World today (Ni Srbija ni zemlje u okruženju)

[Harley Quinn]

Nije hiperbola. 

Ali biki ne zna prirodu mog posla, ni gde sam sve bila, ni šta sam sve radila, ni sa kim dolazila u posredni i neposredni kontakt. U te hiljade ubrajam - putnike, pilote, cabin crew, novinare, menadžere, službenike EU, prijatelje, one koje sam upoznala lično i uživo i one koji mi pišu. Ja sam u jednom danu, godinu i po dana, dolazila u kontakt sa stotinama ljudi iz celog sveta. Blog ima milion pogleda, svakog dana dobijam mejlove od nepoznatih ljudi iz celog sveta. Možda ih ne poznajem u klasičnom smislu, ali ih poznajem dovoljno da ponešto skontam.

I šta sam ja to tebi skrivila, biki, ha? Zbog koga si mi ljubomorna? Kunem se, nemam ništa ni sa kim sa foruma, svi su tvoji. 

[Biki]

Nije hiperbola. 

Ali biki ne zna prirodu mog posla, ni gde sam sve bila, ni šta sam sve radila, ni sa kim dolazila u posredni i neposredni kontakt. U te hiljade ubrajam - putnike, pilote, cabin crew, novinare, menadžere, službenike EU, prijatelje, one koje sam upoznala lično i uživo i one koji mi pišu. Ja sam u jednom danu, godinu i po dana, dolazila u kontakt sa stotinama ljudi iz celog sveta. Blog ima milion pogleda, svakog dana dobijam mejlove od nepoznatih ljudi iz celog sveta. Možda ih ne poznajem u klasičnom smislu, ali ih poznajem dovoljno da ponešto skontam.

I šta sam ja to tebi skrivila, biki, ha? Zbog koga si mi ljubomorna? Kunem se, nemam ništa ni sa kim sa foruma, svi su tvoji. 

Nista mi nisi skrivila samo sam malo alergicna na glupost i egocentrizam.
Mislim, stvarno smatras da ti godinu ipo u Dubajiu i blog  daju za pravio da pravis stereotip o jednom narodu? Necuveno! To nije drskost, nego obicna glupost i malogradjanstina. Po tvojoj logici bi i Kim Kardasijan ili tamo neki ekvivalentan slucaj u Srbiji ( nisam upucena u estradne zvezde) bila ekspert za medjunarodna prava, tehnologiju ili sta vec drugo.

[Biki]

svakog dana dobijam mejlove od nepoznatih ljudi iz celog sveta. Možda ih ne poznajem u klasičnom smislu, ali ih poznajem dovoljno da ponešto skontam.

Uh , huh

[Harley Quinn]

Dobro, biki, ja sad idem da spavam, uverena u svoje pravo da napišem svoje mišljenje i da diskutujem na forumu, zezanja i zabave radi. 

Stereotipi postoje, mentalitet postoji. Ne možeš to da primeniš na svakog pojedinca, ali na nivou kolektiva - itekako postoje. Kada počneš da komuniciraš sa stotinama ljudi iz celog sveta svakog dana, shvatiš to. Kulture iz različitih delova sveta imaju određene karakteristike. Nasleđe i prošlost imaju određene posledice. Pri tom, imam sreće da imam mrežu prijatelja iz celog sveta, tu su i njihovi utisci o svetu i ljudima i razmena informacija.

Da se zna koliko su Britanci među sobom podeljeni, ne bi ih čudio rezultat referenduma, niti činjenica da je uopšte raspisan.

Mislim, ti si slobodna da, osim uvreda, uputiš i koju tvoju, originalnu, ideju i teoriju o diskutovanoj temi. Moguće je da ja nisam u pravu, da pametujem i kenjam. Ali daj mi neki drugi argument osim uvrede, pa da pričamo. Forum tome služi. U suprotnom, otkači se, porfavor. 

[Meho Krljic]

Ketrin Kros o Bregzitu:



Brexit Offers Lesson in the Danger of Protest Votes

Primary blame for the result of last Thursday's EU referendum in Britain lies with the Fleet Street press, the Conservative Party fighting their internal civil war through a vote and a tidal wave of xenophobic isolationism that both they and the far-right UK Independence Party exploited with terrifying enthusiasm. But there appeared to be an alarming number of voters who supported Brexit for a welter of other reasons that were at least somewhat more sympathetic — whether as a protest against the nominally pro-EU David Cameron, as a strike against what they see as a capitalist/neoliberal state or to hasten a coming workers' revolution. At least some of those people have a bit in common with America's own Bernie-or-busters: They're political idealists who allow purity to trump reason. Meanwhile, others were more isolated protest voters who simply wished to register some displeasure with the EU or extend a middle finger to the establishment; now they suffer something of an electoral hangover.

The forces that drive the tidal wave of anti-EU sentiment in Europe and the meteoric rise of Donald Trump here in the U.S. are politically reactionary ones. UKIP's Nigel Farage, Germany's Alternativ fur Deutschland, Holland's Geert Wilders and of course our own Donald Trump are all feeding off of a groundswell of virulent racism that is finding more and more public space in which to express itself. It should surprise no one that Trump has earned such enthusiastic and sincere support from neo-Nazis, nor that a pro-Brexit man with Nazi ties was responsible for assassinating British MP Jo Cox days before that nation's referendum because of Cox's integrationist views. Where once the far-right stewed in permanent resentment about being consigned to the fringe of public life, they now appear to be enjoying something of a renaissance under trendy new labels like "alt-right," as if they were the hipster version of white nationalism. These people are the fire burning on the West's right, fueling its electoral engine — nothing more or less.
Yet to listen to some leftists on both sides of the Atlantic talk, one would think that this nationalist tide was a vindication of their most radical beliefs. No less than the U.S. Green Party's presumptive presidential nominee Jill Stein wrote on Friday:
"The vote in Britain to exit the European Union (EU) is a victory for those who believe in the right of self-determination and who reject the pro-corporate, austerity policies of the political elites in EU. The vote says no to the EU's vision of a world run by and for big business. It is also a rejection of the European political elite and their contempt for ordinary people."
Meanwhile, veteran left-wing campaigner and former MP George Galloway backed Brexit saying that, like Jill Stein, he wanted to combat the "neoliberal policies" of the EU and arrogate more power to the British people to support an eventual left leaning government.
This is, to say the least, stunningly tone-deaf when one of the architects of Brexit, Nigel Farage, said Friday that Britain's single-payer National Health Service might have to be privatized — after campaigning on the notion that exiting the EU would save money to be reinvested into NHS health care. Whoever takes over at 10 Downing Street will almost certainly be to Cameron's right — someone who favors a punitive austerity regime and is very likely to continue it. Meanwhile, online, many cheering for Brexit come from the extreme, crypto-fascistic right. In short, this is not Jill Stein's revolution.
Yet it has been a trend on the left in both the UK and the U.S. to suggest that any black eye given to "the establishment," even if it's from a decidedly rightward hook, is a victory for all. The group of voters in the U.S. who have vowed to support Bernie Sanders until November, pledging to vote for him in a write-in campaign, think in similar terms. So flawed a liberal is Hillary Clinton, they say, that even a nightmarish term under a President Trump is preferable, because at least his campaign is also "anti-establishment." Still others think it is precisely Trump's capacity for mayhem and destruction that makes him an asset to the left: His tenure will be so destructive that the people will at last rise up in a glorious revolution in response, and then we'll get real change.
But as British socialist David Renton puts it so well, "if the opening to a new situation of political instability has to come about through a big victory for the press, the parties, and the people of the Right, then it is unlikely that the instability which follows will assist the Left." Making one's self a handmaiden to a fundamentally reactionary movement only furthers its ugliest aims. The change we'll get is most certainly not the change envisioned by the likes of Galloway or Stein. The energy for Brexit and Trump is not coming from sober Marxist analyses on neoliberal crises of late capitalism, but from a staunchly pro-capitalist, deeply prejudicial resentment that seeks to scapegoat all for the misery caused by capital.
Many UK voters, apparently, were not even well acquainted with what the EU is. The Brexit referendum became a proxy for anger at the Tory government and at wider economic inequality, with blame being displaced onto Brussels and the refugees and immigrants who have become inextricably associated with free movement across Europe's borders. The small number of leftists who jumped on board only aided that, handing the far-right a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime victory.
The same will happen with Trump in the United States if we do not stop sleepwalking, and if liberals and leftists cannot at least temporarily suspend their internecine squabbling to combat a greater threat. Part of what they must do is combat the sense of inertia many feel from so many elections where votes didn't seem to matter. In the UK this led to people casting ballots for Leave without any appreciation of what might happen if that side actually won. Call it "Regrexit" if you must, but there does appear to be a phenomenon of voters who cast their ballots as a protest against the "status quo" suddenly feeling very sorry for helping to upend it in the worst possible way.
For all those who think Bernie-or-bust is reasonable, I urge them to consider what has been awakened across Europe. Justice will not be served by bitter or clueless ballot protests — but darker forces will be very grateful for your support. And there will be no time for regrets.

[Stipan]

U stvari, Britanija će uraditi sve da ostane u EU.

Teško. Ne bi Britanija postala imperija i svetska sila od onog ostrvceta da povlače poteze navrat - nanos. To su hladni i proračunati političari sa dobrim njuhom za buduće događaje. Ništa nije slučajno, pa ni taj referendum.

[Truman]

Možda ću zvučati naivno, ali meni se čini da su se ovog puta ipak odlučili da demokratski dopuste narodu da odluči. A ne slažu se svi britanski političari o pitanku izlazska iz EU. Dovoljno govori to što je otprilike pola-pola raspodela glasova, teško da su mogli tačno da predvide ishod referenduma.

[Harley Quinn]

To su hladni i proračunati političari sa dobrim njuhom za buduće događaje.

! No longer available

Britanci protiv Britanaca.

Also:

http://imgur.com/5UHyn3c

[Father Jape]

"Farage is like someone rolled all the power crazy little shits from provincial golf clubs together in slime & blended Britain its own Satan."

[Meho Krljic]

Džon Oliver je malo nervozan.


http://youtu.be/nh0ac5HUpDU

[Meho Krljic]

Meanwhile u otadžbini:


Istanbul Ataturk Airport attack: Live updates after 'three suicide bombers detonate explosives killing 36 and wounding dozens'  

  The attackers detonated their explosives just before reaching security as police fired shots at them, Turkish officials claim 


     At least 36 people are feared to have been killed and dozens injured in an apparent terror attack at Turkey's biggest airport, officials have claimed.
Three suicide bombers detonated their explosives at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul after police fired shots at them, it's reported.
At least 147 people are believed to have been injured while hero taxi drivers ferried wounded people from the terminal. 

[Ugly MF]

Ovomi nekako ne ide u moju blentaru...?
Ako će ISIS da uvodi šerijat, zašto onda napada svoje izvorište?
Da zaplaši sekularce da kažu, evo ok šerijat, samo nemo' se više samoexplodirujete?

Ili da zaplaši onu drugu vrstu muslimana , znam da ih ima dve vrste, jedna sunuta, druga šinuta,e sad, valjda su jedni miroljubiviji malko od drugih...?
Ne ide mi u shvatanje ovaj terrorizam,malko mi nema logiku, a bogami ni budućnos'....
kad su tako glupi, bolje da me odma ubiju sas bombe negoli da vladaju nadamnome...

[Meho Krljic]

Na koji je način Turska "izvorište" šerijata?

Ovo ostalo što pitaš - Zoran Ćirjaković je za Politiku pre dve godine napisao koristan  tekst koji dosta toga objašnjava:


http://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/308338/Znakovi-pored-fundamentalistickog-puta

[Ugly MF]

pa u Turaca je šerijat valjda ukinut pre jedva kolio 100 godina?
Ili manje? A pošto je toga bilo par stoja godina, teško da će jedna stotka zapadnih pogrešnih indoktrinacija to da izbriše.

Kolko se kod mene javlja poriv za izbledjivanjem zapadnih demagogija, koji nisam nit radikalan nit ratoboran, moš' mislit kako je tek Turićima...
A i bajdvej, oni su nam najbliži,sproću toga i moje vidjenje ...

One Budabidubaji mekušci što se voze u dijamantima optočenim aftomobilima koji sve to finansiraju, teško da su neka opasnost, a i daleko su.

A gde je ono istinsko leglo odakle se širi, o premudri

[trt-mrt]

istinsko saudijska, a najinstinskije uk

[Meho Krljic]

pa u Turaca je šerijat valjda ukinut pre jedva kolio 100 godina?
Ili manje?

Pre 92, ali nisi ti to rekao, pominjao si "izvorište" šerijata, a to Turska nikako i ni u kom slučaju nije bila.

[Ugly MF]

Pa danas jeste,ja i dalje sumnjam da je leglo širenja ovog danas Turska.
Turska je divan saveznik Amera, trti se u EU, a muslimanska je, a najmanje muslimanima treba sekularitet.
Tako da po mojoj proceni 'izvorište' ovog šerijata koji hoće da nametnu celom svetu kroz ISIS su Turaci.
Njih smatram za najinteligentniju naciju svih Mujo-Arapskih postojećih i jedine sposobne da nešto ozbiljno urade.
Mani ti lovu svih onih Abudabidubajaca, kad su glupi.

[trt-mrt]

isis je trebao da posluzi kao teritorija sa koje bi vojska isla na iran, a onda kroz meki trbuh na rusiju, ali je iznenada (!) negde zapelo. inace, nije to ni bio projekat koji je trbao da se nametne celom svetu. prilicno je regionalnog karaktera

[Ugly MF]

Ma da, muslimanski džihad je regionalnog karaktera, jesssss.....

[trt-mrt]

pa sve ovo sa strane je sitnica u globalnim okvirima u odnosu na iran, a potom rusiju

[SIMERIJANAC]

http://www.fsksrb.ru/fond-strateske-kulture/ostalo/ko-je-imao-korist-od-teroristickog-napada-na-ataturku/

[Meho Krljic]

Oh, konačno nećemo morati da više koristimo reciklirani helijum koji smrdi 

Researchers find game-changing helium reserve in Tanzania

Helium may best be known as the lighter-than-air gas used to fill party balloons, but it's also key to medical applications like MRI scans and for nuclear power.  For years, there have been global shortages of the element -- Tokyo Disneyland was once forced to suspend sales of its helium balloons.That's all set to change, however, with the discovery of what researchers called a "world-class" helium gas field in Tanzania's East African Rift Valley. A group of researchers from Oxford and Durham universities, working with the Norwegian helium exploration company Helium One, have discovered what they believe is a vast supply of the element in an unlikely place.
"Their research shows that volcanic activity provides the intense heat necessary to release the gas from ancient, helium-bearing rocks," according to a statement from the University of Oxford. "Within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley, volcanoes have released helium from ancient deep rocks and have trapped this helium in shallower gas fields."

However, the gas traps are often located too close to a volcano and the helium becomes heavily diluted by other gases such as  carbon dioxide. "We are now working to identify the 'goldilocks-zone' between the ancient crust and the modern volcanoes where the balance between helium release and volcanic dilution is 'just right," said Diveena Danabalan, of Durham University's Department of Earth Sciences.Danbalan is presenting the findings at this month's Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Japan.

Why is this so important? The team estimates that just one part of the reserve in Tanzania could be as large as 54 billion cubic feet (BCf), which is enough to fill more than 1.2 million medical MRI scanners."To put this discovery into perspective, global consumption of helium is about 8 billion cubic feet (BCf) per year and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world's largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf," said University of Oxford's Chris Ballentine, a professor with the Department of Earth Sciences. U.S. needs a strategy on helium "Total known reserves in the USA are around 153 BCf. This is a game-changer for the future security of society's helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away," Ballentine added.

[mac]

Game changer koji nam daje 7 godina helijuma. Jej.

[Meho Krljic]

Komitet UN za socijalna, ekonomska i kulturna prava u novom izveštaju veli da su britanske vlasti svojim merama štednje prekršile ljudska prava svojih građana:


UK in breach of international human rights

The United Nations has confirmed that the UK's Austerity policies breach the UK's international human rights obligations.
The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has expressed "serious concern" about the impact of regressive policies on the enjoyment of economic and social rights in a damning report on the UK.
Based on evidence it received from Just Fair and other civil society groups, the Committee concludes that austerity measures and social security reform breach the UK's international human rights obligations.
This was the Committee's first review of the UK since 2009 and thus its first verdict on the Austerity policies pursued by successive governments since the financial crash.   Over eight months the Committee conducted a dialogue with government officials, the UK human rights commissions and civil society groups.
In a wide ranging assessment, expressed in unusually strong terms, the Committee sets out the following findings:

   
• Tax policies, including VAT increases and reductions in inheritance and corporation tax, have diminished the UK's ability "to address persistent social inequality and to collect sufficient resources to achieve the full realization of economic, social and cultural rights". The Committee recommends the UK adopt a "socially equitable" tax policy and the adoption of strict measures to tackle tax abuse, in particular by corporations and high-net-worth individuals.
• Austerity measures introduced since 2010 are having a disproportionate adverse impact on the most marginalised and disadvantaged citizens including women, children, persons with disabilities, low-income families and those with two or more children.  The Committee recommends that the UK reverse the cuts in social security benefits and reviews the use of sanctions.
• The new 'National Living Wage' is not sufficient to ensure a decent standard of living and should be extended to under-25s. The UK should also take steps to reduce use of "zero hour contracts", which disproportionately affect women.
• Despite rising employment levels the Committee is concerned about the high number of low-paid jobs, especially in sectors such as cleaning and homecare.
• The Committee urges the UK to take immediate measures to reduce the exceptionally high levels of homelessness, particularly in England and Northern Ireland, and highlights the high cost and poor quality of homes in the private rented sector and the lack of sufficient social housing.
• The UK is not doing enough to reduce reliance on food banks.

Jamie Burton, Chair of Just Fair, said:

"The UN's verdict is clear and indisputable. It considered extensive evidence and gave the Government every opportunity to show why its tax and policy reforms were necessary and fair.  In many important respects the Government proved unable to do this. It is clear that since 2010, ministers were fully aware that their policies would hit lower income groups hardest and deepen the suffering of many already facing disadvantage without offering any long term gain for the pain they inflicted.  We urge the Government to take heed of the Committee's recommendations and commit to ensuring that it does not diminish human rights further in the UK."

Simon Duffy, Director of the Centre for Welfare Reform, a member of the Just Fair Consortium said:

"The past six years of Austerity have seen the UK Government intentionally diminish the rights of its own citizens. The Centre for Welfare Reform welcomes the news that the United Nations has strongly criticised the UK Government for these policies - policies that have harmed immigrants, asylum seekers, disabled people and those living in poverty. There is no good reason for these ongoing attacks; instead it seems likely that these groups have been targeted simply because they are convenient scapegoats for problems they did not cause.
"The UK Government's policy has been shameful, and so is the ongoing failure of most of the media to attend to the impact of Austerity. So, we are all the more grateful to Just Fair for coordinating the efforts of civil society organisations like ourselves, and for helping to draw attention to these injustices.
"The Government of the UK is now in chaos and its future leadership is uncertain. Sadly it is unlikely that any immediate change in leadership will lead to the recognition of the UK's human rights obligations. Given recent events, it is even to be feared that the Government might try to blame international bodies for holding them to account for the obligations they freely entered into.
"The Centre adds its voice to all those who seek an end to Austerity and to the mounting injustice we've seen over the past six years. We will continue to work with groups or organisations who seek to advance justice, human rights and respect for all human beings - in all our diversity."

The Just Fair Consortium includes 76 national and local organisations and has published a series of reports that have highlighted the impact of austerity measures and social security reform on economic and social rights in the UK.

[lilit]

vrhovni sud odlučio: drugi krug iznora ima da bude ponovljen zbog proceduralnih grešaka na par biračkih mesta a što je moglo da dovede do (čak! ) krađe na izborima.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/01/austrian-presidential-election-result-overturned-and-must-be-held-again-hofer-van-der-bellen

[Meho Krljic]

Ovi Španci ko da su Srbi:



Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed 

Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates.
After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere.
"We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others."
Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need.
"It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."    From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe. Randstad estimates that Spanish companies may struggle to fill almost 2 million posts through 2020. Data released by the European Union's statistics office Friday shows that unemployment in Spain was at 19.8 percent as of May compared with an average 8.6 percent for the 28-country bloc.Weighing on GrowthCaretaker Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, the front-runner to lead the next government after posting gains in Sunday's election, has pledged to add half a million jobs a year, but his campaign focused on posts for the legions of unemployed, rather than producing skilled workers to power the economy. Rajoy's opponents say his policy of driving down wages and stripping back job protection has mainly created poorly-paid low-skill posts.
For more on the outlook after the Spanish election, click here.
The failure to equip sufficient numbers of workers with the skills sought by modern companies is holding back the Spanish economy. The skills shortage is a drag on productivity, delays investment and strains a pension system dependent on new workers with good salaries to pay for an aging population, according to Sandalio Gomez, emeritus professor at the IESE Business School in Madrid.
"The workforce does not have the qualifications the market needs," he said. "That's a real problem."    As Rajoy tries to build bridges with his rivals ahead of talks on a governing alliance, he's offering a cross-party initiative to address flaws the education system. Spain has had seven different education laws since 1978, but arguments about the use of regional languages like Catalan or the status of religious teaching have often crowded out debate about more fundamental problems that have led to a high-school dropout rate that is twice the European average.
"Education and work exist in two alternative worlds that don't really connect," Gomez said. "While in other nations, like the U.S., college education is designed to get you a job, that's not the case in Spain."Low-Grade ExecutivesIn its election manifesto, Rajoy's People's Party also vowed to put more emphasis on technology in schools and get more students learning English. During his first term, Rajoy hired private agencies to work alongside unions in retraining and recruitment and tied the funding for public jobs programs to results.
Yet the new administration is facing a problem that has been decades in the making.


Even when senior posts are filled, Spanish companies have to make do with lower-caliber candidates than their competitors in other European countries, and that hurts the profitability and resilience of companies, according to the Bank of Spain's 2015 annual report. Spanish executives are less-skilled than their competitors in Germany, France or Italy, according to a study of 11 European countries. Only Greece came out worse.
Pimentel's client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain.
But such people are thin on the ground in Spain. It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles.
"This society urgently needs digital professionals but there aren't really enough places where you can learn those skills," Pimentel said. "Spain is a country that is not really investing enough in technology."

[Truman]

Dobro, i kad bi našli te softveraše i medicinske sestre koliko bi još ostalo nezaposlenih? Nešto mi kaže da je broj radnih mesta tih traženih profesija prilično mali.

[Truman]

A u Brazilu haos: http://www.blic.rs/vesti/svet/rio-grca-u-dugovima-preti-kolaps-zdravstva-ugrozeni-bezbednost-i-olimpijada-policajci/74qfmsf

[Harley Quinn]

A u Britaniji haos: http://www.blic.rs/vesti/svet/svi-beze-od-uzasnih-posledica-bregzita-posle-borisa-i-faraz-podneo-ostavku/sn4rrbn

[Truman]

Dakle, i Džonson i ovaj demamog Faraž se povlače. Džonson rekao da neće da bude premijer, verovatno je skapirao kakve ih ekonomske teškoće čekaju...Ali ako, za to su glasali.

[Harley Quinn]

Toliko o "hladnim i proračunatim" britanskim političarima. Proračunatim, da, ali u svoju korist.

[Stipan]

Hahhah! Ti se još uvek svađaš sa mnom?

[Harley Quinn]

A ti još uvek juriš devojke po ulici koje liče na mene? 

[Stipan]

Što ih jurim to još i nekako, a što sam je uštinuo? Umalo da mi odvali šamar.

[Harley Quinn]

Ja te ne bih promashila. Inace, ja shutiram, ne udaram shamare. 

[Stipan]

Sva sreća da ipak nisi bila ti...

[varvarin]

http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2016&mm=07&dd=05&nav_category=11&nav_id=1151740

"EU je kao bajat hleb i počinje da liči na Jugoslaviju"

...,,Nije lep osećaj želeti nešto što drugima više ne valja. Veknu hleba od juče – ili Evropsku uniju", piše novinarka Zidojče cajtunga Nadja Pantel: ,,Tako to trenutno izgleda na Balkanu. I pored toga što su Britanci okrenuli leđa Briselu, tamo sada dižu dva prsta. Pristup EU? Da, molim! Šefovi vlada Srbije, Albanije, Makedonije, Kosova, Bosne i Hercegovine i Crne Gore upravo su još jednom naglasili da bi rado postali deo Unije. To možemo smatrati za dobru ili za lošu vest. Ona se može tumačiti kao znak slabosti EU koja privlači još samo one koji jedva mogu samostalno da stoje: ekonomski slabe i politički labilne zemlje Jugoistočne Evrope."

