Thomas Paine's version of "you didn't build that":
"Separate an individual from society,and give him an island or a continent to possess,and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end,in all cases,that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore,of personal property,beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice,of gratitude,and of civilization,a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came"
Submitted by Leah
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Endangered bonobo, migrating storks and one of the world’s biggest raptors
A young bonobo in the forest canopy near Nkala village, Malebo, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Global forest wildlife populations have declined on average by 53%, a new WWF report reveals
Photograph: Karine Aigner/WWF
A Philippine eagle in a sanctuary in Davao city, Philippines. The bird, one of the largest and most powerful in the world, is endangered by deforestation and hunting.
High up in the French Alps, the climbers who spend their days on the rocks and glaciers have come to a grim conclusion: the mountains are crumbling around them
Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images
A man walks near the Mer de Glace on the path to the Refuge du Couvercle (moutain hut) near Chamonix. Retreating glaciers, which are melting under the effect of higher temperatures, are also leaving some peaks more vulnerable and less supported
Aspiring mountain guide Yann Grava looks over the Mer de Glace from the Refuge du Requin in Chamonix. ‘I’ve started to accept quite a few things,’ says Grava, who will finish his training to be a guide next year. ‘On average, a guide used to be able to work for about 15 years, but for me I think it’ll be around 10. The mountains are falling.
Nigel Farage and his hangers-on need a new rallying cause, so they’ve turned on this 16-year-old with frightening vitriol
Greta Thunberg. ‘What’s funny about the idea of a teenage girl sinking to the bottom of the sea?’ Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
She looks both younger than her age and old enough to have the cares of the world on her shoulders. Face scrubbed clean, dressed in a severe black jacket, Greta Thunberg stares unsmiling from the cover of this month’s GQ magazine. It’s an arresting, even unsettling, image: her outstretched finger points accusingly at the reader, in the manner of a wartime recruitment poster. Your planet needs you, millennials.
Back in the 1990s, posing for men’s magazines in your knickers was a rite of passage for young actors and pop stars not so much older than Greta, but that feels a very long time ago now. Here is a cover girl designed not to titillate male readers but to nudge their consciences, and very successfully, too. Successfully enough to make her some powerful enemies.
The perennial rightwing agent provocateur Arron Banks this week tweeted, “Freak yachting accidents do happen in August”, over a picture of Greta sailing across the Atlantic in order to avoid the carbon emissions of flying. A joke, he insisted, but what’s funny about the idea of a teenage girl sinking to the bottom of the sea?
Something about female eco-warriors seems to bring out the worst in a certain kind of man, whether it’s Nigel Farage accusing Meghan Markle of destroying Prince Harry’s popularity with her woke enthusiasms, or the Australian shock jock Alan Jones suggesting this week that the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinta Ardern, should have a “sock shoved down her throat” for daring to argue that Australia go further in reducing emissions. Choke her, drown her, whatever; just shut her up. Who do they think they are, these women telling us how to live?
It’s not just men who bait climate crisis campaigners, of course; the TalkRadio presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer tweeted this week, over a picture of Thunberg at sea, that she’d just booked flights for a winter sun holiday with “level of guilt being felt: zero”. Male environmentalists get their share of vitriol, too – even if it’s hard to recall, say, Zac Goldsmith being targeted in quite this way.
It’s selfishness, rather than misogyny, that is surely the root cause of this rage at the very idea of being asked to give up any individual freedom – to fly, drive, eat a steak, carry on with our oblivious lives as if nothing was happening – for the greater good. But female climate campaigners are perhaps uniquely prone to press the buttons of what might be called toxic libertarians; people who combine a burning desire to do what the hell they like with fury at the very idea of being nagged, nannied or told what to do, especially by women. We are way beyond arguing about the science here, and fast moving beyond politics too, at least in the conventional sense of debating how far and how fast it’s reasonable to move in a democracy, or whether the moral absolutists of movements such as Extinction Rebellion have thought hard enough about the impact on other people’s livelihoods.
There is still a perfectly legitimate political argument to be had about the need to secure democratic consent for sweeping changes in people’s lives. But those arguments are giving way to something altogether nastier: not climate crisis denial, so much as climate crisis nihilism. The nihilists don’t necessarily deny that the planet’s frying but, essentially, they refuse to feel bad about it; they want their sunshine holidays and their 4x4s, come hell or (possibly quite literally) high water, and screw anyone who gets in the way.
