I commend some reading to you, valuable in thinking about the changing world. The first two are essential regular reading for me.
Caitlin Johnstone writes as a Melbourne (Australia) feminist living in the US, writing with her American husband. Her writing is absolutely uptodate, with a global perspective, like ths:
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/new-study-finds-the-rest-of-the-world
and by turns equally uptodate, also simply ferocious:
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/disrupt-the-cognitive-infrastructure
For those not faint-hearted I paste the full text of that blog post below, lest it be erased at source.
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Patrick Lawrence is a different figure. I appreciate his writing in its reflection of his experience in Asia as correspondent for such as the Far Eastern Economic Review and the International Herald Tribune. His essays are long, calm, fact-based, insightful, providing fresh perspectives, and destructive of much standard western media pap.
As published today at Consortium News:
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/11/01/patrick-lawrence-war-as-presentation/
Earlier items of his at Consortium News can be found here: https://consortiumnews.com/tag/patrick-lawrence/
...
They are among my regular reads. I also add, to make the list different, Romano Prodi, a former Italian Prime Minister, former President of the European Commission, etc, unusual in his jobs as being a creative reformer, including bringing the former communist party into a centre-left coalition for the first time. I have recently subscribed to Il Messaggero, the Rome daily newspaper, to try to understand recent politics of Europe via one of the larger European countries, in a moment when its politics are changing. And I discover Prodi has an editorial commentary most weeks. There was a time, in 1969, when an Italian person unkindly said I spoke Italian like the political pages of an newspaper. But, while Messaggero contains a lot of such politcal jargon, of a new era, I can observe that it is a joy to read Prodi in his beautiful elegant standard Italian. A full list of his Messaggero essays here.
Last Sunday Prodi wrote on the necessity of dealing with the agonising problems of the Mediterranean with a long term perspective. I have taken the liberty of placing a copy of Ms Google's translation here. In these dark times, it is refreshing to encounter positive practical, hopefully achievable vision.
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pasting here the whole of https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/disrupt-the-cognitive-infrastructure
Disrupt The Cognitive Infrastructure
Listen to a reading of this article:
Leaked documents reveal that the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the "cognitive infrastructure" of the population — the information systems people use to feed their minds and think their thoughts.
If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society's cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.
Fill the cognitive infrastructure with information that is inconvenient for the powerful.
Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure by saturating it with unauthorized speech.
Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Corrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Tell the cognitive infrastructure that the teacher is bullshitting and the preacher is a liar. Sneak the cognitive infrastructure its first cigarette and a copy of the Communist Manifesto.
Take the cognitive infrastructure's virginity. Teach the cognitive infrastructure about the primacy of the clitoris. Take the cognitive infrastructure on its first psilocybin mushroom hunt and give it phoenix reincarnation orgasms in the forest.
Pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Extremely close attention. Be intrusive about it. Shine a flashlight up his asshole. Disregard the proper channels. Hack his devices and publish his emails.
Sow chaotic good tidings throughout the information ecosystem. Surf on waves of WikiLeaks documents and Grayzone reports with problematic revelations pouring from your throat like rain. Scrawl "WHAT CAN BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH SHOULD BE" on bathroom stalls and overpasses.
Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on your smartphone. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on the street corner. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in conversations with friends and family. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure too severely and from too many directions for there to ever be any hope of its regulation or control.
Be the disruption you want to see in the cognitive infrastructure. Be a splinter in the monster's paw. Be sand in the gears of the juggernaut machine. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in such numbers and with such aggression that the whole thing comes toppling down, and people's eyes begin to flutter open, and they wake up from their propaganda-induced comas into the real world, and stride out to do the very things the US intelligence cartel has been trying to prevent them from ever doing.
Free beings under a wide open sky.
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END OF QUOTE FROM CAITLIN'S BLOG
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