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Spectres are haunting Earth—the spectres of anti-communism. From Wahhabism to neoliberalism, overproduction to debt, the disastrous “war on terror” to the genocide of the welfare state, and from cold war game theory to cybernetics’ networked offspring, the internet—these are all anti-communist projects that came back to haunt us. In this apocalyptic climate, where CO2, ISIS and HFT (High Frequency Trading) stand for the self-annihilation of this civilization on a cultural, economic, political and biological level, we propose The Kids Want Communism. This ongoing clandestine and public series of events marks ninety-nine years to the October Revolution.

“Communism” might sound like an irrelevant term for many people today, but more than any other word in our political vocabulary, communism is the radical negation of the current regime which celebrates exploitation and inequality. It is a cosmos that was devoured by the black hole that is 1989–91. This cosmos includes many communisms; an epic reestablishment of property-free communities, communal indigenous societies, real-existing socialism with its achievements and crimes, the long history of anti-Fascist resistance, egalitarian mysticism, the dialectic abolition of capitalism through its internal dynamics, the uncharted, un-exploitable pockets of resistance that cannot be appropriated by capitalism, the already present humane solidarity and camaraderie shared by people everywhere and the political proposal of the emotion called “love.”

For many opponents, the heart of the case against is made by Chief Justice John Roberts’s pithy comment “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” The dictum seems to be trivially true

In context, it’s clear that Chief Justice Roberts means “The way to stop discrimination against any given race is to stop discriminating against all races.”

over the past 50 years, the idea that race should not matter in judgments of merit has become widely accepted among Americans. Affirmative action, however, denies this: When the purpose is sufficiently worthy, it’s right to prefer minority over majority applicants (and even to prefer some minorities over other minorities, such as Asian-Americans).

stereotypical ideals have long been found not just in advertising, but in commerce at large: For most of American consumer history, makeup brands made few dark shades, and most clothing brands didn’t make any adjustments in their designs for different body sizes, gender presentations, or disabilities, among other things. Hemmed in by limited mall options, women had little choice but to make their best effort to work within whatever physical standards brands set, and brands were free to be as strict with their expectations as they wanted to be.

The internet, and particularly social media, has changed that. Suddenly, the hierarchy of who speaks and to whom in the brand-consumer relationship has shifted beneath the feet of corporate behemoths such as L Brands, and now frustrated women can launch negative mainstream press cycles on their own. For generations, clothing and personal-care marketing could dictate how American women should look without any pretense of kindness. Now, faced with the unfiltered reactions of their customers for the first time, most of those same brands have decided to make nice. Where they could once profit by making women feel worse, the money now is in promising them a way to feel better.

Victoria’s Secret took the old strategy to its logical extreme. It made superstars out of an army of wing-clad Angels, all perfectly thin, busty, and long-legged in the same impossible way. For years, Victoria’s Secret has been the brand equivalent of the stereotypical cool-girls’ table in a high-school cafeteria: hot, unfriendly, and definitely not interested in bolstering your self-worth. And as in a teen movie, the less popular brands took as many cues as possible from the queen bee.

I also read an interview on the New Yorker website, one that had done brisk business on Twitter, causing indignation, outrage and glee wherever it appeared. People were saying that it dispatched the supposedly beyond-the-pale Ellis satisfyingly, and with utmost appropriateness. But it seemed to me to be mostly an exercise in baiting, interruption, disingenuousness and grandstanding on the part of its writer.

Yes, there’s lots of goading about why he hates snowflakey millennials (“Generation Wuss”, as he has dubbed them). It attacks what he regards as the narcissism of the young, roundly dismisses the rush to offence and the cult of victimisation

Although he thinks the #MeToo movement had real meaning when it began, Ellis dislikes the way it has since extended to include, most recently, such supposed crimes as what some might call the overfriendliness of the former US vice-president Joe Biden. He is largely dismissive of identity politics, and despises the way that people can now be “cancelled” (erased from public life) over some relatively small but dumb thing they may have said in the past.

Olsen sees this as an important but normal political moment, in which the policy views of populists and conservative intellectuals need to be reconciled on issues such as trade and immigration. An intellectual dialectic within the Republican coalition is straining to produce a new, more pro-worker synthesis — which Olsen himself has long advocated

But this raises the question: Is this a normal political moment?

If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism.

The powerful should never tell relatively powerless people who are protesting for their very lives how they should be behaving.

It was young people protesting about the death of another Florida teenager who died from gun violence six years ago, Trayvon Martin, that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. Their love for that boy killed by George Zimmerman helped spark a movement honoring the value of black life.