[varvarin]

Najzad!! 

http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2016&mm=07&dd=06&nav_category=78&nav_id=1151858

Kineski list: SAD će platiti cenu ako "pređu granicu"

Peking -- List kineske Komunističke partije "Pipls dejli" upozorio je Vašington da će "platiti cenu" ukoliko "pređe granicu" mešanjem u sporove oko Južnog kineskog mora...

[Meho Krljic]

Au, Mesija će dutamniče (osim što po španskom zakonu ovo može i da se odsluži na slobodi):


Lionel Messi handed jail term in Spain for tax fraud

Argentina and Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi has been sentenced to 21 months in prison for tax fraud.
His father, Jorge Messi, was also given a jail term for defrauding Spain of €4.1m (£3.5m; $4.5m) between 2007 and 2009.
They also face millions of euros in fines for using tax havens in Belize and Uruguay to conceal earnings from image rights.
However, neither man is expected to serve time in jail.
Under the Spanish system, prison terms of under two years can be served under probation.




The footballer and his father were found guilty of three counts of tax fraud in Wednesday's ruling by the court in Barcelona.
As well as the jail terms, Messi was fined about €2m and his father €1.5m. They made a voluntary €5m "corrective payment", equal to the alleged unpaid tax plus interest, in August 2013.
The sentence can be appealed through the Spanish supreme court.

[Truman]

Očekivano. I naravno da neće da robija.

Meni je ipak ovo utisak dana: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3676748/Chilcot-s-damning-verdict-Blair-Inquiry-Iraq-war-slams-former-PM-misrepresenting-intelligence-dodgy-legal-advice-hubris-failing-protect-troops-says-did-not-need-invade.html#reader-comments

Englezi priznali da im je bivši PM monstrum.

[Meho Krljic]

 Postkapitalizam – klik po klik

Prikaz knjiga: 1. Paul Mason, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future / PostKapitalizam: vodič u našu budućnost, Allen Lane 2016; 2. Nick Srnicek i Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work / Izmišljanje budućnosti: postkapitalizam i svet bez rada, Verso 2016.
U knjigama PostKapitalizam: vodič u našu budućnost Paula Masona i Izmišljanje budućnosti: postkapitalizam i svet bez rada Nicka Srniceka i Alexa Williamsa zagovaraju se stvari za koje smo verovali da su nestale sa levičarskog repertoara krajem 60-ih godina prošlog veka: tehnološki optimizam, futurizam, programi i zahtevi, umesto prostog dokumentovanja propadanja i protesta. Kao oznaka za ponuđenu alternativu, u obe knjige se koristi neobično neutralna kovanica ,,postkapitalizam", a ne socijalizam, komunizam ili anarhizam, koji su za naše autore na ovaj ili onaj način kompromitovani.
Srnicek i Williams odbacuju praktično sve što je evropska i američka levica mislila i činila posle 1968, osim što donekle uvažavaju značaj polne i rasne intersekcionalnosti. Za njih problem nije u ,,politikama identiteta" – koje neki levičari vide kao glavni razlog zašto je šezdesetih sve otišlo dođavola – već u odustajanju od ideje da je društvo s one strane kapitalizma moguće i neophodno. ,,Od najava novih svetova dokolice, preko komunizma sovjetske ere i afro-futurističkog slavljenja sintetične i dijasporične prirode crne kulture, do post-rodnih snova radikalnog feminizma", pišu oni, ,,popularna imaginacija levice je gradila vizije društva neuporedivo superirornije od svega o čemu danas sanjamo". To je izvor velike frustracije, jer se ,,čini da je ostvarenje tih snova bliže nego ikada" zahvaljujući širenju automatizacije, zajedničkoj (komunalnoj) proizvodnji i distribuciji softvera sa otvorenim kodom, copyleftu (za razliku od copyrighta) koji ukida vlasništvo nad intelektualnom imovinom i mogućnostima koje otvara 3D štampa.
Srnicek i Williams su skrenuli pažnju na sebe 2013. ,,Manifestom za politiku akceleracionizma" u kojem afirmišu ,,samoovladavanje", tehnologiju i oslobađajući potencijal kapitalizma kada se ovaj natera da prekorači sopstvene granice. To je suvoparan i često neubedljiv teorijski melanž pun apokaliptičnog uzbuđenja koje priziva doba Vajmarske republike (,,Posle Hitlera, mi!"). Izmišljanje budućnosti je trezvenije štivo. Dok je manifest bio sračunato uvredljiv, autori se ovoga puta trude da pridobiju i preobrate čitaoca.
Mason je do postkapitalizma stigao posle duge novinarske karijere u kojoj je pisao o novim tehnologijama i ekonomiji, kao i kratke ljubavne afere sa trockizmom. Svoj ,,vodič u budućnost" započinje na granici između Moldavije i ruskog satelita Pridnjestrovlja, mesta gde je, kako tvrdi, ljudima draža stabilnost diktature nego haos neoliberalizma. Reka Dnjestar je ,,geografska granica između kapitalizma slobodnog tržišta i sistema Vladimira Putina, kako god ga nazvali" (autor ne objašnjava zašto i taj sistem ne bi bio ,,kapitalizam slobodnog tržišta"). Prelaskom u Putinlend shvatamo da je ,,najbolje što je kapitalizam imao da ponudi već iza nas": oko 2050. svet će se urušiti zbog klimatskih promena, starenja stanovništva, migracija i disfunkcionalne ekonomije.
Mason, Srnicek i Williams su skeptični i smatraju da kejnsijanski programi borbe protiv politika štednje kakve predlažu Corbyn, Sanders, Podemos ili prvobitna Siriza – koji treba da ,,zauzdaju finansijski sektor, eliminišu nametnute mere štednje, osiguraju investicije u zelenu energiju i bolje plaćen rad", kako ih Mason sažima – nisu ni izbliza dovoljni da zaustave dolazeću propast. Odsustvo bilo kakve održive sistemske alternative verovatno je ,,logičan ishod, ako verujete da je jedina druga mogućnost ono što je levica 20. veka nazivala 'socijalizmom'", što Mason definiše kao spoj ,,državne kontrole i ekonomskog nacionalizma" utemeljen na ,,brutalnoj hijerarhiji". Znatno mlađi Srnicek i Williams smatraju da je naš glavni zadatak da ispravimo greške koje su levi libertarijanci činili posle 1968. Mason, s druge strane, misli da oni nisu otišli dovoljno daleko.
On ne krije svoju veru u istorijsku nužnost i napredak, veru koju većina današnjih marksista brižljivo krije. Postkapitalizam je moguć i neophodan zato što ,,kapitalizam više nije u stanju da se prilagodi tehnološkim promenama". Rečima koje evociraju Marxov predgovor za Prilog kritici političke ekonomije, Mason konstatuje da će ,,kapitalizam biti ukinut" jer je potrošio svoje produktivne resurse i u sebi krije ,,nešto dinamičnije, nešto što već postoji unutar starog sistema, u početku skoro neprimetno". Autori obe knjige su uzbuđeni zbog mogućnosti nastanka ,,novoga čoveka", ali ga različito vide. Srnicek i Williams imaju ,,intervencionistički pristup čoveku", prihvatanje ,,individualnog telesnog eksperimentisanja" do nastanka novog čoveka u novom telu. Masonova proteza nam je bliža: zasluge za talas protesta u protekloj deceniji, od Occupy Wall Street (OWS) preko arapskog proleća do Majdana, on pripisuje internetu koji je stvorio ,,obrazovane i povezane ljude" čiju avangardu čini ,,umrežena generacija". Masonova analiza danas zvuči u najmanju ruku neodmereno optimistički, ali on i dalje nema nikakvih rezervi prema ,,umreženim revolucijama" kojima je posvetio prethodnu knjigu, Zašto svuda počinje (2012). Srnicek i Williams su oprezniji i novu pokretačku silu istorije ne vide u postdiplomcima na Tviteru.
U obe knjige, glavna bitka se bije protiv politika štednje i neoliberalizma. Obe knjige se bave i mogućim posledicama širenja automatizacije kao što je stvaranje populacije ,,suvišnih ljudi". ,,Pravi smisao projekta štednje", piše Mason, jeste ,,smanjivanje plata i životnog standarda na zapadu, sve dok se oni u narednim decenijama ne izjednače sa rastućim platama i standardom srednje klase u Kini i Indiji". Zato će ,,naredna generacija biti siromašnija od sadašnje; stari ekonomski model je razbijen i više ne može proizvesti rast". Ni ona mesta koja su na neki način uspela da se izoluju – autoritarni Iran, Kina, Rusija, socijaldemokratska severna Evropa – neće biti pošteđena. ,,Do 2060. zemlje kao što je Švedska dostići će nivo nejednakosti ravan onome danas u SAD".
Razmišljajući o tome kako smo stigli dotle, Srnicek i Williams – kao i mnogi autori u poslednje vreme, od Owena Jonesa preko Marka Fishera do Philipa Mirowskog – naglašavaju ulogu ekspertskih grupa (Društvo Mont Pelerin i slične organizacije) koje su imale spremna rešenja kada je kejnsijanizam počeo da posustaje polovinom 70-ih godina prošlog veka. ,,Folklorna politika" klimatskih kampova, tematskih kampanja i lokalizama pokazala se kao neadekvatan odgovor na neoliberalno preuzimanje države, univerziteta i ,,zdravog razuma". Mason je hrabriji i ambiciozniji. On tvrdi da postoje jasni strukturni razlozi zašto je kapitalizam u svom sadašnjem obliku kočnica tehnološkim promenama i poboljšanju ljudskog života i veruje da su promene u načinu rada i raspodele proizvele novu istorijsku silu sposobnu da ga prevaziđe.
Mason smatra da je ključni problem u tome što je ,,informaciona ekonomija možda neuskladiva sa tržišnom ekonomijom". U solidnom pregledu različitih teorija adaptacije kapitalizma od početka 20. veka, Mason se posebno fokusira na ,,talase" kapitalističke promene o kojima piše ruski revolucionarni socijalistički ekonomista Nikolaj Kondratijev, talase zahvaljujući kojima kapitalizam uspešno izbegava scenarije kolapsa i katastrofe koje su predviđali boljševici i menjševici. Talas promene može podrazumevati ,,uvođenje novih tehnologija, razvoj novih poslovnih modela, izlazak novih zemalja na globalno tržište ili rast količine i raspoloživosti novca", kao u slučaju ,,trećeg talasa" kapitalističke ekspanzije u vreme Belle Époque (1871-1914). Mason analizira pokušaje Rose Luxemburg, Lenjina, Rudolfa Hilferdinga i Eugena Varge da objasne procvat sistema za koji su mislili da je na izdisaju. Rosa Luxemburg veruje da će njegova konačna propast nastupiti kada čitava planeta bude uvučena u kapitalistički sistem. Ali ona ,,gubi iz vida činjenicu da se nova tržišta mogu otvarati ne samo u kolonijama, već i unutar nacionalnih ekonomija, u lokalnim sektorima, u kućama ljudi, pa i u njihovim glavama".
Nakratko se činilo da je takav novi talas počeo u periodu posle 1989, kada je kapitalizam ,,dobio inekciju adrenalina kroz priliv radne snage, otvaranje novih tržišta i širenje preduzetničkih sloboda" zahvaljujući otvaranju Kine, Istočne Evrope i bivšeg Sovjetskog Saveza. Ipak je već krajem 90-ih godina prošlog veka bilo jasno da nešto nije u redu. Propast internet kompanija je pokazala da nova industrijska revolucija nije ni približno tako profitabilna kao što smo verovali da jeste. U novom ,,info-kapitalizmu" cenu više nisu diktirali cena rada, degradacija materijalne baze, troškovi proizvodnje i tako dalje. Zahvaljujući novoj dostupnosti ,,besplatnih stvari" cene su određivane arbitrarno. Koliko iTunes može naplatiti jedan mp3, ako znamo da se digitalne datoteke mogu beskonačno kopirati, a nova muzika je u roku od nekoliko sekundi od objavljivanja dostupna preko desetina polulegalnih kanala distribucije? Drugi problem je bio pokret slobodnog softvera: raspoloživost kolektivno razvijanog i besplatnog softvera kao što je Linux znači da su nam ,,potrebni novi oblici vlasništva i upravljanja vlasništvom", čime je najavljen ,,novi modus proizvodnje s one strane kapitalizma". Čak i ,,tvrdokorni kapitalisti" poput Gugla zavise od besplatnog softvera: na primer, Android, koji Gugl koristi kao telefonski operativni sistem. Iz današnjeg info-kapitalizma, zaključuje Mason, ne može proisteći nikakav novi ,,talas". (Srnicek i Williams se slažu s njim: ,,nove industrije" – Fejsbuk, Tviter, Instagram i tako dalje – ,,zapošljavaju tek 0,5 odsto američke radne snage", a ,,prosečna nova kompanija otvara 40 odsto manje radnih mesta nego pre 20 godina".)
Masonov omiljeni primer postkapitalističke institucije je Vikipedija, uspešno neprofitno preduzeće koje se oslanja na entuzijazam i volonterski rad hiljada urednika, samoregulišuća mreža koja nikoga ne plaća i ne može se prodati ili kupiti. To je verovatno bolji primer nego Uber, otvoreno eksploatatorska mreža za taksi prevoz o kojoj Mason govori na drugom mestu, ali njegov prikaz Vikipedije jasno pokazuje da on nije proveo mnogo vremena uređujući enciklopedijske odrednice. Vikipedija se gotovo parazitski oslanja na istraživanja koja nije obavila mreža, već akademska zajednica – zato se fraza ,,potreban izvor" tako često ubacuje u odrednice sumnjive vrednosti, pre nego što dođu na red za brisanje. (S druge strane, Vikipedija će vam progledati kroz prste ako izvor izgleda iole zvanično. Svako sumnjivo istraživanje može proći kao izvor podataka, kao što pokazuju neke od epskih uredničkih bitaka, na primer povodom sukoba Rusije i Ukrajine: staljinistički istoričari i ukrajinske službe bezbednosti redovno se navode kao pouzdani izvori.) Greh ,,izvornog istraživanja" – još jedan neprimeren sklop reči, zloslutan skoro kao ,,potreban izvor" – takođe nas podseća da je ne-post-kapitalistički rad akademske zajednice osnova ovog projekta. Vikipedija nije toliko nova forma znanja koliko novo pakovanje starih formi.
Knjiga PostKapitalizam, kao i Srnicekov i Williamsov ,,Manifest akceleracionizma", utemeljen je na Marxovom ,,Fragmentu o mašinama" u Osnovima kritike političke ekonomije, misaonom eksperimentu u kojem se ,,kapitalizam raspada jer nije u stanju da opstane u okruženju zajedničkog, deljenog znanja". To nam se upravo sprema, veruje Mason, zahvaljujući peer-to-peer mrežama i sličnim tehnologijama koje najavljuju ,,ekonomiju u kojoj se mašine grade besplatno i traju večno. Mada mehaničarska radionica danas miriše i zvuči gotovo isto kao pre 30 godina, ona se od radionice u kojoj sam ja radio razlikuje isto koliko i pesma sa iTunesa od pesme na ploči od vinila". Gotovo polovina poslova će uskoro biti automatizovana, tvrdi on, a ljudi koji će tako ostati bez posla ,,ne mogu se svi pretvoriti u postmodernu poslugu za 1% najbogatijih". Zbog smanjivanja ponude poslova koji se plaćaju i nesposobnosti novih tehnologija da ponovo pokrenu sistem (zbog ugrađene preferencije za besplatno i kolektivno), kapital je primoran da nastavi da isisava ostatke socijalne države i frenetično traga za načinima da naplati, ,,monetizuje" društvene mreže. ,,Da bi zahvatio sve nepredviđene posledice (eksternalije) u informatičkoj ekonomiji", piše Mason. ,,kapital je prinuđen da širi vlasnička prava na nove oblasti; on mora posedovati nas same i naše plejliste, ne samo objavljene akademske radove, već i istraživanja na osnovu kojih smo ih pisali. Ipak, sama tehnologija pruža sredstva da se tome odupremo i čini takav aranžman dugoročno neodrživim". Kao i Marx i Rosa Luxemburg, Mason veruje da je kraj kapitalizma moguć: njegovi prethodnici su samo pogrešili u tome što su ga najavili pre vremena.

