I found these through Mastodon and Twitter, and while each could have sustained a linkpost on its own, the fact that I wanted to post all of them at once has made me roll them into one.
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed is a great little article about how the standard 40-hour work week is designed to leave us crushed and exhausted, and how this influences our choices in recreation (i.e. spending money for fast gratification, instead of doing something that might be free but takes more time and maybe some hard work to reach the rewarding part, like creative pursuits).
The Propaganda Multiplier talks about where Western media outlets source their international news from, namely a small group of agencies: AP, Reuters, AFP. Additionally, it talks about how easily these agencies can be misled and manipulated by Western diplomats and military sources. The overall result: international news that reinforces the interests and prejudices of the Western ruling class, instead of being accurate.
Finally, Towards a New Language of the Global Language Crisis discusses the problems with talking about “endangered languages” the way we often do, in a passive way, saying the languages are “being lost” or “in decline” or whatever. Languages don’t just lose themselves; the real problem is oppression. Governments and other institutions set deliberate policies to restrict and even punish the use of minority languages, which is to say, speakers of minority languages face repression just for speaking their own language. The article argues, fairly convincingly to my mind, that we need to be clear about calling this out to have any hope at actually halting language loss.
