Dear ChatGPT: Assuming widespread agreement, in 800 words or less, how can the U.S. best fix its immigration problem?
ChatGPT
Addressing the U.S. immigration system requires a multifaceted approach, balancing the need for security, economic growth, humanitarian responsibilities, and the preservation of America's core values as a nation of immigrants. Here's a comprehensive plan, within 800 words, to address the issue:
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In her magnificent magnum opus, Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and criticizes domination. She proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. Nevertheless, her analysis falls short.
Allen affirms the development of
This attention to interpersonal relationships by a political scientist is rare and vital.
She defines difference without domination as social patterns that don’t involve any group or individual controlling another. She rightly asserts that protecting private autonomy is as important as safeguarding political liberties.
Allen recognizes the necessity to submit to legitimate limits “that come from laws, shared cultural practices, social norms, and organizational protocols.” These hierarchies, however, must “avoid an arbitrary or rights-violating exercise of power.”
Read MoreBy Rashid Khalidi
Israel has ordered more than a million people to leave northern Gaza, presumably to prepare for an imminent ground offensive. Its military strategists appear to be planning the depopulation and reoccupation of at least part of an area home to around 2.3 million people — nearly half of them children — and most of them descended from people driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. We must understand that these are human beings at grave risk, not just numbers.
Read MorePetition for Peace in Palestine
Dear Mr. President:
Israel deserves to exist in peace and the Palestinian people deserve their own country.
The Palestinian Authority and the Arab nations have recognized the right of Israel to exist.
But Israel has not pledged to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza to allow the formation of a Palestinian state on those lands.
International law forbids Israel from keeping land that it seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, including the West Bank and Gaza.
The United States has thrown its weight behind Israel in the Middle East conflict, rather than adopting a balanced approach.
Israel is the largest recipient of United States foreign aid, including two billion dollars a year in military aid.
Israel, with the fourth largest military in the world, can protect itself against military conquest.
Israel could trade land for peace by agreeing to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza and recognizing a Palestinian state on those lands.
Therefore, I urge you to:
Read MoreHow Russia Went from Ally to Adversary, Keith Gessen
In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush... Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”... Bush did not react... Perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender...
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, these campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the world with compassion and justice one demand at a time.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the documentary about its production on the Criterion channel. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.
The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan.
Read MoreOrganized people power leading change towards a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change.
We are a global community of organizers, practitioners, educators and researchers catalyzing change through the power of narratives, rooted in the pedagogy and practice of community organizing.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change. We build the leadership, organizing capacity and resources of change makers across the globe to enable them to win campaigns that strengthen justice and human rights.
LCN members are developing leadership and building power in over 75 countries.
Read MoreJune 6
The Politics of Delusion
These excerpts from Edsall’s New York Times essay., The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold, The language is his except where indicated. Following these excerpts, I post a comment. Posted in Political/Partisan Divide
“Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.” (Lilliana Mason) [read more]
Read MoreOn May 18, 2023 I posted the following to the Compassionate Action Workshop listserv:
In his “What Americans Don’t Understand About China” New York Times op-ed yesterday, Peter Coy reported:
The latest World Values Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020, indicates that 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the United States. Similarly, 93 percent of Chinese participants valued security over freedom; only 28 percent of Americans did so.
This data prompted me to find these quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” story in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear—for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them…
This elicited the following comments:
Larry Walker: I like this a lot. I believe China is VERY misunderstood in America - to our loss!
Wade Lee Hudson: Should we encourage the development of more democracy in China? If so, how?
By Wade Lee Hudson
In her April 14, 2023 interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Danielle Allen (whose new book is Justice by Means of Democracy) addresses how society might use modern technology to develop and strengthen “deliberative democracy structures that we have not yet set up.” Klein calls voting “a pretty thin level of participation” and envisions methods to enable people to “really be part of steering the ship of state.”
Klein argues, “You could have things like citizens assemblies and meetings, and in other ways, you could have a thicker kind of participation and advisory role for the public than you currently do.” Modern deliberative digital tools can enhance democracy, which Allen defines as “equal empowerment across a body of free and equal citizens.” She believes, “One of the greatest values of democracy is that together we can be much smarter than we can be as individuals.”
Read MoreTo ChatGPT:
What is the criticism of the left-right political spectrum?
From ChatGPT:
There are several criticisms of the left-right political spectrum, including:…
wadehudson0726@gmail.com:
Thank you. Please send me links to resources that elaborate on these arguments.
From ChatGPT:
Sure, here are some resources that you might find helpful:…
What are healthy and unhealthy forms of leadership? Is a co-equal partnership the ideal or merely one option? Must some one person ALWAYS be in charge (in control)? If not, then when must someone be in charge? Are there examples of democratic hierarchies? Are there examples of viable collective/collaborative leadership? Do we need to cultivate more collective/collaborative leadership?
Dialogues / Plutocracy
Following is a dialog that was conducted by email. To contribute further, please post a Comment below.
Dan Brook
I think the US is more accurately an aristocracy or plutocracy.
Wade Lee Hudson
I no longer believe that the accumulation of wealth and power is society’s driving force. Gaining status is equally if not more important. And almost everyone if not everyone seeks relatively greater status. I certainly have. Those of us who do are complicit. We reinforce the System. Scapegoating the rich is a diversion and it nurtures divisive violent communication.
By Michelle Goldberg
It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.
In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: “It’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult.” Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues. But with a few exceptions, like the brave reproductive justice leader Loretta Ross, most don’t want to go on the record. Not surprisingly, many of Grim’s sources in the nonprofit world were anonymous.
That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant.
Read MoreBy Carlos Lozada
It was early in my senior year of college when I received a comment from a professor, scribbled at the bottom of one of my papers, that would transform how I think and write, how I read books and how I try to read the world. So rare to possess written proof of an epiphany.
Carlos — this is just great! Nice job. You have a fine Hirschmanian mind.
Hirschmanian? I don’t recall, at age 20, knowing much about the social scientist Albert O. Hirschman — at least I hope I didn’t — but this nudge sent me deep into his writings on economic growth, political change and ideological temptation. Three decades later and almost 10 years after his death, I’ve yet to come up for air. Hirschman imbued me with skepticism of all-encompassing worldviews, which he dismissed as “shortcuts to the understanding of multifarious reality.” He warned against experts peddling self-serving agendas but also displayed “a bias for hope,” as one of his book titles has it, a caution against seductive fatalism at the prospect of political renewal. And particularly valuable for a time, like today, when polarization and demagogy are overtaking American politics, Hirschman bequeathed us a slim and vital book identifying the slippery arguments that pretend to engage in democratic deliberation, even as they strangle it.
Read More