***

Neoliberalizam računa na to da će ,,uzbuđenje i polet koji prate nove tehnologije biti prihvaćeni kao opravdanje za pretrpljene patnje na putu do slobodnih tržišta. Rudari su morali biti slomljeni da bismo dobili Fejsbuk, telekom kompanije su se morale privatizovati da bismo dobili 3G telefone". Zapravo, ,,potkopavanje pregovaračke pozicije radništva... je suština čitavog projekta, sredstvo za sve ostale ciljeve". Ali radnička klasa posle toga nije nestala, već je stvoren ,,proletarijat koji broji tri milijarde ljudi". Mason je veoma skeptičan u pogledu sposobnosti novog proletarijata da razvije političku svest i primećuje da ,,na tlu neizvesnih poslova, ekstremnog siromaštva, migracija radne snage i očajnih uslova života nema izgleda da na globalnom jugu izraste bilo šta uporedivo sa zajedništvom i političkom svešću radničkog pokreta na zapadu na vrhuncu njegove moći". On objašnjava da ni radnički pokret na zapadu nikada nije bio revolucionaran, ali propušta da primeti činjenicu da je kvazi-ruralno ,,tle" Kine ili Južne Amerike bilo mnogo sklonije pobunama u poslednjih 70 godina nego organizovano radništvo Birmingema ili Pitsburga. Ali sve to više nije važno, jer ,,danas je pokretač promene, potencijalno, svaki čovek na planeti", a ,,na mestu subjekta istorije" proletarijat je ,,zamenila raznorodna globalna populacija čije su bojno polje svi aspekti društva – a ne samo rad".
U ovom delu PostKapitalizma čitaoce će frustrirati kontrast izmeđi Masonovog veoma uzdržanog prikaza poznatih elemenata istorije radikalne levice i ushićenog prizivanja novog umreženog ljudskog bića. Mason sofisticirano razvija argument da je ,,u istoriji ljudskog društva proletarijat bio najbliži prosvećenom, kolektivnom istorijskom subjektu", ali taj subjekt nikada nije verovao da je njegov zadatak da sruši kapitalizam, već samo da ga zauzda uz pomoć sindikata, zadruga i samoobrazovanja i tako osigura bezbednost i održivost života za koje su se radnici izborili unutar sistema. Nasuprot Marxovoj ideji o proletarijatu kao ,,odsustvu" bez sopstvene kulture ili prtljaga, Mason ističe da je nova industrijska radna snaga stvorila osobenu i autonomnu kulturu još dok je Marx bio student. Dok je Lenjin smatrao da je ,,radnička aristokratija" reakcionarna sila unutar radničke klase, Mason je uveren da su u stvarnom životu viokokvalifikovani radnici avangarda levice, na primer u Glazgovu i Berlinu 1919. ili u Brimingemu i Torinu 70-ih godina prošlog veka.
Mason briljira kada opisuje efekte finansijalizacije na Laj, njegov rodni grad na severozapadu Engleske, ili istoriju militantnog radništva u 20. veku. Manje je ubedljiv kada pređe na ,,umrežene pokrete" iz poslednjih godina. On misli da organizovani fabrički proletarijat u SAD, Evropi i Japanu nije uspeo da probije put do postkapitalizma – ili socijalizma, kako se to nekad zvalo – ali OWS, Majdan, Tahrir, pa čak i protesti protiv Radničke partije u Brazilu su ,,dokazi da je na scenu stupio novi istorijski subjekt. To nije samo radnička klasa pod novom maskom – to je umreženo čovečanstvo". Kapitalizam je stvorio ,,novu silu koja će ga sahraniti". Tu silu čine umreženi pojedinci koji su kampovali na gradskim trgovima, blokirali mesta na kojima se vadi nafta iz škriljca (protiv frakovanja), organizovali pank koncerte na krovovima ruskih katedrala, prkosno podizali limenke piva u lice islamizmu na travi Gezi parka i tako dalje. Mason tu zaista prelazi u kič, ali veći problem je njegov propust da analizira političku sadržinu omladinskih pokreta.
On ne razume da ni u jednom od tih pokreta nema mnogo onih koji u ,,kapitalizmu" vide najvećeg neprijatelja, a svakako ih je manje nego među štrajkačima iz 30-ih ili 70-ih godina prošlog veka. To je šarena gomila ljudi koji potiču iz različitih društvenih klasa i zagovaraju različite stavove sa svih strana političkog spektra, a ono što ih navodno ujedinjuje jeste korišćenje Tvitera i nepoverenje u ,,stare elite" i hijerarhije. Pošto ne nose nikakv prtljag, nije vredno truda istraživati zašto su, na primer, protesti u Brazilu tako brzo prešli granicu otvorenog rasizma, zašto su neki od demonstranata na Tahriru odabrali da podrže novog generala umesto demokratski izabranog islamiste, zašto na obe strane u sukobu u Ukrajini važan deo čine elementi radikalne desnice i zašto mladi koji su donedavno okupirali London i Njujork sad odjednom vode klasične političke kampanje za osedele socijaldemokratske i levičarske kandidate starog kova. Zaslepljen svojom tehno-utopijom Mason zanemaruje sva ta pitanja.
On stalno iznova ponavlja da je sukob između postkapitalizma i njegovih navodnih neoliberalnih neprijatelja ,,prožet sukobljavanjem mreže i hijerarhije". I to je možda tačka u kojoj se najviše udaljava od Srniceka i Williamsa. U prvom delu Izmišljanja budućnosti izlaže se kritika lokalne, samoorganizovane, nehijerarhijske politike. Srnicek i Williams to nazivaju ,,folklornom politikom", iako se spolja čini da su takve inicijative uvezane s internetom i društvenim mrežama bar koliko i futurizam koji oni zastupaju, možda i više. Akteri folklorne politike, poput Masonovih mladih umreženih pojedinaca, postavljaju ,,svakodnevnicu iznad strukture... osećanje iznad mišljenja". Primer su OWS, 15M u Španiji, zapatisti i većina oblika političke borbe koji se zasnivaju na direktnoj akciji: sve je u neposrednosti. U folklornoj politici ,,taktika i proces su važniji od strateških ciljeva", pa modus komunikacije – bilo kroz direktna sučeljavanja u protestnim kampovima ili preko društvenih mreža – postaje fetiš, dok se politički sadržaj potiskuje u drugi plan. Što se tiče Srniceka i Williamsa, ideja da sami treba da budemo promena koju želimo da vidimo u svetu garantuje da nikakve promene neće biti.
Zašto folklorna politika naizgled cveta u umreženom svetu savremenih protesta? Zato što proizvodi osećaj topline, tvrde oni, utisak da zaista ,,preduzimamo nešto", utisak koji se pojačava kad neku od bitaka dobijemo: ,,Ali na male pobede – koje su bez sumnje korisne, jer bude nadu – pada senka velikih poraza. Glavni izazov s kojim se levica danas suočava jeste izlaženje na kraj sa razočarenjima i neuspesima poslednjeg ciklusa borbi". To uključuje ,,noviju istoriju revolucija – od revolucije u Iranu do arapskog proleća" (prilično širok zahvat, mora se primetiti), koje su se redovno ,,završavale nekom kombinacijom teokratskog autoritarizma, vojne diktature i građanskog rata". Oni više prostora poklanjaju pokretima koji su pokušali da se polugama državne moći približe uobičajenim putem, pobedom na izborima. Njihov primer toga je pokušaj stvaranja ,,dvojne vlasti" države i lokalnih zajednica u Venecueli – što danas možda izgleda kao promašaj, ali je bar bio pokušaj izgradnje nečega istinski ,,protivhegemonijskog" i ,,strukturnog".
Kako Srnicek i Williams vide stvari, misija istorijskog radničkog pokreta je bila da definiše ciljeve i postavi zahteve – da traži penzije, socijalno osiguranje, kraće radno vreme – i bori se za njih na radnom mestu i van njega. Ono što njih dvojica zapravo predlažu, ako se kritika folklorne politike ostavi po strani (jer su je događaji već prevazišli, budući da se posle finansijskog sloma levica poslednje generacije više ne organizuje u afinitetske grupe već u političke partije), jeste da treba ustanoviti novi skup zahteva i uporno insistirati na njima, onako kako je to činila stara levica. Dva od tih zahetva – puna automatizacija i univerzalni osnovni dohodak – sasvim su konkretni; treći zahtev, budućnost, očekivano je manje jasno definisan. Srnicek i Williams nas podsećaju da smo nekada verovali da će ljudi u 21. veku raditi tri dana u nedelji, a prosečno puno radno vreme u SAD danas se približilo brojci od 47 sati nedeljno, bez vremena provedenog na putu do posla. To je apsurdno, kažu oni, ako se ima u vidu koliko rada je već automatizovano, da ne govorimo o onome što nas čeka u budućnosti. Njihov zamišljeni ne-radnički pokret zahteva potpunu automatizaciju. Ipak, iako se veliki deo ljudskog rada može automatizovati bez većih problema, ostaje još dosta toga što je teško zamisliti kao automatizovano, na primer usluge nege bolesnika – što je pitanje koje Srnicek i Williams zaobilaze.

