#Political Institutions

[saxafimedianetwork]

Somaliland: 'Home Grown' Peacemaking and Political Reconstruction

Through clan reconciliation, traditional institutions, & a hybrid governance system blending elders' councils with modern structures, #Somaliland has built enduring peace & political stability. A testament to local ownership & resilience.

Continue reading Somaliland: ‘Home Grown’ Peacemaking and Political Reconstruction

[skull-pun]

All he had to do was simply say:

"I'm sorry that my salute came across the way it did. I am not a nazi."

But he couldn't bring himself to do it, and do y'know why? Because he's a fucking nazi!

Like, yes, ofc America is a genocidal country, but at least before they had some fucking shame, now it's like they're fucking proud of it and want the whole world to know.

Absolutely ghoulish.

[quillsword]

Is the European Union Democratic?

No, of course not. It’s a bureaucracy. You need details, huh? They really don’t teach you college kids much for all that money they charge you, do they? Any word ending in -cracy refers to what governs. Democracy just means the people govern – there aren’t any true democracies. Autocracy means a single person has full governing power. Think ‘despot’ but that’s just the usual outcome. Benevolent…

[howdoesone]

How does one examine the relationship between political institutions and the likelihood of genocide?

The relationship between political institutions and the likelihood of genocide is a critical area of study within political science. Understanding how political institutions shape societal dynamics and contribute to the risk of genocide is essential for preventing and mitigating such atrocities. This article examines how one can examine the relationship between political institutions and the…

[reasonsforhope]

"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.

A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.

The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.

“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.

But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”

The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”

How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.

It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.

This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.

However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.

Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."

-via Good News Network, December 11, 2023

[namistrella]

I'm gonna say it until I'm blue in the face

Right now, it doesn't matter that our federal programs and institutions need reform. YOU CAN'T REFORM SOMETHING ONCE IT'S GONE. It will take WAY more work (and harm way more people in the meantime) to rebuild from scratch than to work to save these programs now.

Did the grant freeze scare anyone?? It should have!! Yes, it's been temporarily blocked, BUT EVEN IF IT STAYS BLOCKED, IF THERE'S NO ONE TO ADMINISTER THE GRANTS, WE STILL DON'T GET FUNCTIONING PROGRAMS

Snyder's On Tyranny, #2: DEFEND INSTITUTIONS. All Americans should be throwing their backs behind civil service right now and calling their reps until the reps actually DO something to keep our workers in their jobs. We NEED good people in the agencies and offices that are being targeted!! Or we are going to lose programs, resources, and data we worked for generations to build!

Don't think for one second it's going to be fucking ICE that shuts down because of this... ICE won't be touched. It'll be research, welfare, disaster assistance, land protections, environmental protections, even access to core data that we take for granted, is what we're going to lose. With the grant freeze, and the DEI purge, we've already seen just how FAST resources can be ripped away

FEDERAL WORKERS ARE NOT YOUR ENEMY. We need to stand together on this, as they are building a resistance to defend the constitution against ALL ENEMIES, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC, because if anyone's the enemy here it's the fucking fascists. And, like it or not, bureaucracy (filled with stubborn, dedicated people) is our first line of defense.

[the-shadows-request-candy-corn]

Trump may be about to sign the death sentence of the National Institute of Health, and, by extension, the Office of Lab Animal Welfare.

He gutted research animal protections.

Any vertebrate that isn't a mammal will have no rights.

Neither will mice or rats.

If NIH grants are stopped, researchers can't pay anyone. They can't perform research. They can't pay for veterinary services.

They won't be required to provide veterinary services.

The only medical research that will happen will be self funded by big pharma, and they can torture the animals and skew all the lab results that they want.

Just like Musk did to the primates in his neuralink research.

I don't know what's going to happen to me or anyone else at the university where I work. My job is to make sure the animals are treated humanely and to provide veterinary care. I'm especially scared about what's going to happen to those research animals if veterinary staff gets laid off. The USDA only covers mammals, and it doesn't even cover all of them. Every rat I've ever made a tiny paper gift box full of marshmallows for, every mouse I've ever watched grow up, every rodent I've ever separated from an aggressive dominant brother and then treated their tiny wounds, they have no protections if NIH goes down. Decades of research into humane handling, euthanasia, and animal behavior will be tossed aside and wasted.

Please, do everything you can. Protest. Contact your representatives. Anything you can do. Do it for science, for medicine, for people's lives, for people's jobs, and for the animals.

[sare11aa11eras]

You walk into the Night’s Watch in 300 AC and THIS is the first thing you see, wyd?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Occupy the Democratic National Committee

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Back in 2017, the Democratic National Committee's lawyers submitted a legal brief that didn't just say the quiet part out loud; they bellowed it: "[The DNC can] go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the [presidential] candidate that way":

https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/

The brief was submitted in the lawsuit between Bernie Sanders and the DNC. Sanders sued over the DNC changing the rules midway through 2016 process in order to sideline him and give the nomination to Hillary Clinton. The DNC's response boiled down to, "Sure, we cheated. So what? We, the committee, are ultimately answerable only to ourselves, and we can choose anyone to lead the party into any election."

The DNC is a weak institution, in other words. There's a universe in which that would be OK. After all, there's a lot of overhead that comes with making strong institutions, all those checks and balances and oversight and transparency soak up resources that you could be using to do other stuff. In an ideal world, a badly run Democratic Party would be spurred to improve after it lost elections, which would result in the defenestration of bad party bosses and the ouster of bad candidates:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

But the US political system is not an ideal world. In the real world, it's possible for party bosses who pursue disastrous strategies that result in key electoral losses to remain in power. The Democratic Party still rakes in massive donations from people who hate Trump more than they hate the Democratic Party's incompetence. Candidates in gerrymandered safe seats can be wildly incompetent and still hold onto power for improbably long timescales, despite the manifest evidence of their total unfitness for office:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Lipinski

In the absence of real consequences for corruption, incompetence and utter moral turpitude, the Democratic National Committee needs some other form of discipline to get it into fighting form. We need to occupy the DNC, strengthen its institutional safeguards, and turn it into an election-winning, fascism-fighting, extinction-rebelling, worker-defending powerhouse.

Three weeks from now, the DNC will meet in National Harbor MD to elect its new president and officers. Who gets to vote on that? The 448 members of the party's national committee. Who are they? As Micah Sifry writes for The American Prospect, it's a secret, even to the committee members:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-10-opening-dncs-black-box/

No, really. While nominally, members can request a list of their fellow members, the DNC stalls and stonewalls and does everything it can to prevent the committee from communicating in any way they can't control. This is incredible, but it's true. Which is why Sifry has published a leaked list of all 448 members:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bQKIP3W1NWChRjSbsE0O5k5s7OdgXrJi5-CMfFECIBU/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Looking at the spreadsheet of members, we get a rare glimpse inside the Democratic sausage factory. There's te 73 "at large" members who were voted on as a single block after being handpicked by outgoing president Jaime Harrison. These members are a mix of great people and terrible people, and that's by design: it meant that Sanders and Warren voters could only get their people onto the committee if they voted for some of the most disgusting corporate shills you can imagine.

The fact that the national committee's membership is secret and their communications must pass through a DNC chokepoint means that they get up to all kinds of shenanigans, like at the 2023 summer meeting where they voted themselves the power to throw out any bylaw amendments passed at a national party convention. The vote was whipped by paid DNC staff, creating an atmosphere so poisonous that Jessica Chambers (a rep from Wyoming) called the DNC "the least democratic organization that I’m involved with."

Sifry's breakdown is really useful: he identifies the minority of members who are elected by the party rank-and-file, calling them "the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about." He also calls out the corporate shills who "buckrake as lobbists," like Donna Brazile, "a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm.”

But even where state party organizations have elections for their committee members, some states keep the results of those elections a secret. Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have 69 members, but the identities of all but 14 of them are a secret.

This is a rotten institution, and that's by design. If you want to know why we can't have nice things – or, you know, a world that's not on fire and haunted by creeping fascism – this is why. The takeover of the DNC won't be easy, but it can't start until we know who the DNC is.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#dinosaurs

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[hometownrockstar]

I hate the argument abt when you say customizable games should have fat people and people say "well it would be harder to model or scale clothes to fit" cause like i guess youre technically right, but why then are fat people not seen as worth the effort to actually code and model these things? Someone else said this abt baldur's gate but they said "in an RPG like that game shouldn't the priority be on allowing people to express themselves as much as possible with designing their character?" Also like fat people aren't a rarity or minority, even if all media ever wants to give people the impression that the world is 99% skinny people with maybe one or two fat villains or sidekick friends.

[communistkenobi]

another thing that bourdieu says that I feel very deeply is that if you investigate any social phenomena long enough you arrive at the state. I didn’t start in academia particularly interested in the state as an object of study but it has ended up being completely unavoidable

[chronic-high-achiever]

So uh…

Anyone gonna acknowledge that Trump is making an executive disorder to declassify non-binary and other genders, therefore only leaving male and female?

SO wild to me how we used to think America was this superpower first world country but like… it’s starting to smell a bit dictatorship-core idk

[baldwinheights]

the fix is in!!

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[syn0vial]

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

AKA, some art to express my recent feelings towards my home country