Al Jazeera: The problem with leftist myths about Syria

A great number of leftist in the West and the East have been buying into regime propaganda for years now. From Australian academic Tim Anderson, who's claimed that Bashar al-Assad has not been involved in mass killings of civilians and was simply demonised by the imperial West to British and US journalists Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh who have claimed the regime did not use chemical weapons in various attacks on civilians, leftist public figures continue to believe that the Assad dictatorship is a bastion of anti-imperialism in the region and needs to be supported. [...]

For me, it is unfathomable how people who have stood up for social justice and human rights across the world remain in support of a regime that has exploited its population economically and tortured and killed innocent civilians in the most horrendous ways possible. Or how people who had seen through US imperial war propaganda cannot see through the Russian equivalent of it. [...]

In schools, we were brainwashed daily. I attended Baathist schools, where the president's portrait adorned every wall. During the flag salute every morning, we called for the immortality of Hafez al-Assad before heading to class. We memorised songs praising him and the Baathist Party, we had to recite his speeches. He was our leader and father. When Hafez died in 2000, I was 9 years old. I cried because the person who I'd always been told was immortal had died like a normal human.  [...]

Bashar's cousin, Rami Makhlouf, is the richest man in Syria. Makhlouf controls the major mobile phone company, TV channels, pro-government newspapers and used to control the oil and gas industry of the country before the war.

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Salon: Why Americans are such easy targets for trolls and bots

We measure intelligence in lots of ways, but at the top of the list is literacy and numeracy. A study published in September 2017 by the U.S. Department of Education found that U.S. adults performed the lowest of all developed nations in numeracy. They also found that our literacy was on the low end of developed nations. Most interesting was the finding that young adults in their 20s from Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan who did not finish high school had the same literacy levels of U.S. high school graduates.

Study after study shows that the United States underperforms in literacy across the developed world — especially given its resources. But that isn’t even the core issue; the real problem is the way we have consistently devalued quality education across all levels for decades. Consider the fact that 14 states teach creationism in public schools.

Add to that the reality that a Pew Research Study from 2015 found that 34 percent of Americans reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. [...]

Public investment in K-12 schools has fallen dramatically in a number of states over the last decade, despite post-recession economic growth. Arizona cut funding for K-12 by 36.6 percent from 2008-2015. A study of investment in education across the developed nations of the OECD found that from 2010-2014 the U.S. decreased K-12 funding by four percent. Over the same period, education spending, on average, rose five percent per student across the 35 countries in the OECD. Even more noteworthy is the fact that in some countries, spending rose at a much higher rate. Between 2008 and 2014, education spending rose 76 percent in Turkey, 36 percent in Israel, 32 percent in the United Kingdom and 27 percent in Portugal.

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The Guardian: How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy

Some of these rules are formal. A president or prime minister allows the judiciary to investigate wrongdoing by members of his government instead of firing the prosecutor. He puts up with critical coverage in the press instead of shutting down newspapers or persecuting journalists. When he loses an election, he leaves office peacefully instead of clinging to power.

But many of these rules are informal, making it less clearcut when they are violated. The government does not rewrite electoral rules months before an election to maximise its chance of winning. Political insurgents do not glorify authoritarian rulers of the past, threaten to lock up their opponents or set out to violate the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. The losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an office to which an adversary has been elected in their last days in the job. The opposition confirms a competent judge whose ideology it dislikes rather than leaving a seat on the highest court in the land vacant, and strikes an imperfect compromise about the budget rather than letting the government shut down. [...]

In the US, and many other countries around the world, that is no longer how democratic politics works. As Ignatieff put the point, we are increasingly “seeing what happens when a politics of enemies supplants a politics of adversaries”. And the new crop of populists who have stormed the political stage over the past decades shoulder a lot of the blame for this. [...]

Citizens are less committed to democracy than they once were; while more than two-thirds of older Americans say that it is essential to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than a third of younger Americans do. They are also more open to authoritarian alternatives; two decades ago, for example, 25% of Britons said that they liked the idea of “a strongman ruler who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”; today, 50% of them do. And these attitudes are increasingly reflected in our politics: from Great Britain to the US, and from Germany to Hungary, respect for democratic rules and norms has precipitously declined. No longer the only game in town, democracy is now deconsolidating.  [...]

As I argue in my new book, The People vs. Democracy, we will only be able to contain the rise of populism if we ensure that the political system overcomes the very real shortcomings that have fuelled it. Ordinary people have long felt that politicians don’t listen to them when they make their decisions. They are sceptical for a reason: the rich and powerful really have had a worrying degree of influence over public policy for a very long time. The revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, the outsized role of private money in campaign finance, and the tight links between politics and industry really have undermined the degree to which the popular will steers public policy.

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The Atlantic: A Bright Red Flag for Democracy

Another group is speaking out, too: people who believe the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas was staged, and that students like Gonzalez are actors, not victims. Far-right provocateurs have focused on David Hogg, a 17-year-old student who had the self-possession to interview his classmates while the shootings were taking place. Hogg’s composure in interviews, his criticism of President Donald Trump, and the fact that his father is a retired FBI agent have fueled a conspiracy theory that claims Hogg has been paid—by Hillary Clinton, George Soros, or favorite figures among conspiracy theorists—to promote an anti-gun agenda. Supported by media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, the conspiracy theories have received a big boost from YouTube, with its algorithms that push videos targeting Hogg to the top of trending video lists.  [...]

In the mid-1960s, 77 percent of Americans reported trust in the U.S. government to do the right thing all or most of the time, according to surveys from Gallup and the National Elections Survey. Asked the same question in a Gallup poll late last year, only 18 percent reported trusting the government. This isn’t a Trump-specific phenomenon. Trust has been falling in the United States for decades, and it hit comparably low points during the Clinton and Obama presidencies. [...]

Despite having good reason not to trust the political process, the students are doing what we’ve been taught to do as citizens: tell our legislators what we think, and if they don’t listen, demand to be heard. So far, that’s not gone especially well. One group of students traveled to Tallahassee to meet with legislators and instead watched 71 Republican legislators block debate on bills to limit high-capacity magazines. A town meeting with legislators, televised by CNN, went little better, as politicians squirmed uncomfortably and failed to answer the blunt questions put forward by students. [...]

Mistrust is expensive. When people worry that the media is being manipulated, it takes work to get to a set of facts we trust, and more work to get to a common set of facts we can discuss or debate. When people worry legislators aren’t listening to citizens, but to corporations and lobby groups, they move beyond letters and phone calls to protests and rallies. Two decades ago, the author Frank Fukayama posited that high-trust societies were wealthier than low-trust ones because fiscal transaction costs were lower. As Americans experience an increasingly paralyzed and dysfunctional federal government, it’s clear that mistrust is raising the costs of representative democracy.

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The Alternatives: German town takes power back from energy giants – podcast

In Britain, rip-off energy prices have become politically toxic, with the major parties vying to offer price caps, heating allowances and a transition to lower-carbon technologies. But truly radical plans – such as taking the supply of energy back into the hands of local communities – have never been given serious consideration. It is a model that has been trialled in the German town of Wolfhagen and is now a source of local pride. Aditya Chakrabortty hears from Iris Degenhardt-Meister, who sits on the board of the local energy cooperative, which not only replaced a major multinational in running the town’s energy supply but is now aiming to make it 100% renewable.

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