***

Kako ćemo izdržavati stanovništvo sveta kada potpuna automatizacija jednom bude ostvarena? Tu na scenu stupa univerzalni osnovni dohodak. Mason podržava tu ideju i predlaže da se ,,isplate finansiraju iz poreza na tržišnu ekonomiju". Tako će primaoci osnovnog dohotka moći da preusmere svoje vreme u postkapitalistički segment ekonomije. Gugl će biti nemilosrdno oporezovan da bi bivši radnici u kol-centrima i prodavnicama ,,sve za funtu" mogli da se posvete radu na Vikipediji. I ovde Mason ide korak dalje od Srniceka i Williamsa u artikulisanju alternativa i predlaganju sredstava za njihovo ostvarivanje. Tamo gde Srnicek i Williams pokazuju izvesne simpatije za neke aspekte sovjetskog socijalizma (naročito za svemirski program i ,,intervencionistički" pristup prirodi, ljudskoj i onoj drugoj), Mason pokazuje samo prezir za ,,strojevi korak" Sovjetskog Saveza i njegovih satelita. ,,Izlaz" iz kapitalizma koji je ponudio sovjetski sistem, tvrdi on, vodio je u ,,nešto još gore od kapitalizma". (To nije sasvim fer: neko će primetiti da je pravo pitanje da li je to gore od ruskog kapitalizma na kraju 20. veka ili u poslednjih 25 godina, a to je pitanje na koje je već teže odgovoriti.)
Mason se ne slaže sa stavom ,,sajber-staljinista" da je snaga računara udahnula novi život fantaziji o sasvim planiranoj ekonomiji: ,,Čak ni sa najbržim super-kompjuterima i najvećim farmama podataka, planiranje nije primarni put izlaska iz kapitalizma". U takvom sistemu, tvrdi on, ne bi bilo mesta za ,,elektronsku trgovinu, mrežne strukture, stvari koje se besplatno dele preko peer-to-peer mreža – to jest, za oblike nekapitalističkog života koji već postoje. Mason do kraja ostaje sasvim posebna vrsta marksiste. Protivi se planovima za kompjuterizaciju socijalističke ekonomije iz istih razloga iz kojih su Marx i Engels napadali ,,utopijske socijaliste" svog vremena": zato što njihovi planovi zanemaruju ,,stvarni i već postojeći pokret koji ukida sadašnje stanje stvari" – to jest, organizovanu radničku klasu. U Masonovoj viziji, pokret je umrežena omladina koja ukida kapitalizam kliktajima miša, klik po klik.
Ipak, iznenada, pred sam kraj PostKapitalizma, planiranje ponovo dospeva u prvi plan. Mason tu prvi put pominje klimatske promene. On odbacuje ideju da ,,tržište" može rešiti problem sistemom trgovine pravima na emisiju gasova i sličnim aranžmanima, a onda se, kao da je uskočio u neku drugu knjigu, zalaže za ,,državnu kontrolu i planiranje" kao put prelaska u ekonomiju sa nultom emisijom štetnih gasova u kojoj će ,,niskoplatežne, nedovoljno kvalifikovane i nekvalitetne korporacije" koje cvetaju u režimu neoliberalizma biti ,,nemilosrdno" likvidirane, kao radnički pokret 80-ih godina prošlog veka. Odjednom se pokazuje da su njegove nehijerarhijske mreže irelevantne za najveći problem koji nas čeka u sledećih 100 godina. Srnicek i Williams, s druge strane, usputno primećuju da su klimatske promene jedan od velikih strukturnih problema koje ,,folklorna politika" ne može rešiti: posle potpune automatizacije, tvrde oni, relaksiranije stanovništvo će manje trošiti, pa će se i pritisak na resurse smanjti. Možda je stvarno tako, ali bilo bi lepo da nam Mason ili Srnicek i Williams otkriju malo više detalja o našim budućim robotima-slugama: gde će ih praviti i od čega, gde će se vaditi potrebne sirovine – i tako to.
Optimizam ove dve knjige, vera da je velike probleme još moguće rešiti, deluje zarazno. Ipak, na kraju, postkapitalizam je, kao i postmodernizam, samo oznaka za odsustvo, a ne pozitivan program. Kao i antikapitalizam s početka 21. veka, on nam govori samo šta nije: u ovom slučaju, on nije stara levica, folklorna politika, socijaldemokratija ili staljinizam, sa njihovim čvrstim hijerarhijama i bez svih onih besplatnih stvari koje su tako kul. Postkapitalizam, kao i prekapitalizam, može biti feudalno društvo ili robovlasnički sistem ili noćna mora razrušenih gradova i radioaktivnih nomada iz naučne fantastike. Ili možda samo etatizam bez slobodnog tržišta, koji toliko užasava Masona. Socijalizam, koliko god da je značenje tog termina zamagljeno neodmerenim korišćenjem, i dalje podrazumeva nešto socijalno, komunizam nešto komunalno, anarhizam nešto anarhično. U svakom slučaju, nešto za šta smo spremni da se borimo, ako u to verujemo. Narativ o postkapitalizmu nas samo obaveštava da proizvodne snage čine mogućim neke promene i predlaže da ih zahtevamo, ili tvrdi da to već nesvesno činimo.
Owen Hatherlay, London Review of Books, 30.06.2016.
Preveo Đorđe Tomić
Peščanik.net, 06.07.2016.

[Meho Krljic]

Evo i originala za naše anglosaksonski inklinirane članove:

One Click at a Time

Owen Hatherley

   
• PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason
  Allen Lane, 368 pp, £8.99, June, ISBN 978 0 14 197529 0
• BuyInventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
  Verso, 256 pp, £12.99, October 2015, ISBN 978 1 78478 096 8

