Recommended articles for Monday, August 6, 2018

• Taibbi: Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship from Rolling Stone. The following statement shocked me:

As noted in Rolling Stone earlier this year, 70 percent of Americans get their news from just two sources, Facebook and Google. As that number rises, the power of just a few people to decide what information does and does not reach the public will amplify significantly.

• Eternity, nature, society and the absurd fantasies of the rich by Kurt Cobb from his blog.

• Confronting Authoritarianism vs. Disciplining Democracy: The Recent Protests in Jordan and US Attempts at Democracy Promotion by Benjamin Schuetze from Jadaliyya. Jordan has been obviously very important strategically for the Empire and its military incursions in Syria. The author starts off with this introduction:

Jordan currently ranks among the highest recipients of US foreign aid worldwide, both in absolute terms and particularly so on a per capita basis. Besides military and economic support, Jordan has over the past years also been the target of a whole plethora of US democracy-promotion interventions. As a result, there are probably only a few Jordanian state institutions that have not in one way or another been the target of external attempts at some form of capacity building and institutional engineering.

Later he writes:

Comparing US attempts at alleged democracy promotion with the recent protests highlights important differences in both approaches and the key actors. In fact, such comparison reveals the extent to which many US-funded programs in the country are about the disciplining of democratic demands and shaping them such that they become compatible with existing authoritarian power structures.