Utopia, you are standing in it!

I have a new book review of Sandrine Kott’s Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society out today with H-German.

In Communism Day-to-Day, Sandrine Kott explores the history of the everyday in state enterprises based in East Berlin. Published originally in 2001 in French and now available in English translation for the first time, Kott’s work stemmed from the wave of critical work seeking to move beyond totalitarian interpretations of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the late 1990s. Building on the everyday history—Alltagsgeschichte— approaches to the history of East Germany pioneered by Thomas Lindenberger and others at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam, Kott seeks to find the limitations and contradictions of state power and society in the GDR through the lens of East Berlin work-places.

You can read the whole review here

Jordan Peterson ia a professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and a clinical psychologist. He is very principled, very honest, and very determined. The question here is one of gender pronouns, but really of the larger question of more genders than the two assigned to us by science, custom, and chromosomes.  This one really gets into it.

Jason Brennan, an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown University says in his new book that thinking that Socialism is the best way to run a society neglects the fact that even in utopia people will have significantly different visions of a life well lived.

You want a system under which you can realize all these different conceptions of the good life and the good community, Brennan argues. Even in a world free of petty rivalries, tribalism, and human failings, capitalism would still be superior because it uniquely affords citizens the rights and freedoms necessary to customize their lives and pursue their own, personally meaningful projects.

We recently posted about a motion passed by the executive council of the National Union of Students (the confederation of 600 students’ unions in the UK) to boycott Israel – one which, quite remarkably, followed a decision by the NUS last year to reject a motion condemning ISIS. Though it has almost no practical impact on the state, the anti-Israel vote comes amidst a broader recognition by commentators, pro-Israel activists and Israeli politicians of the unique strategic challenges posed by the BDS movement.

The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Peter Beaumont published a piece yesterday focusing on BDS and recent comments by Prime Minister Netanyahu calling out the movement for its hypocrisy and malevolence (Israel brands Palestinian-led boycott movement a ‘strategic threat’, June 3).

In a manner similar to the Guardian’s whitewashing of the extremist student group Students for Justice in Palestine that we commented on recently, Beaumont wants his…

Written by Aron White

Last week, Israel published a list of twenty organisations that support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), whose leaders will not be allowed into Israel. This has led to a furious response from the BDS movement and its supporters, and unsurprisingly, the Guardian and Independent ran articles critical of the decision.

“Israel is increasing its pressure of human rights activists,” says an opinion piece in the Guardian, and similar sentiments were expressed in an article at the Independent, which suggested this would lead to wide-scale banning of human rights observers. However, these articles are misleading as they blur the distinction between BDS and other groups, and thus misrepresent the decision taken by the Israeli government.

The articles lack a very important piece of context: In Israel, tens of anti-government organisations work with complete freedom, documenting (what they perceive to be) flaws in Israeli policy…