Both Paul Mason's PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams's Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work advocate things that seemed to have disappeared from thinking on the left sometime in the late 1960s: technological optimism, futurism, the making of programmes and the issuing of demands as opposed to bearing witness through protest. Both use the curiously neutral coinage 'postcapitalism' for their alternative, rather than socialism, social democracy, communism or anarchism, each of these tainted for the authors in one way or another.
Srnicek and Williams reject practically everything that the Euro-American left has thought and done since 1968, bar a somewhat tokenistic acknowledgment of the importance of sexual and racial 'intersectionality'. Their problem isn't with 'identity politics' – the common bugbear of everything-went-wrong-in-the-1960s leftists – but with the abandonment of the belief that a society beyond capitalism is both possible and necessary. 'From predictions of new worlds of leisure, to Soviet-era cosmic communism, to Afro-futurist celebrations of the synthetic and diasporic nature of black culture, to post-gender dreams of radical feminism,' they write, 'the popular imagination of the left envisaged societies vastly superior to anything we dream of today.' It's especially frustrating because 'today, on one level, these dreams appear closer than ever,' through the ever greater expansion of automation, the communal production and distribution of open-source software and 'copyleft' systems of repudiated ownership, and the possibilities opened up by 3-D printing. Srnicek and Williams came to notoriety in 2013 when they issued a 'Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', affirming 'mastery', technology and the liberatory possibilities of capitalism if pushed beyond its limits. It was a heady and largely unconvincing theoretical melange, fuelled by a rather Weimar Republic sense of apocalyptic excitement ('After Hitler, us!'). Inventing the Future is more sober; the manifesto was wilfully offensive, but here the authors are keen to make converts.
Mason, who arrives at postcapitalism from a background in technology and economic journalism, and a sometime involvement in Trotskyist politics, begins his 'guide to our future' at the border between Moldova and the Russian-backed statelet of Transnistria: a place, he tells us, where people would rather the stability of dictatorship than the chaos of neoliberalism. The river Dniester is 'the geographic border between free-market capitalism and whatever you want to call the system Vladimir Putin runs' (it remains unclear why that system shouldn't also be called 'free-market capitalism'). To cross into Putinland is to realise that 'the best of capitalism is over for us': around 2050 it will all start to collapse, through climate change, ageing, migration and economic dysfunction. Both Mason and Srnicek/Williams are sceptical that the Keynesian anti-austerity programmes of Corbyn, Sanders, Podemos or pre-capitulation Syriza – to 'suppress high finance, reverse austerity, invest in green energy and promote high-waged work', as Mason puts it – are nearly enough to stop the rot. But the lack of a viable systemic alternative is 'logical, if you think the only alternative is what the 20th-century left called "socialism"', which Mason defines sweepingly as 'state control and economic nationalism' along with a 'brutal hierarchy'. For the much younger Srnicek and Williams, the problem is reversing the errors of post-1968 left-libertarians; for Mason, they didn't go nearly far enough.
Mason especially displays the sort of belief in historical necessity and progress that most Marxists have learned to be deeply embarrassed by. Postcapitalism is both necessary and possible because 'capitalism can no longer adapt to technological change.' In language that recalls Marx's preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 'it will be abolished' because it has exhausted its productive resources, and harbours 'something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system'. The two books share an excitement about the possibility of a 'new kind of human being', but mean different things by it. Srnicek and Williams envisage 'an interventionist approach to the human', an embrace of 'individual bodily experimentation' set 'against restricted images of the human' – a rather startling image, a new human with a new body. Mason's prosthesis is more familiar: the internet, which has created 'the educated and connected human being' and whose vanguard is the 'networked generation' he credits with the wave of protests in recent years, encompassing everything from Occupy to the Arab Spring to Maidan. His analysis now seems over-optimistic, to put it mildly, but he expresses no second thoughts about the 'networked revolutions' he hailed in his last book, Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere (2012). Wisely, Srnicek and Williams do not find a new historical subject in graduates using Twitter.
In both books the critical fronts are a total opposition to austerity and neoliberalism, and a focus on the possible consequences of increased automation, including the creation of a 'surplus population'. The 'real austerity project', Mason argues, is 'to drive down wages and living standards in the West for decades, until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up'. As a result, 'the next generation will be poorer than this one; the old economic model is broken and cannot revive growth.' Those places which, in their different ways, have managed to insulate themselves – authoritarian China, Russia or Iran, residually social democratic northern Europe – will not be exempt: 'By 2060, countries such as Sweden will have the levels of inequality currently seen in the USA.' In thinking about how we got here, Srnicek and Williams – like so many recent writers, from Owen Jones to Mark Fisher to Philip Mirowski – lay great stress on the think-tanks (the Mont Pelerin Society and the like) that had their solutions ready when Keynesianism faltered in the mid-1970s. The 'folk politics' of Climate Camps, single-issue campaigns and localism have proved inadequate as a response to the neoliberal conquest of state, academia and 'common sense'. Mason is braver, and more ambitious. There are structural reasons, he says, why capitalism as it currently exists is a brake on technological change and human improvement, but changes in labour and distribution have created a new historical agent capable of transcending it. The central problem, as Mason sees it, is that 'an information economy may not be compatible with a market economy.' He gives a good potted account of the various theories of capitalist adaptation since the turn of the 20th century, focusing particularly on the Russian Socialist Revolutionary economist Nikolai Kondratiev's 'waves' of capitalist change – a rejection of the collapse and catastrophe scenarios of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. A wave involves the 'rollout of new technologies, the rise of new business models, new countries dragged into the global market, a rise in the quantity and availability of money': the 'third wave' of capitalist expansion around the Belle Epoque, for example. Mason tracks the attempts by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Rudolf Hilferding and Eugen Varga to explain this apparent thriving of what they considered a moribund system. For Luxemburg, the collapse would finally come once everywhere on the globe was pulled into the system. However, she 'had ignored the fact that new markets ... can be created not only in colonies but within national economies, local sectors, people's homes and indeed inside their brains'.
Another wave appeared to have come after 1989, when capitalism 'experienced a sugar rush: labour, markets, entrepreneurial freedom and new economies of scale' as a result of the assimilation of China, Eastern Europe and the former USSR. But by the end of the 1990s, it was obvious that something had gone awry. The dotcom crash made clear that the new industrial revolution wasn't nearly as profitable as we had been led to expect. In the new 'infocapitalism', prices ceased to be dictated by labour, degradation of materials, production costs and so forth, but were set arbitrarily as a response to the new accessibility of 'free stuff'. How much can iTunes charge for an mp3 when digital files can be copied limitlessly, and new music is accessible on dozens of semi-legal channels within seconds of its release? Another problem was the free software movement: the ready availability of collectively produced, free software such as Linux meant that 'new forms of property ownership and management become imperative,' presaging a 'new mode of production beyond capitalism'. 'Hard-assed capitalists' like Google are reliant on free software: Android, for instance, which Google uses for its phone operating system. There will, Mason concludes, be no new 'wave' emerging out of current forms of info-capitalism. (Srnicek and Williams agree: the 'new industries' – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc – 'only employ 0.5 per cent of the American workforce', and 'the average new business creates 40 per cent fewer jobs than it did twenty years ago.')
Mason's great exemplar of a postcapitalist institution is Wikipedia, a hugely successful and non-profit-making enterprise which relies on the enthusiasm and voluntary labour of countless thousands of editors, a self-regulating network which pays no one and cannot be bought or sold. It is a better choice than Uber, the rampantly exploitative taxi network Mason has cited elsewhere, but his account of Wikipedia suggests he hasn't done much editing on there himself. Wikipedia is reliant to the point of parasitism on research not done by a network, but by academics – that's why 'citation needed' is the thing most likely to be inserted into your text should you write a shoddy entry, shortly before it is slated for deletion. (Though Wikipedia can be highly undiscriminating as long as the source looks official enough. All 'real' research is citable, however dodgy, as a look at some of the historical edit wars over, say, Russia and Ukraine will tell you: Stalinist historians and the Ukrainian security services are regularly cited as reliable authorities.) The sin of 'original research?' – a solecism nearly as grave as 'citation needed' – is another reminder that the non-postcapitalist labour of academics is the basis of nearly the entire operation. Wikipedia is less a new form of knowledge than a novel packaging of an old one.
PostCapitalism, like Srnicek and Williams's 'Accelerationist Manifesto', sets itself up on the rock of Marx's 'Fragment on Machines' in the Grundrisse, a thought experiment in which 'capitalism collapses because it cannot exist alongside shared knowledge.' This is now coming, Mason believes, courtesy of peer-to-peer networks and the like, which promise 'an economy where machines can be built for free and last for ever'. 'Though a machine shop smells and sounds much as it did thirty years ago,' he writes, drawing on his own youthful experience, 'it is as different from the one I worked in as an iTunes track is from a vinyl record.' Nearly half of all jobs will soon be automated, he claims, and the resulting unemployed 'can't all become postmodern servants for the 1 per cent'. With the shrinking of waged labour, and the incapacity of new technologies to get the system going again owing to their in-built preference for the free and collective, capital is reduced to consuming the remains of the welfare state while frantically trying to find a way to 'monetise' social networks. 'To capture the externalities in an information-heavy economy,' Mason writes, 'capital has to extend its ownership rights into new areas; it has to own our selves, our playlists, not just our publicised academic papers but the research we did to write them. Yet the technology itself gives us a means to resist this, and makes it long-term impossible.' Like Marx or Luxemburg, he believes that capitalism has limits: it's just that they were premature in hailing them.
*
The wager of neoliberalism, for Mason, is that 'the exhilarating rush of new technology was taken as justifying all the pain we'd gone through to get free markets. The miners had to be smashed so that we could have Facebook; telecoms had to be privatised so we could have 3G mobile phones.' In fact, 'the destruction of labour's bargaining power ... was the essence of the entire project, the means to all the other ends.' As a result, however, the working class has not disappeared, but a 'three billion strong proletariat' has come into being. Mason is extremely sceptical that this proletariat is capable of political consciousness – 'on the subsoil of precarious work, extreme poverty, migrant labour and slum conditions it has been impossible for anything that matches the collectivity and consciousness of the western labour movement at its height to grow in the global south' – though since he goes on to argue at some length that the Western labour movement was never revolutionary, he might have reflected on the fact that the quasi-rural 'subsoil' of China or Latin America has been much more inclined to insurrection in the last seventy years than the organised workforces of Birmingham or Pittsburgh have. But anyway none of this matters, because the 'agent of change has become, potentially, everyone on earth', and 'as a historical subject' the proletariat 'is being replaced by a diverse, global population whose battlefield is all aspects of society – not just work'.
What makes this part of PostCapitalism so frustrating is the gap between Mason's exceptionally subtle handling of the familiar shibboleths of far-left history, and his awed invocation of the new networked human. He makes a sophisticated case that 'the proletariat was the closest thing to an enlightened, collective historical subject that human society has ever produced,' though he was never fully convinced it needed to overthrow capitalism, just temper it, with the help of unions, co-operatives and self-education, to ensure that the lives workers were carving out for themselves within the system were safe and viable. Against Marx's idea of the proletariat as an 'absence' without its own culture or baggage, Mason points out that the new Lancashire industrial workforce created a distinctive autonomous culture while Marx was still at university. Where Lenin considered the 'labour aristocracy' a reactionary force within the working class, Mason knows that in reality skilled workers tended to be the left vanguard, as in Glasgow and Berlin in 1919, or Birmingham and Turin during the 1970s.


Mason excels when he is describing the effects of financialisation on Leigh, his hometown in the north-west of England, or the history of workers' militancy in the 20th century. But he is much less convincing when he branches into the territory of the 'networked movements' of recent years. The organised factory proletariat in the US, Europe and Japan never carved out a path to postcapitalism – or socialism as it was then known – but Occupy, Maidan, Tahrir Square, and even the protests against the Workers' Party government in Brazil, 'are evidence that a new historical subject exists. It is not just the working class in a different guise; it is networked humanity.' The 'new gravedigger' produced by capitalism consists of 'the networked individuals who have camped in the city squares, blockaded the fracking sites, performed punk rock on the roofs of Russian cathedrals, raised defiant cans of beer in the face of Islamism on the grass of Gezi Park' etc. This is kitsch, but more significant is Mason's failure to analyse the political content of the movements of the young. Not a lot of people in any of them considered 'capitalism' their main enemy, probably less so than the average striker in the 1930s or 1970s. They are a disparate bunch, from all manner of class backgrounds, advocating various positions across the political spectrum, but all united apparently by their use of Twitter and their distrust of 'old elites' and hierarchies. Since they carry no baggage, it isn't worth investigating why, say, the protests in Brazil so easily passed over into racism, why some in Tahrir Square preferred a new general to an elected Islamist, why both sides in Ukraine's unrest had a crucial far-right element, or why the descendants of Occupy in London and New York now find themselves campaigning for ageing, old-school leftist social democrats. Mason sweeps all this away on a tide of goofy utopianism.
The point Mason reiterates again and again is that in the struggle between postcapitalism and its alleged neoliberal enemies, 'everything is pervaded by a fight between network and hierarchy.' This is perhaps the issue on which he differs most from Srnicek and Williams. The first part of Inventing the Future mounts a critique of local, self-organised, non-hierarchical politics. Srnicek and Williams prefer to call it 'folk politics', though it seems as deeply enmeshed in the internet and its social networks as the futurism they advocate; more so, in fact. The participants in folk politics, like Mason's young networked individuals, prefer 'the everyday over the structural ... feeling over thinking'. Their exponents can be found in Occupy, 15M in Spain, the Zapatistas and most forms of politics predicated on direct action: immediacy is all. In folk politics, 'the importance of tactics and process is placed above strategic objectives,' so that the mode of communication – whether the face-to-face deliberations in a protest camp or the use of social media to organise – becomes a fetish, and political content secondary. So far as Srnicek and Williams are concerned, the idea of being the change you want to see in the world practically guarantees that change won't take place.
Why does folk politics apparently thrive in the networked world of contemporary protest? Because, they claim, it creates a warm glow, a sense that you are indeed 'doing something', reinforced when a minor battle is actually won: 'Small successes – useful, no doubt, for instilling a sense of hope – nevertheless wither in the face of overwhelming losses.' The 'key challenge facing the left today,' they write, 'is to reckon with the disappointments and failures of the most recent cycle of struggles.' These include 'the recent history of revolutions – from the Iranian Revolution to the Arab Spring' (a big sweep there), which has 'simply led to some combination of theocratic authoritarianism, military dictatorship and civil war.' They have more time for movements that have tried to approach state power via the more familiar route of winning elections: the attempt, for instance, to create 'dual power' between the state and collectives in Venezuela – something which now seems abortive, but was at least an attempt to build something genuinely 'counter-hegemonic' and 'structural'.
What the historical labour movement did, in Srnicek and Williams's eyes, was set itself goals and demands – for pensions, social security, fewer working hours – and fight for them inside and outside the workplace. What they are really proposing, when their critique of folk politics is put aside (it already seems overtaken by events, now that the young post-crash left is organising not in affinity groups but in political parties), is that a new set of demands be agreed and doggedly insisted on, in the manner of the old left. Two of these – Full Automation and Universal Basic Income – are concrete; the other, The Future, is naturally somewhat vaguer. Srnicek and Williams remind us of the once-ubiquitous belief that by the 21st century, we'd all be working a three-day week, yet 'the average full-time US worker in fact logs closer to 47 hours a week,' not counting travel. This is all the more absurd, they argue, given how much work is automated already, let alone what's to come in the future. Their imagined non-labour movement will demand full automation as something that isn't just possible but necessary. Yet while a great deal of work could be automated without serious problems, there remains much that it is difficult to imagine being automated even in the long run, care work in particular – an issue that Srnicek and Williams gloss over.
*
As for what will sustain the population after full automation is achieved, that's where the Universal Basic Income comes in. Mason also supports UBI, and proposes that it should be 'paid for out of taxes on the market economy', so that its recipients can put their time into the postcapitalist part of the economy. Google will be ruthlessly taxed so that former call centre workers and Poundland shop assistants can do shifts on Wikipedia. Here, as elsewhere, Mason goes further than Srnicek and Williams in articulating an alternative and putting forward a means of achieving it. Where Srnicek and Williams show some affection for aspects of Soviet socialism (particularly its space programme and its 'interventionist' approach to nature, human and non-human), Mason has contempt for the 'forced march' approach of the USSR and its satellites. The Soviet system, he argues, provided a 'way out' of capitalism that ended up creating 'something worse than capitalism'. (This isn't terribly fair: the real question, you might think, should be whether it was better than Russian capitalism, as it existed at the turn of the 20th century or has in the last 25 years, which is a more difficult matter.)
Mason doesn't share the opinion of 'cyber-Stalinists' that computing power gives new life to the fantasy of a completely planned economy: 'Even with the best supercomputer and the biggest data farm, planning is not the primary route beyond capitalism.' Such a system, he argues, has no role for 'e-commerce, network structures, peer-to-peer free stuff' – that is, forms of noncapitalist life that actually exist. Mason remains a peculiar kind of Marxist. He opposes blueprints for computerised socialist economies for much the same reason that Marx and Engels attacked contemporary 'utopian socialists': that their plans ignored the 'real movement that abolishes the present state of things' – that is, the organised working class. Mason's version of this is his networked kids, busy abolishing capitalism one click at a time. And yet, suddenly, near the end of PostCapitalism, planning comes back. For the first time, Mason brings up climate change. He rejects the notion that 'the market' could help, via carbon trading or the like, and then, as if speaking from another book entirely, advocates 'state control and planning' as the means to move to a zero-carbon economy in which the 'low wage, low skill and low quality corporations' that thrive under neoliberalism will be 'ruthlessly' suppressed, as the labour movement was in the 1980s. The incredible non-hierarchical network turns out to be completely irrelevant to what is obviously going to be the major problem of the next hundred years. Srnicek and Williams, meanwhile, do little more than note that climate change is one of the vast structural issues that 'folk politics' couldn't possibly solve: after full automation, they claim, a more relaxed population would consume less, hence putting less pressure on resources. That's as may be, but it would be nice if either Mason or Srnicek and Williams had told us a little more about our new robot servants: where they will be made, what they will be made of, where the materials to make them will be mined – that sort of thing.
The optimism of both these books, the belief that big problems can be solved, is infectious, but in the end postcapitalism, like postmodernism, is the name of an absence, not a positive programme. Like the anticapitalism of the early 2000s, it tells you what it's not: in this case, the old left, folk politics, social democracy or Stalinism, with their hierarchies and lack of cool free stuff. Postcapitalism, like precapitalism, could be feudalism or slavery or some Threads-like nightmare of devastated cities and radioactive nomads. Or it could merely be the non-free-market statism that so horrifies Mason. Socialism, however much its meaning may have been clouded by overuse, still means something social, communism something communal, anarchism something anarchic. Each is something you might want to fight for because you believe in it. Postcapitalism tells you that the forces of production make something possible, then suggests either that you demand it, or that you're already doing it.

