Some links to chew on

I include some samples partly so that you can see what you are getting, but also because links are rather unreliable at the moment and so you can google the quotations if required.

1. This piece needs to come with trigger warnings for those concerned about grammar and punctuation marks: the author would not get the full SPAG marks in an English school test. It could also do with a fair bit of pruning. Nonetheless, it is really quite interesting and refreshing. Give it a go and see what you think. Sample: "During the last election Matthew Yglesias claimed a Trump victory would lead to roving mobs of trump supporters beating up Jews at random, a major celebrity said Donald Trump winning was like a second 9/11 and got a lot of retweets saying so on twitter. I took a bet with someone very intelligent and reasonable that Donald Trump would not nuke anyone, start a random war, cause international crisis, or crash the economy in his first year or anything of such magnitude. This was a normal thing people claimed Trump would do if he won, in fact many people were certain of it and this was central to their argument for who to vote for in 2016. People seemed very sure Donald Trump would be the worst president in American history and were equally sure there was no way he could win."

2. This is Glenn Greenwald's resignation from the Intercept, which he co-founded. Sample: "The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. // The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication." And here is the article he was not permitted to publish on the Intercept. Sample question he put to the Biden campaign: "how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective."

3. John Gray on Bruno Maçães. Sample: "This may be why one can detect a sneaking admiration for Xi’s tyranny among Western progressives. Rightly, they perceive that he is promoting an Enlightenment project; although not the liberal project of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or the communist utopia of Marx, to be sure. Xi’s dictatorship is more like the enlightened despotism of the early Bentham, who aimed to reconstruct society on the model of a Panopticon – an ideal prison designed to enable total surveillance of the inmates. How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress."