Editorial: Snapshot Systems
The winning candidate does not need all the support, just enough to secure more votes than their opponents. Campaign Battle aims to shed some light on primary principles that shape the election process and the best campaign strategies.
Once a centralizing force of the democratic process, political parties have eroded over the past fifty years. Parties now rank among the most unpopular institutions in society—less trusted than business, the police, and the media. Identification with parties has plummeted, and even those who are loyal to a party report feeling that parties care more about special interests than about regular citizens. What does a "good" political party look like? Why do we urgently need them? And how do we get them? The Great Retreat explores the development of political parties as democracy expanded across the West in the nineteenth century. It focuses in particular on mass parties, and the ways they served as intermediaries that fostered ties between citizens and governments. For democracy to adapt to a new era of global capitalism, Kuo makes the case that we need strong intermediaries like mass parties—socially embedded institutions with deep connections to communities and citizens. Parties are essential to long-term democratic stability and economic growth, while the breakdown of party systems, on the other hand, has historically led to democratic collapse. As trust in political parties has plummeted, The Great Retreat provides a powerful defense of political parties—for without parties, democratic representation is impossible.Ver libro
Demystifying forces of the state, gangs, and revolutionary violence. In Gang Politics, Kristian Williams examines our society's understanding of social and political violence, what gets romanticized, misunderstood, or muddled. He explores the complex intersections between "gangs" of all sorts—cops and criminals, Proud Boys and Antifa, Panthers and skinheads—arguing that government and criminality are intimately related, often sharing critical features. As society becomes more polarized and conflict more common, Williams's analysis is a crucial corrective to our usual ideas about the role violence might or should play in our social struggles.Ver libro
The New York Times–bestselling military analyst offers a collection of essays covering a generation of geopolitics and military policy. For decades, Ralph Peters has been the most provocative and visionary American writer on military affairs, strategy, security, and intelligence. In that time, he predicted every major trend that has plagued the post-Cold-War world. A career military officer and acclaimed author, he has faced issues ranging from the explosion of religious terrorism to the fatal weaknesses of our intelligence system and our dangerous over-reliance on technology. Now Peters delves into these and other enduringly vital themes in this definitive, career-spanning collection of his writings. Lines of Fire is an indispensable volume for understanding today’s crises—and tomorrow’s.Ver libro
The KGB is one of the most famous abbreviations of the 20th century, and it has become synonymous with the shadowy and often violent actions of the Soviet Union’s secret police and internal security agencies. In fact, it is often used to refer to the Soviet state security agencies throughout its history, from the inception of the inception of the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) in 1917 to the official elimination of the KGB in 1992. Whether it’s associated with the Russian Civil War’s excesses, Stalin’s purges, and even Vladimir Putin, the KGB has long been viewed as the West’s biggest bogeyman during the second half of the 20th century. However, the KGB did not appear out of thin air. Naturally, the earliest Soviet leaders utilized intelligence agencies that collected information both abroad and within the Soviet Union, targeting foreign opponents and domestic opponents alike. Lenin did not imagine the scale of the opposition he would have to face after the revolution, and he quickly came to the conclusion that "a special system of organized violence" must be created to implement the dictatorship of the proletariat. Though it might be hard to believe, the Americans did not have a covert operations organization when they joined World War II, and like the British, it took them some time to realize it could be a powerful tool. As a result, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was not established until June 13, 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This would all chart a path for the early days of America’s most famous intelligence agency, the CIA. Although plagued by its own share of problems in its early existence during World War II and the early Cold War years, the agency’s early problems, smoothed over by a string of tenured presidents, paled in comparison to those it would face in the coming decades.Ver libro
Chicago is a world-class city, but it is also a city in crisis. Crime is up, schools have repeatedly shut down due to conflict between City Hall and the powerful teachers' union, and COVID-19 only deepened the entrenched poverty, institutional racism, and endless tug of war between the city's haves and have nots. For four years, the person at the center of this storm was Lori Lightfoot. A groundbreaking figure—the first Black, gay woman to be elected mayor of a major city and only the second female mayor of Chicago—she knew the city was at a critical turning point when she took office in 2019. But the once-in-a-lifetime challenges she ended up facing were beyond anything she or anyone else saw coming. Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Royal Pratt offers the first comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous single term of Mayor Lightfoot and the chaos that roiled the city and City Hall as she fought to live up to her promises to change the city's culture of corruption and villainy, reform its long-troubled police department, and make Chicago the safest big city in America.Ver libro
He is the law—and you better believe it! Judge, jury, and executioner, Judge Dredd is the brutal comic book cop policing the chaotic future urban jungle of Mega-City One, created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra and launching in the pages of 2000 AD in 1977. But what began as a sci-fi action comic quickly evolved into a searing satire on hardline, militarized policing and "law and order" politics, its endless inventiveness and ironic humor acting as a prophetic warning about our world today—and with important lessons for our future. Blending comic book history with contemporary radical theories on policing, I Am The Law takes key Dredd stories from the last forty-five years and demonstrates how they provide a unique wake up call about our gradual, and not so gradual, slide towards authoritarian policing. From the politicization of policing to "zero tolerance," from violent suppression of protest to the rise of the surveillance state, I Am The Law examines how a comic book warned us about the chilling endgame of today's "law and order" politics.Ver libro