[mac]

Koliko slova! Jel može tldr sažetak?

[Meho Krljic]

Uh, brate.

Dakle, Hederli je prilično skeptičan da je postkapitalističko društvo kliktivizma, 3D printinga, socijalnih interakcija (u odsustvu proizvodnog rada) stvarna i dosežna utopija u društvu koje sada već ima tri milijarde proletera, ali veli da ove dve knjige barem ulažu častan napor da istraže istorijski trenutak u kome živimo i ekstrapoliraju ga na optimističan način.

[Truman]

Nigerijac pobegao od Boko Haram da bi ga ubio rasista u Italiji. Eh, živote skote...

[Truman]

Zanimljiv lik ovaj Oktar: http://www.kurir.rs/planeta/on-je-voda-islamskog-seks-kulta-njegova-moc-je-toliko-velika-da-je-usao-u-sukob-sa-samim-erdoganom-clanak-2343973

[Meho Krljic]

Ko u Britaniji do sada nije bio u depresiji, sad će pasti u istu 


Known for jokes and insults, Boris Johnson takes helm of British diplomacy

LONDON (Reuters) - Boris Johnson, Britain's most colourful politician with a long record of gaffes and scandals, was appointed as foreign secretary on Wednesday in a surprise move by new Prime Minister Theresa May that could shake up world diplomacy.
The former London mayor, who has never previously held a cabinet post and is known for his undiplomatic language, was the most prominent figure in the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union that culminated in a vote for 'Brexit' on June 23.
The appointment of a man who in the run-up to the referendum compared the goals of the EU with those of Adolf Hitler and Napoleon is likely to cause consternation in European capitals.
Johnson also drew accusations of racism during the campaign by suggesting in a newspaper article that U.S. President Barack Obama, whom he described as "part-Kenyan", was biased against Britain because of an "ancestral dislike of the British empire".
The U.S. State Department was quick to say it looked forward to working with Johnson. But he may face awkward moments in Washington over the Obama comments, as well as a 2007 article in which he likened Hillary Clinton to "a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital" and a more recent quip that he feared going to New York because of "the real risk of meeting Donald Trump".
The rise to one of the four great offices of state was the latest twist in an eventful career for the man invariably referred to simply as "Boris", known in Britain and beyond for his clownish persona and dishevelled mop of platinum hair.
Johnson originally made his name as an EU-bashing journalist in Brussels, then entered politics in the Conservative Party while also raising his profile through a series of appearances on a hit comedy TV show.
DOWNING STREET AMBITION THWARTED
His ability to charm people with his quick wit and eccentric style helped him shrug off a series of scandals, including getting sacked from the party's policy team while in opposition for lying about an extra-marital affair.
That and other episodes earned him the tabloid nickname "Bonking Boris". But where others would have floundered, Johnson became increasingly popular, culminating in his two victories in usually left-leaning London's mayoral contests in 2008 and 2012.
His decision to defy then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who was campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, by leading the push for Brexit, was widely seen as a bold gamble to replace Cameron should the "Leave" side win the referendum.
After that came to pass, he was seen as the favourite for the top job, but in his hour of triumph his ambition was thwarted in dramatic fashion when his close ally Michael Gove abruptly deserted him and announced his own candidacy.
The betrayal by Gove, whose parting shot was to say that "Boris cannot provide the leadership or build the team for the task ahead", stopped Johnson's march on Downing Street before it had even started.
His prospects appeared bleak as he was widely ridiculed for playing a major role in pushing Britain towards Brexit, only to duck out of the daunting task of actually steering that process. A joke that circulated widely on social media was "Cometh the hour, run awayeth the man".
His appointment as foreign secretary was unexpected. In her previous role as interior minister, May had humiliated Johnson by refusing to allow the use of water cannons in England after, as mayor of London, he had bought three of the devices second-hand from Germany.
In a speech launching her own leadership bid on June 30, May made fun of Johnson by contrasting her own experience of negotiating with European counterparts with his.
"Last time he did a deal with the Germans he came back with three nearly-new water cannon," she said to laughter.
With May having also appointed David Davis to the newly created post of secretary of state for exiting the European Union, Johnson's role in detailed negotiations over the terms of Brexit is likely to be limited.
"OFFENSIVE POETRY COMPETITION"
However, he will have to handle some of the most complex and explosive diplomatic crises around the world, from Syria to Ukraine.
"At this incredibly important time ... it is extraordinary that the new prime minister has chosen someone whose career is built on making jokes," said Tim Farron, leader of the opposition Liberal Democrats.
Despite recent efforts to project a more serious image, Johnson may well find that old and not-so-old jokes come back to haunt him in his new job.
It could be hard for him to work his charm in Turkey, a NATO member and key player in the Middle East as well as in the refugee crisis on Europe's borders, after he was declared the winner of The Spectator magazine's "President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition" in May.
The magazine ran the contest to protest against what it described as Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's abuse of blasphemy laws to block criticism of himself.
Johnson's winning entry was as follows: "There was a young fellow from Ankara, Who was a terrific wankerer, Till he sowed his wild oats with the help of a goat, But he didn't even stop to thankera".

[Meho Krljic]

Gardijan detaljno o tome kako u vreme kad smo zatrpani informacijama zahvaljujući, jelte, internetu, telefonima, socijalnim medijima itd., saznati šta je faktičko stanje stvari postaje jako težak zadatak. Kako reče i Bodrijar pre skoro četiri decenije "U moru onog što želi da se čuje, ja ne mogu da čujem ono što želim":


How technology disrupted the truth


One Monday morning last September, Britain woke to a depraved news story. The prime minister, David Cameron, had committed an "obscene act with a dead pig's head", according to the Daily Mail. "A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony at a Piers Gaveston event, involving a dead pig," the paper reported. Piers Gaveston is the name of a riotous Oxford university dining society; the authors of the story claimed their source was an MP, who said he had seen photographic evidence: "His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal."
The story, extracted from a new biography of Cameron, sparked an immediate furore. It was gross, it was a great opportunity to humiliate an elitist prime minister, and many felt it rang true for a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club. Within minutes, #Piggate and #Hameron were trending on Twitter, and even senior politicians joined the fun: Nicola Sturgeon said the allegations had "entertained the whole country", while Paddy Ashdown joked that Cameron was "hogging the headlines". At first, the BBC refused to mention the allegations, and 10 Downing Street said it would not "dignify" the story with a response – but soon it was forced to issue a denial. And so a powerful man was sexually shamed, in a way that had nothing to do with his divisive politics, and in a way he could never really respond to. But who cares? He could take it. Then, after a full day of online merriment, something shocking happened. Isabel Oakeshott, the Daily Mail journalist who had co-written the biography with Lord Ashcroft, a billionaire businessman, went on TV and admitted that she did not know whether her huge, scandalous scoop was even true. Pressed to provide evidence for the sensational claim, Oakeshott admitted she had none.
"We couldn't get to the bottom of that source's allegations," she said on Channel 4 News. "So we merely reported the account that the source gave us ... We don't say whether we believe it to be true." In other words, there was no evidence that the prime minister of the United Kingdom had once "inserted a private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig – a story reported in dozens of newspapers and repeated in millions of tweets and Facebook updates, which many people presumably still believe to be true today.
Oakeshott went even further to absolve herself of any journalistic responsibility: "It's up to other people to decide whether they give it any credibility or not," she concluded. This was not, of course, the first time that outlandish claims were published on the basis of flimsy evidence, but this was an unusually brazen defence. It seemed that journalists were no longer required to believe their own stories to be true, nor, apparently, did they need to provide evidence. Instead it was up to the reader – who does not even know the identity of the source – to make up their own mind. But based on what? Gut instinct, intuition, mood?
Does the truth matter any more?

Nine months after Britain woke up giggling at Cameron's hypothetical porcine intimacies, the country arose on the morning of 24 June to the very real sight of the prime minister standing outside Downing Street at 8am, announcing his own resignation.


"The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected," Cameron declared. "It was not a decision that was taken lightly, not least because so many things were said by so many different organisations about the significance of this decision. So there can be no doubt about the result."
But what soon became clear was that almost everything was still in doubt. At the end of a campaign that dominated the news for months, it was suddenly obvious that the winning side had no plan for how or when the UK would leave the EU – while the deceptive claims that carried the leave campaign to victory suddenly crumbled. At 6.31am on Friday 24 June, just over an hour after the result of the EU referendum had become clear, Ukip leader Nigel Farage conceded that a post-Brexit UK would not in fact have £350m a week spare to spend on the NHS – a key claim of Brexiteers that was even emblazoned on the Vote Leave campaign bus. A few hours later, the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan stated that immigration was not likely to be reduced – another key claim.


It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along. This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.
The remain side's worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as "Project Fear" – and quickly neutralised by opposing "facts": if 99 experts said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some report climate change.) Michael Gove declared that "people in this country have had enough of experts" on Sky News. He also compared 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler.     

It can become very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and 'facts' that are not

      For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious claim and rubbished every expert warning, filling the front pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to count – many of them later quietly corrected in very small print. A week before the vote – on the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory "Breaking Point" poster, and the Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead – the cover of the Daily Mail featured a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline "We are from Europe – let us in!" The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.
The brazen disregard for facts did not stop after the referendum: just this weekend, the short-lived Conservative leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom, fresh from a starring role in the leave campaign, demonstrated the waning power of evidence. After telling the Times that being a mother would make her a better PM than her rival Theresa May, she cried "gutter journalism!" and accused the newspaper of misrepresenting her remarks – even though she said exactly that, clearly and definitively and on tape. Leadsom is a post-truth politician even about her own truths.
When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not. The leave campaign was well aware of this – and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to police political claims. A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip's largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. "It was taking an American-style media approach," said Banks. "What they said early on was 'Facts don't work', and that's it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn't work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It's the Trump success."


It was little surprise that some people were shocked after the result to discover that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised benefits. When "facts don't work" and voters don't trust the media, everyone believes in their own "truth" – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.
How did we end up here? And how do we fix it?

Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth.This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these "facts" to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). A dubious story about Cameron and a pig appears in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has flown around the world on social media and turned up in trusted news sources everywhere. This may seem like a small matter, but its consequences are enormous.     

In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true

      "The Truth",as Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter!, their history of the Sun newspaper, is a "bald statement which every newspaper prints at its peril". There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts.
This settled "truth" was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press. Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an "information cascade". As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, "people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable." This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend's post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you're "in the know", and thus you increase the visibility of their post to others. Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term "filter bubble" in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google's personalised search function, which means that no two people's Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser's plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that "their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that's important, not just the stuff that's most popular or most self-validating". But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:

I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook's custom search that I can't find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I'm *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.
This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies ... We're getting countries where one half just doesn't know anything at all about the other.

But asking technology companies to "do something" about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see.

