Gondwanaland: a moral panic-free zone
ClearerThinking.org is doing a scientific test of astrology -- not the popular sun sign astrology but the full deal. As they say on their website, "[A]nyone in the world who believes they have the ability to glean insights about a person's life or character from astrological charts is invited to participate." Read all about it at https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/we-re-launching-a-scientific-test-of-astrology-and-anyone-can-participate.
The Spartacus app, just released, is described as "Kickstarter for Collective Action." As stated on its home page, it will allow people to:
"Bootstrap projects, organize people around a common purpose, and generate leverage to impact institutional and systemic change.
"Using Assurance Contracts and conditional anonymity, Spartacus.app can help solve Social Dilemmas, Traps, and Paradoxes, Perverse Incentives, and Preference Falsification"
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is calling on CNN to include him in next month's Presidential debate. Below is the text of his message.
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From the International Cultic Studies Association:
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A message from Standing Together, the binational Israeli peace and justice group:
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The other day I sent a message to my state representative about PA HB 1178, which would allow municipalities to adopt ranked choice voting. I got an encouraging reply.
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This week we started off with a brink of hope that an immediate ceasefire agreement would take place allowing there to be a hostage release deal, and an end to the immense suffering in Gaza. However, unsurprisingly, the Israeli government is still choosing death, destruction, and chaos in both Gaza and the West Bank instead of bringing the hostages back home to their families.
All week we held protests in multiple areas across the country demanding that this brutal war comes to an end. Israeli police brutality is still happening during these protests and 4 of our activists were arrested in Haifa, while another was fined at a protest in Tel Aviv. Despite the difficulty, we know that it is crucial to continue to go out to the streets and grow the movement calling for an end to the war and Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Tomorrow night we are planning a huge demonstration in Tel Aviv to demand an immediate ceasefire agreement and hostage release deal. To make sure that masses of people come out to protest we have launched a campaign to get advertisements on two large trucks that will drive around central Tel Aviv inviting the public to join the demonstration. We need your support to make this happen!Your support is crucial for our grassroots organizing to continue to grow - in order to create a future here where both Jews and Palestinians have equality, peace, freedom and security.In solidarity,Standing Together team
A message from the peace and justice organization says: Earlier this week, we continued our demonstrations with families of the hostages demanding a hostage release deal. These demonstrations are crucial to place public pressure on this extreme right-wing government, and to bring an immediate stop to this horrific war. During the protest, one of our activists was faced with terrible violence from an Israeli police officer, resulting in a torn short and a nearly broken hand. They brought in the demonstration dispatch truck and several additional troops, and started pushing the protesters. Israeli police are trying to block us from demonstrating and disperse us in the streets, but their efforts to silence us will not work! In recent weeks, there has been an increase in police brutality during demonstrations, but this only motivates us more to stand our ground and demand loud and clear for an immediate ceasefire agreement and hostage release deal. The first step to ensure security for both Jews and Palestinians living in Israel-Palestine is to come to an immediate ceasefire agreement and hostage release deal. Once the war comes to an end we begin the hard work of rehabilitation, and continue to fight in full force for a real, just Israeli-Palestinian peace that will bring freedom, safety and equality for all.
I've been looking for someone to make a Vote Pact with as well as promoting the concept to others who are trying to build independent and third-party alternatives. But I suspect it could benefit from a rebranding. It's too easy for people to hear "vote pact" and assume it's another name for a vote trade or swap in the presidential election, a much less interesting concept that doesn't reduce total votes for establishment parties, instead just moving them around the electoral map.
A catchier name might be #DRexit, to signify the coordinated defection from both sides of the Duopoly simultaneously. Below is the latest essay about this idea by its originator, Sam Husseini.
https://votepact.org/archives/2024/03/how-this-election-can-go-from-farce-to-glory-votepact/
People in 2024 need to finally stop pretending their “choice” is between the establishment Democratic Party nominee (likely Biden) or the establishment Republican Party nominee, likely Trump.
And yes, Trump is part of the establishment, as I’ve written.
People in this “democracy” have allowed themselves to be pawns in this sick scheme for literally decades.
My entire adult life.
I knew Bill Clinton was a phony.
Virtually everyone I knew voted for him.
He deregulated Wall Street, which led to financial disaster for millions of regular people — and a bailout for Wall Street. He expanded NATO, which led to tons of money for military contractors and ultimately the Ukraine War. He did the Oslo deal, which eventually led to the current Israeli genocide.
I didn’t vote for him. I found someone who was going to vote for George H W Bush and convinced them not to vote for him. I wrote in Ralph Nader, they stayed home.
I made a VotePact with someone. We agreed that neither of us would vote for the “lesser evil” — so we could vote for who we wanted. I’ve done much the same in successive elections.
People need to do that on a mass scale if they are the least bit serious about change.
Actually, they should do more. They shouldn’t stay home.
They should get behind an actual, decent person for president. An authentic antiestablishment candidate, someone who is against the genocide this current establishment is ensuring, someone who believes in civil liberties, someone who can take on Big Tech and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve — someone who can galvanize people across the political spectrum.
Who that is is secondary.
The imperative is that people wake up to the fact that they are putting chains upon themselves. For decades on end. In perpetuity.
I am not simplistically backing Jill Stein (or any other current candidate) here. I don’t see her as meaningfully appealing to people across the political spectrum. Jill Stein was the Green Party nominee in 2016. She got 1 percent.
Part of the reason she got 1 percent is that many people who ostensibly agreed with her on many issues attacked her campaign as a “spoiler”. And she had no real answer to that. She didn’t lay out a strategy for winning, she didn’t seriously try to get votes from Republicans. If she’s changed in this regard, I’d be happy to hear of it, but I’ve not seen it.
The idea behind VotePact is that antiestablishment forces need to unify.
Unfortunately, the opposite is happening.
They are fragmenting. Cornel West has torn through the People’s Party and the Green Party. Robert Kennedy, Jr., as I argued last year, took dissent over pandemic policies and used it to relentlessly back Israel and its multitude of crimes.
He remarkably didn’t use it to lay out a level headed critique of things like the dangers of so-called “gain of function” lab work — making pathogens more deadly, creating biowarfare agents. No, he’d run off to the border — not to lead protests outside EcoHealth Alliance or labs re-creating the Spanish Flu.
As it happens, concern about such lab work is largely on the political right in the United States. This means that an antiestablishment candidate can appeal to people on the political right partly on that basis.
There is an opening for an authentic populist to rip through the phoniness of the duopoly.
If that doesn’t happen, this election will be an enormous farce, with Biden and Trump feeding off the depravities of the other, each enslaving enough of the public to vote against the other.
The alternative is that people can start talking to each other, realizing that the duopoly is a major oppressive force and the public uniting against it may be the last chance to save what actually remains of US democracy.
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