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Politics FAQ, Useful Links, and Recommended Reading List

Pangloss
in Politics

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Politics FAQ & Useful Links

 

This post is intended to be a reference for three kinds of information:

1) How to go about posting on the politics board (rules and guidelines) (coming soon).

2) Helpful links to reference sites that are useful for discussion here.

3) Links to previous discussions on hot topics so you can refer back to how we talking about an issue before.

 

To that end I could use everyone's help, especially with the second and third points, which you can start adding to right now by replying to this thread. This thread will be open but moderated -- I'll be able to see your replies but I'll only tap certain ones for visibility. Others will be deleted after useful information is culled and added to the FAQ post. You can contribute to the guidelines section as well if you want to write up any helpful suggestions about posting here.

 

FAQ Post Begins Here

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Frequently Asked Questions about the SFN Politics Subforum

section[/hr]

 

Useful Reference Links for Political Discussion

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News

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

 

BBC Front Page (CDarwin)

 

 

Legal References

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

 

 

Pending Government Legislation Watch List

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

 

FISA Amendments Act of 2008 - Regarding current US wiretapping regulation.

 

 

Government Watchdogs

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

 

GovTrack - Useful for looking at specific legislation in US legislature.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

 

 

Government Offices & Individuals

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

US Republican Presidential Candidate and Arizona Senator John McCain, Official Web Site

US Democratic Presidential Candidate and Illinois Senator Barack Obama, Official Web Site

 

 

Historical References

section[/hr](Submitter in parentheses)

 

 

Significant SFN Political Discussions By Subject

section[/hr](Listed by Date of Thread Start)

 

Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

7/1/08

 

US Economy, Late Bush Administration

7/3/08

 

FISA and Other US Wiretapping Laws/Legislation/Discussion

7/4/08, 7/9/08

Edited by Pangloss

  • Author

(Note: This thread has been merged into the FAQ.)

 

This thread is intended as a reading list for the members, by the members. It is open and unmoderated, but a few rules apply. The general idea is to post links to articles here without any discussion. You can explain briefly what issue the article addresses or why it is interesting, but the idea is not to provocate or advertise or evangelize a specific point of view.

 

It's okay to pass along an article you feel might convince people of a certain viewpoint, but the purpose of the thread is really to share articles of interest that we come across in our own reading outside of the forum.

 

So a few ground rules:

 

1) No replies to specific posts, except for the following reasons:

a) Correcting a broken link (expect me to edit the broken link and delete your reply).

b) Add another article on the same subject.

 

2) Just include the links, without explanation if possible, but if necessary a brief explanation of the link is okay.

 

3) Try not to hound us with a bunch of links on the same subject. If you really feel compelled to do that, I can gather some links from previous posts into a single post for you. Or just do that yourself and I'll delete your previous posts in the thread.

 

4) Please try to keep the physical length of your post to a bare minimum, to allow for rapid reference scanning by members later on. We want to be able to search and refer to this thread in discussions; that's part of the idea (this is also part of why the extraneous conversation is being kept to a minimum).

 

I'm starting a separate thread to discuss this thread, so you can post any questions there. :)

Edited by Pangloss

United States Supreme Court Decision on "District of Columbia v Heller", concerning the District's ban on firearms. (Warning: PDF!)

 

The Wikipedia also has a lengthy, sourced article on the case here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

Edited by Pangloss
detail added by moderator (thanks DJBruce for the 1st submission!)

  • Author

T. Boone Pickens made headlines yesterday regarding his new wind power venture.

 

Today he writes in the Wall Street Journal, explaining his overall energy strategy from an investor's perspective.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121556087828237463.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

 

line[/hr]

 

US Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt writes about Congress' lobby-driven efforts to stop competitive bidding in Medicare equipment purchasing for the elderly.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121556116413437535.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Edited by Pangloss
multiple post merged

  • Author

Slate op/ed on changing the War Powers Act:

http://www.slate.com/id/2195152?nav=wp

 

Howard Kurtz on the death of Tony Snow:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/13/AR2008071302054.html

 

line[/hr]

 

From the Wall Street Journal and Cook Political Report. What's interesting about this image is mainly the lower portion, which indicates how currently-competitive seats are leaning amongst voters in those districts.

 

NA-AR345A_COATT_20080713205616.gif

 

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Interesting article from Politico.com about Oliver Stone's efforts to make his upcoming film "W" as realistic as possible.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/11776.html

 

line[/hr]

 

The New Yorker's very long biography on Obama's early days. This is the story that came out this week (for next week's issue) that has resulted in controversy, not for the story, but for the cover that the New Yorker ran.

 

Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama

 

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Fannie, Freddie spent $200M to buy influence

Edited by Pangloss
multiple post merged

  • 2 months later...

I've been using this site for the past several months to track the polls:

 

http://fivethirtyeight.com

 

(538 is the number of electoral votes, btw)

 

It was developed by a guy named Nate Silver who originally wrote a model for predicting baseball games called PECOTA. The model predicted the Rays would turn it around, going from losing 96 games to winning 90. They ended up winning 97. Who'da thunk it? PECOTA did.

 

Now he's turned to predicting elections. His model runs 10,000 times a day, and analyzes the history of polls vs election results with a data set going back to the '50s.

 

He predicts Obama has a 94.7% chance of winning... on election day.

  • 1 year later...
  • 11 years later...
  • 5 months later...

Okay, so maybe a full selection would be a little ridiculous. Insead of even trying to select only those perfect top 10, of which I absolutely could not do. I'll just spit-ball and add a few authors and some of their works I consider important reads for a better heterodox understanding that most people do not possess.

