Wednesday I picked up the latest issue of  Adbusters Magazine at Barnes & Noble.  It is a Canadian publication with a global range of contributors.  The March/April issue is entitled, The New Left.  The title succinctly describes the editorial point of view of the publication.  The magazine uses graphic design to advantage, to clarify and press home the point of view. 

Earlier in the week on a day when I did not have my reading glasses, I found the illustrations in the issue of Adbusters interesting, conveying information without need of struggle to read indistinct text. 

For the last 40 years, Americans have been growing poorer and more unhealthy as elites accumulate more and more wealth and institutional legitimacy founders.

The United States is basically eating itself from the inside out.  Inequality and popular immiseration have left the country extremely vulnerable to external shocks like the pandemic, and to internal triggers like the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.  We can expect far more of this kind of unrest in the years ahead, because the underlying conditions are only getting worse.

— Peter Turchin

We see a number of social pathologies on the rise.  Not just any kind.  Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones.  But strange and bizarre ones.  Unique ones.

Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens or Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history.  They suggest that whatever ‘numbers’ we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on — we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll,” but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

— Umair Haque

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• Who is Peter Turchin?
• Who is Umair Haque ?

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