Facebook, which launched only in 2004, now has 1.6bn users worldwide. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet – and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era. As Emily Bell has written: "Social media hasn't just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security."
Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University – and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian – has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism. "Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years," she wrote in March, "than perhaps at any time in the past 500." The future of publishing is being put into the "hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many". News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now "filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable". This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people's work. As Bell notes: "There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past."
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web – where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information – has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which (such as Instagram and Snapchat) do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps, which allow users to create groups to share messages privately – perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces. But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks.
As the pioneering Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, who was imprisoned in Tehran for six years for his online activity, wrote in the Guardian earlier this year, the "diversity that the world wide web had originally envisioned" has given way to "the centralisation of information" inside a select few social networks – and the end result is "making us all less powerful in relation to government and corporations".
Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read – at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions – and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. (The most visible evidence of Facebook's influence on journalism is the panic that accompanies any change in the news feed algorithm that threatens to reduce the page views sent to publishers.)
In the last few years, many news organisations have steered themselves away from public-interest journalism and toward junk-food news, chasing page views in the vain hope of attracting clicks and advertising (or investment) – but like junk food, you hate yourself when you've gorged on it. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks. But the same principle applies to news that is misleading or sensationally dishonest, even if it wasn't created to deceive: the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.
Of course, journalists have got things wrong in the past – either by mistake or prejudice or sometimes by intent. (Freddie Starr probably didn't eat a hamster.) So it would be a mistake to think this is a new phenomenon of the digital age. But what is new and significant is that today, rumours and lies are read just as widely as copper-bottomed facts – and often more widely, because they are wilder than reality and more exciting to share. The cynicism of this approach was expressed most nakedly by Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly employed by Gawker as a specialist in high-traffic viral stories. "Nowadays it's not important if a story's real," he said in 2014. "The only thing that really matters is whether people click on it." Facts, he suggested, are over; they are a relic from the age of the printing press, when readers had no choice. He continued: "If a person is not sharing a news story, it is, at its core, not news."
The increasing prevalence of this approach suggests that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the values of journalism – a consumerist shift. Instead of strengthening social bonds, or creating an informed public, or the idea of news as a civic good, a democratic necessity, it creates gangs, which spread instant falsehoods that fit their views, reinforcing each other's beliefs, driving each other deeper into shared opinions, rather than established facts.
But the trouble is that the business model of most digital news organisations is based around clicks. News media around the world has reached a fever-pitch of frenzied binge-publishing, in order to scrape up digital advertising's pennies and cents. (And there's not much advertising to be got: in the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in the US on online advertising went to Google and Facebook. That used to go to news publishers.)
In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories. "Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically print some of the worst stuff out there, which lends legitimacy to bullshit," said Brooke Binkowski, an editor at the debunking website Snopes, in an interview with the Guardian in April. "Not all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are."
We should be careful not to dismiss anything with an appealing digital headline as clickbait – appealing headlines are a good thing, if they lead the reader to quality journalism, both serious and not. My belief is that what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: the journalism that people value the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a lot of work – where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over tasks big or small, important or entertaining. It is the reverse of so-called "churnalism", the endless recycling of other people's stories for clicks.
The digital advertising model doesn't currently discriminate between true or not true, just big or small. As the American political reporter Dave Weigel wrote in the wake of a hoax story that became a viral hit all the way back in 2013: "'Too good to check' used to be a warning to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit stories. Now it's a business model."

A news-publishing industry desperately chasing down every cheap click doesn't sound like an industry in a position of strength, and indeed, news publishing as a business is in trouble. The shift to digital publishing has been a thrilling development for journalism – as I said in my 2013 AN Smith lecture at the University of Melbourne, "The Rise of the Reader", it has induced "a fundamental redrawing of journalists' relationship with our audience, how we think about our readers, our perception of our role in society, our status". It has meant we have found new ways to get stories – from our audience, from data, from social media. It has given us new ways to tell stories – with interactive technologies and now with virtual reality. It has given us new ways to distribute our journalism, to find new readers in surprising places; and it has given us new ways to engage with our audiences, opening ourselves up to challenge and debate.
But while the possibilities for journalism have been strengthened by the digital developments of the last few years, the business model is under grave threat, because no matter how many clicks you get, it will never be enough. And if you charge readers to access your journalism you have a big challenge to persuade the digital consumer who is used to getting information for free to part with their cash.
News publishers everywhere are seeing profits and revenue drop dramatically. If you want a stark illustration of the new realities of digital media, consider the first-quarter financial results announced by the New York Times and Facebook within a week of one another earlier this year. The New York Times announced that its operating profits had fallen by 13%, to $51.5m – healthier than most of the rest of the publishing industry, but quite a drop. Facebook, meanwhile, revealed that its net income had tripled in the same period – to a quite staggering $1.51bn.


With 150 papers having closed since 2008, it is proving hard for residents to campaign against everything from council pay to road closures
Many journalists have lost their jobs in the past decade. The number of journalists in the UK shrank by up to one-third between 2001 and 2010; US newsrooms declined by a similar amount between 2006 and 2013. In Australia, there was a 20% cut in the journalistic workforce between 2012 and 2014 alone. Earlier this year, at the Guardian we announced that we would need to lose 100 journalistic positions. In March, the Independent ceased existing as a print newspaper. Since 2005, according to research by Press Gazette, the number of local newspapers in the UK has fallen by 181 – again, not because of a problem with journalism, but because of a problem with funding it.
But journalists losing their jobs is not simply a problem for journalists: it has a damaging impact on the entire culture. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warned, back in 2007: "When reorganisation and cost-cutting in this core area jeopardise accustomed journalistic standards, it hits at the very heart of the political public sphere. Because, without the flow of information gained through extensive research, and without the stimulation of arguments based on an expertise that doesn't come cheap, public communication loses its discursive vitality. The public media would then cease to resist populist tendencies, and could no longer fulfil the function it should in the context of a democratic constitutional state."
Perhaps, then, the focus of the news industry needs to turn to commercial innovation: how to rescue the funding of journalism, which is what is under threat. Journalism has seen dramatic innovation in the last two digital decades, but business models have not. In the words of my colleague Mary Hamilton, the Guardian's executive editor for audience: "We've transformed everything about our journalism and not enough about our businesses."

The impact on journalism of the crisis in the business model is that, in chasing down cheap clicks at the expense of accuracy and veracity, news organisations undermine the very reason they exist: to find things out and tell readers the truth – to report, report, report.
Many newsrooms are in danger of losing what matters most about journalism: the valuable, civic, pounding-the-streets, sifting-the-database, asking-challenging-questions hard graft of uncovering things that someone doesn't want you to know. Serious, public-interest journalism is demanding, and there is more of a need for it than ever. It helps keep the powerful honest; it helps people make sense of the world and their place in it. Facts and reliable information are essential for the functioning of democracy – and the digital era has made that even more obvious.


As the longest inquest in British legal history unfolded, a picture emerged of a callously negligent police force led by an inexperienced commander whose actions directly led to the deaths of 96 people
But we must not allow the chaos of the present to cast the past in a rosy light – as can be seen from the recent resolution to a tragedy that became one of the darkest moments in the history of British journalism. At the end of April, a two-year-long inquest ruled that the 96 people who died in the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 had been unlawfully killed and had not contributed to the dangerous situation at the football ground. The verdict was the culmination of an indefatigable 27-year-campaign by the victims' families, whose case was reported for two decades with great detail and sensitivity by Guardian journalist David Conn. His journalism helped uncover the real truth about what happened at Hillsborough, and the subsequent cover-up by the police – a classic example of a reporter holding the powerful to account on behalf of the less powerful.
What the families had been campaigning against for nearly three decades was a lie put into circulation by the Sun. The tabloid's aggressive rightwing editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, blamed the fans for the disaster, suggesting they had forced their way into the ground without tickets – a claim later revealed to be false. According to Horrie and Chippindale's history of The Sun, MacKenzie overruled his own reporter and put the words "THE TRUTH" on the front page, alleging that Liverpool fans were drunk, that they picked the pockets of victims, that they punched, kicked and urinated on police officers, that they shouted that they wanted sex with a dead female victim. The fans, said a "high-ranking police officer", were "acting like animals". The story, as Chippindale and Horrie write, is a "classic smear", free of any attributable evidence and "precisely fitting MacKenzie's formula by publicising the half-baked ignorant prejudice being voiced all over the country".
It is hard to imagine that Hillsborough could happen now: if 96 people were crushed to death in front of 53,000 smartphones, with photographs and eyewitness accounts all posted to social media, would it have taken so long for the truth to come out? Today, the police – or Kelvin MacKenzie – would not have been able to lie so blatantly and for so long.

The truth is a struggle. It takes hard graft. But the struggle is worth it: traditional news values are important and they matter and they are worth defending. The digital revolution has meant that journalists – rightly, in my view – are more accountable to their audience. And as the Hillsborough story shows, the old media were certainly capable of perpetrating appalling falsehoods, which could take years to unravel. Some of the old hierarchies have been decisively undermined, which has led to a more open debate and a more substantial challenge to the old elites whose interests often dominated the media. But the age of relentless and instant information – and uncertain truths – can be overwhelming. We careen from outrage to outrage, but forget each one very quickly: it's doomsday every afternoon.     

The challenge for journalism today is to establish what role journalistic organisations still play in public discourse

      At the same time, the levelling of the information landscape has unleashed new torrents of racism and sexism and new means of shaming and harassment, suggesting a world in which the loudest and crudest arguments will prevail. It is an atmosphere that has proved particularly hostile to women and people of colour, revealing that the inequalities of the physical world are reproduced all too easily in online spaces. The Guardian is not immune – which is why one of my first initiatives as editor-in-chief was to launch the Web We Want project, in order to combat a general culture of online abuse and ask how we as an institution can foster better and more civil conversations on the web.
Above all, the challenge for journalism today is not simply technological innovation or the creation of new business models. It is to establish what role journalistic organisations still play in a public discourse that has become impossibly fragmented and radically destabilised. The stunning political developments of the past year – including the vote for Brexit and the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for the US presidency – are not simply the byproducts of a resurgent populism or the revolt of those left behind by global capitalism.


As the academic Zeynep Tufekci argued in an essay earlier this year, the rise of Trump "is actually a symptom of the mass media's growing weakness, especially in controlling the limits of what it is acceptable to say". (A similar case could be made for the Brexit campaign.) "For decades, journalists at major media organisations acted as gatekeepers who passed judgment on what ideas could be publicly discussed, and what was considered too radical," Tufekci wrote. The weakening of these gatekeepers is both positive and negative; there are opportunities and there are dangers.
As we can see from the past, the old gatekeepers were also capable of great harm, and they were often imperious in refusing space to arguments they deemed outside the mainstream political consensus. But without some form of consensus, it is hard for any truth to take hold. The decline of the gatekeepers has given Trump space to raise formerly taboo subjects, such as the cost of a global free-trade regime that benefits corporations rather than workers, an issue that American elites and much of the media had long dismissed – as well as, more obviously, allowing his outrageous lies to flourish.
When the prevailing mood is anti-elite and anti-authority, trust in big institutions, including the media, begins to crumble.
I believe that a strong journalistic culture is worth fighting for. So is a business model that serves and rewards media organisations that put the search for truth at the heart of everything – building an informed, active public that scrutinises the powerful, not an ill-informed, reactionary gang that attacks the vulnerable. Traditional news values must be embraced and celebrated: reporting, verifying, gathering together eyewitness statements, making a serious attempt to discover what really happened.
We are privileged to live in an era when we can use many new technologies – and the help of our audience – to do that. But we must also grapple with the issues underpinning digital culture, and realise that the shift from print to digital media was never just about technology. We must also address the new power dynamics that these changes have created. Technology and media do not exist in isolation – they help shape society, just as they are shaped by it in turn. That means engaging with people as civic actors, citizens, equals. It is about holding power to account, fighting for a public space, and taking responsibility for creating the kind of world we want to live in.

[lilit]

Ko u Britaniji do sada nije bio u depresiji, sad će pasti u istu 

u to ime, meet my next SG
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/world/refugees-have-repaid-hospitality-my-country-thousands-times-over-clark-lauds-nz-in-strong-un-pitch

[Meho Krljic]

To ako Vuk Jeremić odustane od kandidature