David Graeber,


Thomas Frank,

Naomi Klein,

Michael Hudson,

Yanis Varoufakis,

Slavoz Zizek,

Noam Chomsky, and Edward S Herman,

 

Obviously, I would recommend the standard fare for more popular ideologies, aka...
Ricardo, Smith, Marx, Mises, Hayek,Keynes, Friedman
Adorno, Gramsci, Kropotkin
Hume, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle
Locke, Montesquieu, Paine
Hobbes, Burke

But I consider those to be in the "Well Duh!" of requisite readings.
And obviously, in terms of the populars, there are plenty more that could (and probably should) be added.

Edited by BlightedFox

  • 2 years later...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Working_Class

Recent events following the 2024 UK general election have reminded me of how much this book influenced me in the late '70s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Read

The collection of essays 'Anarchy & Order' concerning (broadly) the role of art within a left-leaning libertarian framework is difficult to obtain outside the UK second hand market. But we'll worth discovering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_to_Freedom

Tied up a lot of loose ends for me and far easier to read than Being and Nothingness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-Fé_(novel)

Just 'must reads' imho. 

Beware: may cause offence to people called Karen (among others)

  • 2 years later...
On 8/26/2024 at 5:10 AM, sethoflagos said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_English_Working_Class

Recent events following the 2024 UK general election have reminded me of how much this book influenced me in the late '70s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Read

The collection of essays 'Anarchy & Order' concerning (broadly) the role of art within a left-leaning libertarian framework is difficult to obtain outside the UK second hand market. But we'll worth discovering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_to_Freedom

Tied up a lot of loose ends for me and far easier to read than Being and Nothingness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-Fé_(novel)

Just 'must reads' imho. 

Beware: may cause offence to people called Karen (among others)

Only took a couple years for the mule team to bring me this post. You might find Murray Bookchin's "The Ecology of Freedom" of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ecology_of_Freedom

Has much to say to our present times. Utopian, but brings together some of the ideas in the other readings you mentioned as regards social hierarchy that seeks to rule over nature.

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

Only took a couple years for the mule team to bring me this post. You might find Murray Bookchin's "The Ecology of Freedom" of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ecology_of_Freedom

Has much to say to our present times. Utopian, but brings together some of the ideas in the other readings you mentioned as regards social hierarchy that seeks to rule over nature.

I match and raise:

The Entropy Law and the Economic Process by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

In the history of economic thought, Georgescu-Roegen was the first economist of some standing to theorise on the premise that all of earth's mineral resources will eventually be exhausted at some indeterminate future point.[1]: 13 [2]: 164f [3]: 160–171  In his paradigmatic magnum opus, Georgescu-Roegen argues that economic scarcity is rooted in physical reality; that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity; that the carrying capacity of earth – that is, earth's capacity to sustain human populations and consumption levels – is bound to decrease sometime in the future as earth's finite stock of mineral resources is being extracted and put to use; and consequently, that the world economy as a whole is heading towards an inevitable future collapse, ultimately bringing about human extinction.[4] Due to the radical pessimism inherent to his work, based on the physical concept of entropy, the theoretical position of Georgescu-Roegen and his followers was later termed 'entropy pessimism'.[5]:

This was a foundational work to the concepts of both Steady=State Economy as promoted by Herman Daly and Degrowth championed by Jacques Grinevald

A steady-state economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. In effect, such an economy does not grow in the course of time.[1]: 366–369 [2]: 545 [3][4] The term usually refers to the national economy of a particular country, but it is also applicable to the economic system of a city, a region, or the entire world. Early in the history of economic thought, classical economist Adam Smith of the 18th century developed the concept of a stationary state of an economy: Smith believed that any national economy in the world would sooner or later settle in a final state of stationarity.[5]: 78 

Since the 1970s, the concept of a steady-state economy has been associated mainly with the work of leading ecological economist Herman Daly.[6]: 303 [7]: 32f [8]: 85  As Daly's concept of a steady-state includes the ecological analysis of natural resource flows through the economy, his concept differs from the original classical concept of a stationary state. One other difference is that Daly recommends immediate political action to establish the steady-state economy by imposing permanent government restrictions on all resource use, whereas economists of the classical period believed that the final stationary state of any economy would evolve by itself without any government intervention.[9]: 295f [10]: 55f 

Degrowth is an academic and social movement,[1] predominantly in Europe,[2] aimed at the planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption as a solution to social-ecological crises.[3] Commonly cited policy goals of degrowth include reducing the environmental impact of human activities, redistributing income and wealth within and between countries, and encouraging a shift from materialistic values to a convivial and participatory society.[4] According to degrowth theorists, degrowth is a multi-layered concept that combines critiques of capitalism, colonialism, productivism, and utilitarianism, while envisioning more caring, just, convivial, happy, and democratic societies.[3]

Obviously, the coupling of dialectical materialism with thermodynamics was a match made in heaven. Even if the original work of Georgescu-Roegen was not entirely robust in the latter.

Edited by sethoflagos
sorting links

20 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

This was a foundational work to the concepts of both

Fascinating stuff - I can begin to discern a chain of theorizing which leads from Georgescu to peecycling (a current branch of research on how to avoid "phosphogeddon." )

https://www.gardenista.com/posts/garden-decoder-pee-cycling/

https://oxsci.org/phosphogeddon-crisis/

Daly and SSE, and degrowth, am somewhat familiar with, and those ideas seem to be in the crosshairs of various right-wing factions around the world. In spite of those invisible hands of Mr Smith proving to be mythological.

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