‘This is an emergency’: Greta Thunberg speaks at Guardian Live – video
If Brexit is any guide – and there is an interesting overlap with the sort of hard Brexiters who no longer argue for no deal on its merits, but solely on the grounds that it’s what they wanted and they’re damn well going to have it – they will increasingly use social media to bully their opponents out of the public sphere and embolden their supporters. We are watching a new front open up in the culture war, and its timing is probably no coincidence.
Without the new lease of life it gives them, where exactly would the self-styled bad boys of Brexit be now? Banks, the money man of the movement, is currently under investigation by the National Crime Agency over the source of loans made to leave campaigners. The emergence of a hard-Brexit Tory leadership threatens to deprive Farage’s Brexit party of its entire raison d’être. He and his hangers-on need a new rallying cause and this one looks like a perfect fit, since his followers tend to be apoplectic about anything – smoking bans, speed cameras, sugar taxes, hate speech laws or simply woke millennial sensibilities – that threatens to restrict individual freedoms in the greater good. Any outrage generated by personal attacks on environmentalists just gives them the welcome oxygen of publicity, which is why it’s generally wiser to ignore it. But dragging a 16-year-old into this splenetic, self-serving bar brawl makes a dangerous new level of provocation that should not go unchallenged.
Greta Thunberg’s unique strength when she first emerged as an activist was that, as a child, and one with Asperger’s to boot, she had almost unassailable moral authority. Her critics argued that if she was old enough to tell world leaders what to do then she should be old enough to take the heat for it, but most people recognise that hers is still an innately vulnerable age; not quite a child, not quite grown up, instinctively evoking protective feelings in anyone with an ounce of humanity.
That doesn’t mean elected politicians are required to treat her every utterance as a tablet of stone, but initially even her detractors accepted that to argue back as robustly as one might with an adult would seem bullying and unkind. It is a twisted testament to her success that the gloves have now come off with a vengeance, but it’s frightening all the same.
Even as someone who sympathises with Thunberg’s argument, admiring her courage and imagination, for a while I have felt a creeping unease about where this is all going. She is still so young, so vulnerable, for someone carrying such an impossible weight of expectation. How would she cope if the world leaders who have paid lip service to her demands don’t ultimately do what she wants? Will she one day regret having missed out on a more conventional adolescence?
But the violence of the backlash adds a more worrying dimension. If she were my daughter I would be both immensely proud of her, and terrified for her; torn between not wanting her to be bullied into silence, and wanting to hide her away from it all.
Yet however her parents choose to deal with this, the broader problem she highlighted remains. A society that cannot bear to be lectured by its children, even when they’ve got a point, while the adults are behaving like spoiled toddlers refusing to clean up their own mess, is one that can never progress. Perhaps our children can finally be children again, when the rest of us grow the hell up.
Thousands of teachers rallied against police brutality toward young protesters. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Hong Kong, as they sought to show their movement still had public support even after two months of increasingly violent clashes.
Protesters, clad in their signature black and holding umbrellas, marched down major streets in Kowloon, chanting: “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our time!” Volunteers handed out herbal tea and juice, while some shops that had closed for the day left boxes of drinks out for protesters.
Three separate rallies were taking place on Saturday, marking the 11th weekend of protests in Hong Kong as residents continue to press the government to formally withdraw a controversial extradition bill as well as meet other demands.
In one of the demonstrations, thousands of teachers braved heavy rains to fill a public square in central Hong Kong where they rallied against police brutality toward young protesters.
“When I see how things are right now, I can’t see a future for the children,” said Li, 30, a kindergarten teacher who helped organise the rally.
“Today the teachers came out to show students that we understand them and we will fight with them until the end,” she said of the event, called “Protect the Next Generation”. She said: “It’s not just the students. All Hong Kong people need protecting.”
Marching in Kowloon, they yelled: “See you at Victoria Park!” in reference to a major rally planned for Sunday.
The teachers’ march moving through central Hong Kong. Photograph: Vivek Prakash/EPA
Demonstrators blocked passengers, forcing a shutdown and clashing with police as well as detaining two men suspected of being spies, in scenes pro-government figures and Chinese state media have seized on as evidence of the protesters’ violent tendencies.
Following the violent episodes, protesters have called for a weekend of peaceful marches and a return to methods used when the demonstrations first began in June. On Saturday, protesters wore surgical masks but did not appear to be in full protective gear as they have been in past rallies in preparation for confrontations with the police.
