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“Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy”

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjy7ez/social-media-threatens-global-democracy “Those who celebrated the Facebook revolution and the Twitter revolution were celebrating the replacement of (relatively) calm reflection with the politics of reactivity and passion… The question that remains is whether democracies have both the will, and the means to bring considered thought back to politics, or, whether digital technology has made politics impossible.” …

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Workers held captive in Indian mills supplying Hugo Boss

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/04/workers-held-captive-indian-mills-supplying-hugo-boss “Luxury fashion retailer Hugo Boss said it has found cases of forced labour, a form of modern slavery, in its supply chain. Young female workers have been held captive behind the walls of garment factories in southern India and prevented from leaving the premises at any time.” … around Tirupur, Palladam and Dindigul in …

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Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy

Liberty Might Be Better Served by Doing Away with Privacy Motherboard has an interesting article by Zoltan Istvan, “futurist, transhumanist, author of The Transhumanist Wager, and a Libertarian candidate for California Governor.” “Privacy, broadly thought of as essential to a democratic society, might disappear.” “While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has …

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All the news is bad

from today’s stories – The Trump administration is rolling back Obama era nutritional improvements to school meals, in order to benefit the food industry. – A former Motherboard editor is being hounded by the Canadian gov’t in order to reveal his sources. – Israel is trying to prevent tour operators from booking rooms in the …

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I, Daniel Blake

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/ We need to exist in alternative support networks of our own, outside State structures: communities, sanghas, churches, tribes, clans, whatever we are comfortable with.  Modern nations, whether so-called welfare states or otherwise, are too large, cold, insensitive to the needs of their populations. That this happens is just another sign of the way in …