this network could constitute structural reform, which Rothfeld seeks. It could also nurture a strong sense of community whose members, given their awareness of the Shaming-Industrial Complex, would logically pursue structural reform in other social sectors and, ideally, cultivate holistic and systemic transformation.”(Posted in Systemic/Essays) READ MORE

• Dr. Cornel West: Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay. American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and educator public lecture.

  “SirFortesque: Is any living human being gonna try to tell me that you couldn’t listen to Dr West talk about any topic for hours on end and just feel better about your life and want to hug somebody? Who else can seamlessly meld Philosophy, Literature, History, Music, Religion, Politics, and Ethics together in such a manner that you smile for no reason while challenging your beliefs. The vast knowledge from so many diverse fields and a computer-like memory mixed with the outpouring and nonjudgmental LOVE just envelops me every time i hear this world treasure speak. This is the sort of Christian warrior that even as an Atheist I find so mesmerizing. He can critique anything without being condescending or mean-spirited. I feel honored to be able to watch this man.” (Posted Systemic/Videos)

• Why Cultures of Care?

  Cultures of Care celebrates people that practice collective care in unconventional and insurgent ways. Care is an essential, immediate and practical way to create belonging. Perhaps most vitally in our urgent times, at the heart of each profile you will find provocations that are seeds for reshaping society and how we relate to each other and the world.

  Cultures of Care was initiated in the fall of 2020 as we faced a deepening pandemic and economic inequality, popular uprisings against state-sanctioned violence against Black people, an expanding border wall and a deluge of traumatic climate events. These conditions continue to grow today. In the chaos, isolation and fear of these multiple storms, we also witness beautiful points of shelter. These practices center an ethos of collective care in the face of multiple forms of overlapping othering and oppression. Some of these are new and emergent, like harnessing technology to adapt to social isolation. Others are long-standing, such as stewarding ancestral lands through fire. Most, if not all, are an evolving mix of new and old ways to practice collective care. Cultures of Care are practices that create belonging in the context of othering. A Culture of Care is an affirmative, generative form of resistance and adaptation…. (Posted in Systemic/Articles)

  READ MORE

The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means

By Ezra Klein

“After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”

Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.

That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle.

At least, it did.

READ MORE

The Shame Industrial Complex Is Booming. Who’s Cashing In? (behind paywall), Alissa Bennett, The New York Times.

Where “The Shame Machine” seems to rattle off its tracks is in O’Neil’s discussion of what she refers to as “healthy shaming” — let’s call it a lateral punch. The lateral punch is the blow that we strike against people who do not share our social value systems; it’s the self-righteous bravado we feel when we tell an internet stranger, after the fact, to put his mask on; it’s the thrill of watching someone be reprimanded when they violate our understanding of how things should be. Though O’Neil outlines how the lateral punch often successfully influences behaviors that result in a genuine collective benefit (she provides Covid-19 vaccinations as an example), she neglects to fully excavate what role sheer pleasure plays in our impulse to shame in those situations that have neither obvious victim nor victimizer. It seems disingenuous to ignore what is quietly at play in even the “healthiest” of shaming: a request for compliance that is hinged to a threat of ostracization. The basic “us” versus “you” dichotomy that foregrounds even the most benign of shaming always stands in the shadow of the hierarchical tower.

sted on Domination/Partnership.

The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld.

,,,the book ends by recommending that we “detoxify our relations.” It’s self-improvement that’s paramount. We should stop feeling shame, and we should stop inflicting it. “Don’t get outraged—or at least don’t make a habit of it.”

But how much does it matter whether we make a habit of it? The suggestion that our emotional practices have such outsized political import belongs to a dubious theory of cultural change. There is little evidence that electoral havoc is an offshoot of private insecurities, to be discussed and dismantled on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Vicious gerrymandering and laws that continue to disenfranchise millions are at least as consequential as a handful of private outbursts.

The force of shame stems from its status as a social condition, not from its emotional resonance. The bad feelings that shamings instill are incidental to the material injuries they inflict. No matter how supreme our sanguinity, how unshakable our equipoise, people who get raked over the coals online can expect to find themselves jobless in the aftermath,….

“The trolling works only when the target is ashamed,” she writes sunnily, concluding that “shamelessness can be a healthy and freeing response.” But if fat-shaming is the result of the weight-loss industry’s machinations, we almost certainly cannot alter our feelings without altering the institutional arrangements that support them. Flanagan may be right that emotions are culturally specific—but we will still have to change a culture in order to change the emotions that it generates. How effective can a personal crusade really be when the gears of the shame machine go on grinding? (Posted in Systemic Resources/Domination-Partnership)

• Podcasts

  • Why this Hollywood Actor Stays Off Social Media (Mostly). Kara Swisher interviews Andrew Garfield, who starred in The Social Network about Facebook and Tick, Tick…Boom” about the producer of the breakthrough, landmark musical Rent. Garfield addresses the deadly allure of status and the need for prophetic voices.
    (Posted in Art)

This post/email originally included a bad link for Political/Foreign Policy), which has been corrected.

• Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria

  Transcript: March 4, 2022

  Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

  The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.

  I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

  It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.

  That’s changed…. (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy).

• Putin Wants a Clash of Civilizations. Is ‘The West’ Falling for It? (behind paywall), The New York Times, March 11, 2022, Thomas Meaney.

  …The more we hear about the resolve of the West, the more the values of a liberal international order appear like the provincial set of principles of a particular people, in a particular place.

  Of the 10 most-populous countries in the world, only one — the United States — supports major economic sanctions against Russia… Nor do non-Western states appear to welcome the kind of economic disruptions that will result…

  The rest of the world is concerned not only about wider economic immiseration but also about the global escalation of a conflict between two “civilizations” that share the preponderance of the world’s nuclear weapons between them.

  (read more) (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy)

• Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria

  Transcript: March 4, 2022

  Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

  The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.

  I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

  It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.

  That’s changed…. (Posted in Political/Foreign Policy).