Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump and the “Me First” Doctrine
In Trumpian lingo, "America First" means "me first" and damn the consequences for the country or the world.
It’s ‘Feminist Christmas’ in Ireland
Source: The Nation
“We’ll never go back,” say activists, as a vote to repeal the ban on abortion wins by an overwhelming margins.
The vote to repeal the amendment banning abortion was supposed to be close. That was what the polls said, and that’s how the press reported it. That was how organizers for both sides thought it would go. But when the voting was over at 10 pm on May 25, the first exit polls showed Yes had achieved an electoral tsunami, crushing No by a two-to-one margin. I was with the psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane and other Doctors for Choice when the word came down, and I swear I saw them dancing in the streets that night.
A Broken Idea of Sex is Flourishing. Blame Capitalism
Source: The Gaurdian
In this world, women are marketed as toys and trophies. Are we surprised when some men take things literally?
Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.
Tomorrow’s Terror Today: Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers
Narco-corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the terror drone attack that never happened. In the Pentagon's dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting “them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America” (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile.
Maya Q’eqchi’ Fishermen and Journalists Fight Back Against Criminalization and Mining in Guatemala
Maya Q’eqchi’ fishermen faced deadly state repression last year for their opposition to transnational nickel mining and lake pollution in El Estor, Guatemala. Now they are confronting criminal charges for their protest. The court case highlights the ongoing environmental and human rights crisis in a country where corporate power regularly meets indigenous resistance. “Just for defending our rights as Maya Q’eqchi’, we’ve been criminalized,” fishers' union leader Cristóbal Pop told Toward Freedom.
Occupy, Resist, Produce: The Strategy and Political Vision of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) is one of Latin America’s largest social movements. For decades the MST has operated under their slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce” to settle landless farmers on unused land in Brazil, where roughly 3% of the population owns over 2/3 of arable land. “In whatever society, and even more so in Brazil, social change doesn’t depend on the government but on the organization and the mobilization of society," said MST leader João Pedro Stédile. "It is the people that make the change.”