Pumpkin pies, pilgrims and pre-existing conditions: PolitiFact’s 2018 Thanksgiving dinner guide
The conversation may start out innocently enough, but there will be hints of what’s to come after the turkey’s been carved. "I love all of you, regardless of your pre-existing conditions." "My, my, you’re getting tall! Almost as tall as the border wall." Then, after a few rounds of stuffing and possibly a few rounds of something stronger, someone will say something you can’t ignore.
The John Birch Society influencing American politics, 60 years later click2x
The retired candy entrepreneur Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society 60 years ago to push back against what he perceived as a growing American welfare state modeled on communism and the federal government’s push to desegregate America. Although Welch’s group has never amassed more than 100,000 dues-paying members, it had garnered an estimated 4 to 6 million sympathizers within four years of its 1958 formation. As a scholar of political history and social movements, I find many parallels between today’s far right and its predecessors. Just as the John Birch Society emerged in the midst of the civil rights movement, today’s far-right movements formed as a reaction to the election of Barack Obama – a milestone for racial equality.
The origins of Thanksgiving
Before gobbling turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie -- or engaging in a well-informed political spat with your family -- some of you might wonder where the Thanksgiving tradition originated. We wondered, too. So we talked with historians to get the facts straight. As it turns out, historians trace the food coma-inducing tradition to multiple origins -- none of which closely resemble what Americans celebrate today.
The Root of All Cruelty?
The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, commenting on this episode on social media, wondered whether its writer had read his book “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others” (St. Martin’s). It’s a thoughtful and exhaustive exploration of human cruelty, and the episode perfectly captures its core idea: that acts such as genocide happen when one fails to appreciate the humanity of others. One focus of Smith’s book is the attitudes of slave owners; the seventeenth-century missionary Morgan Godwyn observed that they believed the Negroes, “though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men” but, rather, “Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly.”
The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout. In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning.
Hysteresis: The Phenomenon Behind the Anti-vax Movement
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are a safe and effective tool for the prevention of childhood diseases, a significant minority of the U.S. population remains skeptical of the practice, as evidenced by the persistence of the anti-vax movement. This has sometimes made it a difficult task to achieve the desired level of coverage required for the protective effects of “herd immunity” to kick in. Now, researchers from Dartmouth College have investigated this phenomenon, uncovering a key factor in why it may be so hard to increase the numbers of people being vaccinated. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Feng Fu, an assistant professor of mathematics, and colleagues showed that a phenomenon known as "hysteresis" may act as a roadblock for efforts to increase vaccination rates.
10 Potential Alternatives To The Conventional Capitalist System
Politics Some believe our current system of economic organization is starting to fail us, but other than the horrors of Communist collectivism, what alternatives do we really have? As it turns out, there are quite a few. Here are 10 systems of economic organization that go against the grain of conventional thinking. 10 Islamic Finance The first Islamic banks emerged in the mid-20th century, but have since become one of the fastest-growing forms of financial institution in the world.
Trump borrows from the old tricks of fascism
The governing principle of the Trump administration is total irresponsibility, a claim of innocence from a position of power, something which happens to be an old fascist trick. As we see in the president’s reactions to American rightwing terrorism, he will always claim victimhood for himself and shift blame to the actual victims. As we see in the motivations of the terrorists themselves, and in the long history of fascism, this maneuver can lead to murder. The Nazis claimed a monopoly on victimhood. Mein Kampf includes a lengthy pout about how Jews and other non-Germans made Hitler’s life as a young man in the Habsburg monarchy difficult. After stormtroopers attacked others in Germany in the early 1930s, they made a great fuss if one of their own was injured.
American Kakistocracy – Thaddeus Howze – Medium
Kakistocracy: is a term meaning a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. A rarely seen word you should familiarize yourself with. Likely to become the word used to describe this particular presidency in the future. Previous contenders include: Plutocracy — rule by the wealthy, kleptocracy — rule by the crooked or those involved in criminal activity, or oligarchy — a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.
The unseen driver behind the migrant caravan: climate change
Thousands of Central American migrants trudging through Mexico towards the US have regularly been described as either fleeing gang violence or extreme poverty. But another crucial driving factor behind the migrant caravan has been harder to grasp: climate change. Most members of the migrant caravans come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – three countries devastated by violence, organised crime and systemic corruption, the roots of which can be traced back to the region’s cold war conflicts. Experts say that alongside those factors, climate change in the region is exacerbating – and sometimes causing – a miasma of other problems including crop failures and poverty. And they warn that in the coming decades, it is likely to push millions more people north towards the US.