Critics say officials seem intent on clashing with protesters. The police have banned the original plan for Sunday’s event, a march, and have instead confined it to a rally within Victoria Park. The park can hold only about 100,000 people, but organisers expect many more.
“We know the government is not trying to help the situation, or at least not showing any signs of trying,” said Elizabeth Yu, 26, a musician and performer.
The US president feigns concern for Jews to justify bullying Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Israel is happy to play along
Israeli Likud party election banners hang from a building, showing Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands with Donald Trump, in Tel Aviv. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
Why would a president who has elevated white nationalism, who said there were “very fine people on both sides” in the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, decide that it’s his duty to identify American leaders who he sees as threats to the Jews and to Israel? Why would a man who has given a platform to proud antisemites like Sebastian Gorka and Ben Garrison decide that the safety of the Jewish people rests on his shoulders?
President Trump’s game of feigning concern for Jews in order to undercut women of color in Congress is all too transparent. And this time, his racism has been handed a new amplifier in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump and Netanyahu are ratcheting one another’s bigoted behaviors up in a game of anti-democracy chicken, where only these two election-frenzied men can win and many have their free expression and civil rights to lose.
The news that Israel planned to bar Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering the country due to their support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is no surprise. It’s the latest episode in the country’s serial moves to stifle leftwing dissidents, including holding Simone Zimmerman, founder of IfNotNow, at the border; detaining the journalist Peter Beinart in Ben Gurion airport; and denying an entry visa to the BDS advocate Ariel Gold. The government’s ploys to quiet anti-occupation activism started even earlier, notably with the 2016 so-called NGO Law that forced organizations to declare foreign funding they received in an effort to stigmatize pro-peace groups like B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence. All of this from America’s proud “democratic ally” – a country hailed as the “sole democracy in the Middle East” that now thinks it appropriate to harass and intimidate critics of the occupation.
At a certain point in the American-Israeli special relationship, the US might have decried these anti-democratic behaviors. We might have used our military aid as leverage to call for free speech and respect for civil society, as Senator Bernie Sanders has advocated. Instead, President Trump has not only built on America’s recent legacy of writing Israel blank military aid checks but actually used his position to intimidate Israeli leadership into even more unscrupulous behavior. “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Representative Omar and Representative Tlaib to visit,” Trump tweeted. “They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.” Minutes after this tweet, Netanyahu’s administration announced that Omar and Tlaib would be barred from entry, though on Friday morning Tlaib was granted permission to visit her grandmother in the West Bank.
While most of President Trump’s “Maga” agenda is built on false nostalgia for a “great America” that never really existed, his tweets Thursday certainly did evoke a longing for the past – think of that moment when Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat met on the White House Lawn in a flash of possibility for cross-cultural dialogue. “Every peace has its enemies, those who still prefer the easy habits of hatred to the hard labors of reconciliation,” President Clinton said then. “But Prime Minister Rabin has reminded us that you do not have to make peace with your friends. And the Koran teaches that if the enemy inclines toward peace, do thou also incline toward peace.”
Where a US president was once quoting the Qur’an to broker peace, Trump uses his position to bully our first Muslim women in Congress; where American-Israeli leadership once leaned toward the “hard labors” of negotiations, Twitter-happy Trump of course chooses the “easy habits” of harassment and division.
Trump and Netanyahu use the Jewish community to justify his bigotry – but Jewish civil society groups are not free from blame in this exercise. For decades establishment Jewish organizations, most prominently the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, have advocated blind American support for Israel in a tacit acceptance of the Israeli government’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories. US military aid with few strings attached is the engine of Trump and Netanyahu’s grossly symbiotic relationship, and such organizations have long blithely poured on the diesel.
Tlaib and Omar are no doubt Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress. That both Trump and Netanyahu are so afraid of letting them travel through the country and ground their critiques in first-hand witness accounts of life in the occupied territories is just as troubling as it is unsurprising. As Peter Beinart writes in the Forward, it should be cause for concern when our leaders know that cruelties on the ground are so obvious that critics must be kept from seeing them first-hand. Birthright Israel has used almost $100m of philanthropy annually to test the notion that “the gift of a life-changing trip to Israel” can “transform the Jewish future”. Trump and Netanyahu seem to believe a trip to the country can be dangerous to the future of the Jews – that is if it’s given to critical thinkers visiting occupied territory. Again, for them the “hard labors” of truth and transparency pale next to the “easy habits” of concealment.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, August 17th, 2019 at 1:12 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.