The Economic Times （www.threads.net/@economictimes）
#Trump cuts $2 #billion #Harvard funding: 'Lose #tax exempt status if you want to push #political #ideology' | https://tinyurl.com/24chbrm2
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https://www.threads.net/@economictimes/post/DIfwN_KMFkU?xmt=AQGzDp9405NzULpPRukavqWaVEbbCwdmKU0EFVRjBLvQdQ

"I think that my assumption was a triumphalism and a sense of victory after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the fact that the week of the Berlin Wall falling, they were already talking about new enemies —enemies that had gone underground in certain ways or transformed in ways that were elusive — was the beginning of the rabbit hole. Because once you accept the idea that Marxism and socialism have survived and yet have changed their face, then anything can be Marxism and socialism.

I think this is how we can understand the fixation of the right wing on things like what they call “cultural Marxism” or “gender ideology” as essentially the new enemy of humanity. Because the adversary continuously changes shape, it makes them open to endless reinterpretation. There is a paranoid quality to the term. And the paranoia doesn’t really have any bounds, as I show in the book.

So I think the narrative arc comes from a feeling on the part of the libertarians, and often the racist libertarians, that they can contain their enemy in new ways by pinning it down on hierarchies of intelligence or deploying the latest findings from genetics. But by the end of the book, with a chapter on “gold bugs” and the far-right obsession with gold, there’s almost a sense of desperation or surrender to the inevitable, a failure to contain their enemies and the idea of an impending collapse and inevitable apocalypse.
(...)
What I recognize is a sort of desperation and a kind of ungoverned willingness to reach for radical remedies in a time of great peril. And as I described in the last chapter, often the rhetorical technique of the gold bug is to predict a coming apocalypse and then immediately sell you the only means there is to protect you from the worst.

I think there’s that accelerationism visible right now on the far right, certainly in the United States."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/race-science-neoliberalism-hayek-slobodian/

"Creativity and cognitive flexibility are really powerful resilience factors against thinking in ideologically closed and authoritarian ways."

From a really fascinating interview with Leor Zmigrod, neuroscientist and author of 'The Ideological Brain'.
#neuroscience #ideology #cognitive #creativity

https://nautil.us/why-our-brains-crave-ideology-1203194/

"Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms—who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.

We must update our taxonomies to account for this new species of oligarch-intellectuals. If yesterday’s public intellectual resembled a careful archaeologist methodically excavating cultural artifacts for display in rarefied literary journals, today’s model is the demolition expert, wiring entire societal structures with ideological explosives and detonating them from the safe distance of offshore accounts. They don’t write about the future; they install it, beta-testing theories on unwitting populations in history’s largest unreviewed experiment.

What distinguishes them from previous wealth-encrusted elites isn’t avarice but verbosity—a torrential output that would exhaust even Balzac. Where industrial barons funded think tanks to launder interests into policy papers, our oligarch-intellectuals cut out the middleman. Forget steering the algorithms: oligarch-intellectuals steer the conversation itself – and they do it with philosophical meme-grenades. Dropped at 3 AM on X, they invariably become international headlines by breakfast."

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/silicon-valleys-new-legislators/

The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking by Leor Zmigrod, 2025

Why do some people become radicalized?

How do ideologies shape the human brain?

And how can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas?

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#brain
#neuroscience
#thinking
#ideology

"Most people drop the #ideology pretty quickly once they get the #support they need. They belong to these groups because they’re getting something from them. You have to become the surrogate of that support so they don’t need the group any more."

As a hate-filled kid, I turned to #farrightideology. Now I help others avoid that path | Matthew Quinn | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2025/mar/28/far-right-ideology-sydney-suburbs-city

#hatecrime
#farrightgroups
#farrightgrooming
#underlyingcausesofracism
#populism
#supportgroup
#grooming

As Adam Gabbatt and Marina Dunbar, Trump has a new institution in his sights: sounding for all the world like a recrudescent Stalin, he's produced an executive order claiming that the Smithsonian suffers from "improper ideology."

#Trump #Smithsonian #ideology
/1

A big goal of this and other similar executive orders is probably, of course, to distract us from the damage being done to the federal government to pave the way for lowering taxes on the super-rich.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/27/trump-smithsonian-executive-order

THOSE FASCIST ASSHOLES! Arlington National Cemetery, Kennedy Center, and now the Smithsonian. They’re censoring our history and culture "IMPROPER IDEOLOGY”?! #Trump #Smithsonian #ExecutiveOrder #Ideology #Politics #APNews

Trump executive order on Smith...

#france #israel #palestine : #nationalrally / #nationalfeont / #farright / #ideology / #antisemitism / #islamiphobia

»As Jordan Bardella, its young president, tries to distance the party from its history of antisemitism, it is making common cause with Israel against “Islamist ideology.”«

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/world/europe/jordan-bardella-israel-far-right.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k4.brxv.cfHzYyRQYsQR&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Of all the things wrong with my language* I find that my ableism is the hardest to get rid of.

I try, then I fail, then I try again. I will keep trying until I no longer fail. And I try to tell myself every time I don't fall into ableism, it's is one discursive act improved.

* That I know of.

Isn't it awkward that the arguments of the custodians of capitalism are generally so self-serving and LAZY, full of clichés and meaningless concepts? It just so seems that these billionaires have become dumb by leaving all critical thinking skills at the foot of the altar of holy money

"Pairing “personal liberties” and “free markets” is a staple of libertarian rhetoric. It is, in fact, the slogan of the libertarian magazine Reason: “Free Minds and Free Markets.” But these abstractions obscure far more than they clarify. What happens when freedom of thought and speech come into conflict with “the free market,” i.e., with letting business owners do whatever they like?

In 2017, socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote an essay for the Post titled “Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office — and out.” In it, he cited a variety of cases in which employees had been fired at various companies for expressing opinions during their free time that their bosses disliked and concluded that as “businesses gain new ways of observing the private lives of employees, they will become more adept at policing those off-the-clock moments,” and “all of us will become less free.”

Could the deBoer piece be published in WaPo now? It depends on whether Bezos cares more about the “personal liberties” half or the freedom of capitalists to police their workforces however they see fit. Given his own history of firing workers for criticizing his company at union rallies, it’s pretty clear that he’d choose the latter."

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/bezos-washington-post-free-market

Okay, everyone supporting #Ukraine:

1. AWESOME. This is clear as day. This is tyrants vs #freedom. Slava Ukraini!

2. If you also feel the same way about how #Palestine is being treated, Yes. It is pretty much the same.

3. If #2 is not true for you, think really really hard. Very hard. Think.

Czech institutions demand equal penalties for Communist and Nazi propaganda.

Restrictions on Nazi ideology are strictly enforced, while measures against Communist propaganda are insufficient.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20250221-czech-institutions-demand-equal-penalties-for-communist-and-nazi-propaganda?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward