Category: Society
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Letter in Support of a Wealth Tax
A CALL TO ACTION: A LETTER IN SUPPORT OF A WEALTH TAX JUNE 24, 2019 TO: 2020 Presidential Candidates We are writing to call on all candidates for President, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, to support a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest 1/10 of the richest 1% of Americans —…
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Veblen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
If you’re looking for a non-Marxist critique of Capitalism and modern society in general, then you need to read Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. Published in 1899, the book is an economic treatise and detailed social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social-class consumerism, which proposes that the social strata…
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Pre-Criminals in China: Uighur Concentration Camps
The Chinese region of Xinjiang is home to millions of ethnic Muslim Uighurs who have lived there for decades. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been detained in camps without trial, but China argues they voluntarily attend centres which combat “extremism”. Recently, the BBC was granted permission to visit one of the camps. Read the…
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Dewey on the “Shadow Cast on Society by Big Business”
I was skimming my archive and came across this wonderful essay from Dewey. John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, democratic socialist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. A well-known public intellectual, he was also a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. John Dewey: The Later Works,…
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Ithiel de Sola Pool and Society’s Need for “Apathy”, “Passivity”, and “Defeatism”
Let’s talk about how the “liberal” elite perceive how a democratic society should function. In 1967, Ithiel de Sola Pool published a book in cooperation with the American Political Science Association titled: Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory. Pool was a revolutionary figure in the field of social sciences, having studied under Harold Lasswell. Pool…