Other books that might interest you

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  Representative Democracy - A...

  Dimitri Landa, Ryan Pevnick

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  Despite the not-so-distant invocations of the "end of history," representative democracy is, today, under siege even from corners where one once might have expected strong sympathy and support. Indeed, confidence in representative democracy has, in recent years, been shaken by the economic and political performance of many such regimes. 
   
  Representative Democracy explains why the definitive institutional features of representative democracy—the electoral selection of policymaking officials who are independent in the interim between elections—are attractive relative to salient alternatives (including direct democracy, lottery-based systems, and meritocratic alternatives) and, relatedly, why it is a distinctively attractive institutional arrangement, rather than—as it is often perceived to be—a pale stand-in for more robust and genuine forms of democratic government. Building on novel arguments that connect the distinctive institutional features of representative democracy to important epistemic and stability-based benefits, the book provides a normative account of a well-functioning system of representative democracy against which proposed reforms can be evaluated.

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  Internet for the People - The...

  Ben Tarnoff

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  Why is the internet so broken, and what could ever possibly fix it? 
   
   
   
  In Internet for the People, leading tech writer Ben Tarnoff offers an answer. The internet is broken, he argues, because it is owned by private firms and run for profit. Google annihilates your privacy and Facebook amplifies right-wing propaganda because it is profitable to do so. But the internet wasn't always like this. Tarnoff tells the story of the privatization that made the modern internet, and which set in motion the crises that consume it today. 
   
   
   
  The solution to those crises is straightforward: deprivatize the internet. Deprivatization aims at creating an internet where people, and not profit, rule. It calls for shrinking the space of the market and diminishing the power of the profit motive. It calls for abolishing the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, and the other giants that dominate our digital lives and developing publicly and cooperatively owned alternatives that encode real democratic control. To build a better internet, we need to change how it is owned and organized. Otherwise, a small number of executives and investors will continue to make choices on everyone's behalf, and these choices will remain tightly bound by the demands of the market. It's time to demand an internet by, and for, the people now.

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  Psychoanalytic and Spiritual...

  Nina E. Cerfolio

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  Nina E. Cerfolio masterfully explores the deeper spiritual and psychoanalytic understanding of the origins of human aggressive and destructive instincts which underlie mass shootings and terrorism. 
   
   
   
  The author survived two terrorist attacks: developing breast cancer from being a first responder at 9/11, and being poisoned by an FSB agent while providing humanitarian aid in the Second Chechen War. Through a personal, scholarly investigation into her psyche, the author describes the spiritual awakening that was catalyzed by these events and their traumatic impact, and examines how a world could create the firmament for the kinds of destructive aggression that are a daily occurrence. Featuring cutting-edge quantitative research and case material, which illustrates the prevalence of undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric illness among mass shooters and terrorists, this book encourages dialogue about the stigma of mental illness and challenges the perception of terrorists as monsters with no societal responsibility. 
   
   
   
  Championing the forgotten collective humiliation of the marginalized—which in turn breeds terrorism—and documenting a new spiritual lens through which healing is possible, this book will be essential listening for mental health workers and anyone wishing to understand the traumatizing epoch in which we are living.

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  Gun Curious - A Liberal...

  David Yamane

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  More than ever, it feels like cultural and political divisions over firearms are tearing the United States apart. Guns are an undeniable and contradictory presence in America, both widely owned and controversial. This book does something remarkable: it promotes insight over animosity in understanding the complex reality of guns in America. It challenges firearms skeptics, entertains enthusiasts, and informs the uncommitted by taking readers on a surprising journey inside gun culture. 
  A lifelong liberal from the San Francisco Bay Area, David Yamane became a new gun owner as a 42-year-old and embarked on an immersive twelve-year study of American gun culture. Weaving together his personal experiences and sociological observations to explain why guns make sense to those who own them, he illuminates defensive gun ownership, the risk of negative outcomes associated with firearms, and what responsible gun ownership looks like in the twenty-first century. This book lowers the heat on America’s inflamed arguments about firearms and models the civil discussions we desperately need.

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  Lifehouse - Taking Care of...

  Adam Greenfield

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  How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis 
   
   
   
  We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life? 
   
   
   
  Using examples from the Black Panthers' "survival programs," the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organized polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair—a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.

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  Vladimir Lenin collection - The...

  Vladimir Lenin

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  The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, by Lenin, is a concise article that examines the historical roots, essence, and content of Marxist teaching. Lenin wrote it on the 30th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. 
  Soviet propaganda makers lifted a key quote from the article to use as a slogan for posters, inscriptions on monuments, or other propaganda purposes. The phrase was: "The might of Marx's teaching is in its truth."
  The book, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, was written while preparing for the socialist revolution. At this time the role of the state was of prime importance to the Bolsheviks. Lenin used the text to justify the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat. He also provided definitions for imperialism, socialism, and communism.

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