To these gay men and their allies, mourning meant being militant about how the dead had been killed by homophobia and inaction – much as the teens staging a die-in outside the White House last week were protesting about the present federal government’s complicity via inaction on gun deaths.

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.

And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.

But bona fide fascism still exist in two forms. First, what you might call cultists. These people are unafraid to be labelled fascist and might even use the Nazi swastika: they were among the people who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017,

They might join violent organisations, such as the Ku Klux Klan – an anti-black group in the United States – or join fringe parties, such as the British National Party. Many of them have a criminal history. Some have found a home within the so-called alt-Right, a largely online movement that routinely abuses racial minorities and women, and which has been known to appropriate fascist symbols.

For example, is Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-Right Front National, a fascist?

There are ways in which the United States is a more just country than it was when we rocketed men onto the lunar surface

But as a commemoration of the moon landing, that kind of emphasis on our own era’s greater enlightenment falls fla

the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since.

Last year about 27 percent of its electricity came from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, three times what it got a decade ago and more than twice what the United States gets today.

Germany, the world’s fourth largest economy, has promised some of the most aggressive emission cuts—by 2020, a 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, and by 2050, at least 80 percent.

The energiewende will take much longer and will involve every single German—more than 1.5 million of them, nearly 2 percent of the population, are selling electricity to the grid right now

The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.

The president of the United States is a menace to public health

I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do

Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.

disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds

he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”

when students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no.

Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.

A researcher at a Swedish university says that Viking burial clothes bear the word “Allah”

Inspecting the woman’s silk burial clothes, Larsson noticed small geometric designs. She compared them to similar designs on a silk band found in a 10th-century Viking grave, this one in Birka, Sweden. It was then that she came to the conclusion that the designs were actually Arabic characters—and that they spelled out the name of God in mirror-image.

tendency of white supremacists to appropriate the symbols of Vikings, whom they claim constituted a pure-bred white race; in Charlottesville, for example, neo-Nazis were seen toting banners with Viking runes. The idea that Vikings were influenced by Muslims would likely be anathema to them. “The Vikings are every white supremacist’s favorite white guy.”

Dutch publisher Meulenhoff had announced Rijneveld, winner of the International Booker prize, as the translator of the Joe Biden inaugural poet’s forthcoming collection, The Hill We Climb, last week

Journalist and activist Janice Deul led critics with a piece in Volkskrant asking why Meulenhoff had not chosen a translator who was, like Gorman, a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”.

“An incomprehensible choice, in my view and that of many others who expressed their pain, frustration, anger and disappointment via social media,” wrote Deul. “Isn’t it – to say the least – a missed opportunity to [have hired] Marieke Lucas Rijneveld for this job? They are white, nonbinary, have no experience in this field, but according to Meulenhoff are still the ‘dream translator’?”

Joe Biden will sign an executive order expanding voting rights on Sunday, the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when police brutally attacked a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama.

Republicans have advanced more than 250 measures in state legislatures which aim to restrict voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The most significant will instruct federal agencies to offer voter registration opportunities if a state requests so

The number of asylum-seeking migrants, including unaccompanied minors, crossing the southwest border into the U.S. is soaring, leaving the Biden administration scrambling to find appropriate care and housing for thousands of children

U.S. Customs and Border Protection released the latest statistics on Wednesday showing agents encountered nearly 3,500 migrants a day during February 2021, a 28% increase over January. Among them, the number of children and families seeking to enter the U.S. more than doubled in the same period. And, the number of unaccompanied minors from Central America also rose 60% over January to more than 9,400.

"The children are approaching the border now because after fleeing their home countries in Central America, they have not been able to access the border for a year due to Title 42," Megan McKenna, a spokeswoman for Kids In Need of Defense, an advocacy group for unaccompanied minors, told NPR

The Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement reached during the negotiations in 1787 to create the United States Constitution, found that, for the purposes of representation and taxation, only three-fifths of a state’s enslaved people would be counted toward its total population. It is regarded as one of the most racist deals among the states during the country’s founding.

Yet in a speech in the Tennessee General Assembly on Tuesday, one representative defended the compromise, arguing that it was “a bitter, bitter pill” that was necessary to curtail the power of slaveholding states and that helped clear the way to ending slavery

— remarks that were rebuked by critics, including Black colleagues, as insulting and demeaning

offering reparations to Black residents whose families have felt the effects of decades of discriminatory housing practices,

from a 3% tax on legalized cannabis into assistance for home loans.

We had to do something radically different to address the racial divide that we had in our city,