The (center-) left, by contrast, instinctively and persistently buys into the idea that its raison d’être is to be the steward of good, sensible, reasonable governance and policy, approaching politics more as a pageant of competence and smarts than as a fight against the powerful and entrenched interests of the capitalist economy.

GL-PvdA’s campaign strategy was telling. Initially it was centered on “restoring trust” and, even more so, Timmermans as an individual. As vice president of the European Commission, Timmermans had successfully guided a moderately ambitious climate change bill through the European Parliament. In public appearances and televised debates, he typically excelled when discussing climate change. But in confrontation with the conservative VVD party, he was often put on the defensive about his economic policies — increasing taxation for large corporations and the wealthy. Those defensive moments were also the few times he actually talked about his economic policies in more detail.

In the home stretch of the campaign, when the PVV began to break away in the polls, the GL-PvdA tried to present itself as a last bulwark against the extreme right, not unlike the strategy the Democratic Party pursued against Donald Trump. There was no positive program anymore, just a warning to not make things worse. But in a country that has been trending further and further to the Right for decades, the strategy was doomed to fail.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/dutch-left-netherlands-pvda-far-right-wilders-timmermans/

Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

[...] Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.

According to the doctrine — developed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is now a Knesset member and part of the current war cabinet — in a war against guerrilla groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah, Israel must use disproportionate and overwhelming force while targeting civilian and government infrastructure in order to establish deterrence and force the civilian population to pressure the groups to end their attacks.

[...] Why, then, after nearly two months, has the Israeli army not yet run out of targets in the current war?

The answer may lie in a statement from the IDF Spokesperson on Nov. 2, according to which it is using the AI system Habsora (“The Gospel”), which the spokesperson says “enables the use of automatic tools to produce targets at a fast pace, and works by improving accurate and high-quality intelligence material according to [operational] needs.”

[...] A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks.

[...] A senior military official in charge of the target bank told the Jerusalem Post earlier this year that, thanks to the army’s AI systems, for the first time the military can generate new targets at a faster rate than it attacks.

https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

Europe’s right is stealing both internationalism and thinkers, tools and strategic capacity, from the Left. Through think tanks and satellite organizations, right-wingers have built a network spreading Budapest to Rome and Brussels; they reproduce the same tactics, whether it is an attack on green policies, migrants, or LGBTQ rights. Members of this network, such as the French xenophobic politician Éric Zemmour, explicitly refer to Antonio Gramsci: “I am waging an ideological, or Gramscian, battle,” he says. There is a hegemonic aspiration, and paradoxically it comes from the opposite side of history.

https://jacobin.com/2023/11/european-left-parties-eu-parliamentary-election-strategy-unity-far-right-defeat/

No relationship exists between national population and global environmental footprint (earths required), whilst a clear and strong relationship exists with GDP per capita.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320722003949

A joint study by think tanks IPPR and Common Wealth found profiteering by some of the world’s biggest companies forced prices up significantly higher than costs during 2022.

[...] In April, Société Générale economist Albert Edwards released a scathing note saying he hadn’t seen anything like the current levels of corporate greed in his four decades working in finance. He said companies were using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to hike prices in search of profits.

https://fortune.com/europe/2023/12/08/greedflation-study/

" In a counterfactual exercise estimating CO2 emissions with and without subways, we find they have reduced population-related CO2 emissions by about 50 % for the 192 cities and about 11 % globally. Extending the analysis to future subways for other cities, we estimate the magnitude and social value of CO2 emissions reductions with conservative assumptions about population and income growth and a range of values for the social cost of carbon and investment costs. Even under pessimistic assumptions for these costs, we find that hundreds of cities realize a significant climate co-benefit, along with benefits from reduced traffic congestion and local air pollution, which have traditionally motivated subway construction. Under more moderate assumptions, we find that, on climate grounds alone, hundreds of cities realize high enough social rates of return to warrant subway construction."

https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1656647542610751499