[Gurdur]

Understanding well the society you live in is incredibly important. Unfortunately, it is also something many or even most people have no interest in. Instead, many people prefer to simply come to terms with whatever tiny corner of society they live in and complain (usually ineffectually) about the rest. They also often prefer, instead of acting socially, to live vicariously through public figures, to line up as fans rather than associate as agents of change. Strengthening such unfortunate attitudes are modern-day Western trends like exaggerated risk aversion, government by tabloid press, attitudes of an exaggerated sense of entitlement, over-dependancy, an overall faddish drive to all the freedom you can buy, and so on. That this is not good shows itself in longterm trends of disengagement from politics and overall civic responsibility and participation.

Throw in that many prefer to be only consumers rather than also creators; this is something that shows itself in political contests that devolve to bribery competitions rather than an involved citizenry, and the citizens sit back and demand satisfaction, and then fashionably decry politicians as a whole when expectations cannot be met -- all the while while the citizens themselves abdicate responsibility and action.

The right-wing has no satisfactory answers for this; all too often, the right-wing are seduced by meaningless slogans and campaigns run on fear. For example, as far as a committed, engaged citizenry go, does the USA provide any worthwhile example? Not at all; instead, people are encouraged to go buy guns and to do mindless negative campaigns like the teabaggers. In fact, actually getting together to build a better society has been too often vilified for itself by the right-wing, resulting in the right-wing not having any strategies or means for doing so, and only an addiction to empty symbols and fearfully, repetitively chanting "No".

The right-wing in Britain do not do better; while the Conservatives (the Tories) are poised to win a national election in the United Kingdom this year, their own agenda is riven by the same kinds of empty fads as with their Labour opponents, and also riven by internal feuds (over the EU, NHS and so on), and their hands are tied by the huge debt caused by the credit-crunch crisis and by the fact the Tories as a party are largely in the control of the financial sector and associated, and so cannot form any effective answer to the causes of the credit-crunch.

The leftwing do no better than the rightwing, in either the USA or the UK. In Britain, under Blair and still to a large extent under Brown, the Labour party became enslaved to the fads of privatization, to the point where the Labour party is makedly more Thatcherite than the New Tories at times (witness the debates on target-meeting for the NHS and the police, for example). There is also a fatal flaw in the Labour higher ranks of still believing that all can be answered with new regulations --- to be fair to Labour, they have been driven into this by the tabloid press and the constant demands to "Do something!", but the cowardly capitulation to the tabloids is also largely Labour's own fault; after all, Blair actively kowtowed and truckled to Murdoch all those years in order to get elected, and the power actually won by the tabloid press overall has vastly increased over the last 10 years as a result of the truckling.

In the USA, Obama has had the bad luck to walk into a huge state deficit not of his own making, caused partly by the credit-crisis, and he has also walked smack into the limits of the possible, and a Republican opposition hellbent on a burnt-earth strategy. I also suspect Obama may be seduced by the Rahm strategy of getting cooperation no matter how much is given away to do so, but that may be Obama's own failure.

And of course we face rather difficult times. There is still Al Qaida out there, and will be there a while. There is still religious extremism, let alone political corruption and authoritarianism in many places round the globe.

And of course there are much worse things. Over-population, enviromental degradation, global warming and so on.

Mind you, there have been worse times for humanity; we survived the Black Death and the Thirty Years' War, well, at least those of us who survived them survived, but even so, the challenges facing us today as concerned and involved private citizens are still pretty damn big, if slow-acting.

And of course there is a big challenge for every each one of us: how to build a good life for ourselves and how to really enjoy life, even while confronting nasty global, national and local problems.

To accomplish all aims requires a big range of actions, on the associative international, national and social levels, and on the personal self level.

As part of the Hub being very much about being for its members to assist each other in empowerment and development, I have been compiling a list of blogs worth reading. The point of the chosen blogs is that by reading them, one gets a good amount of unofficially-given information from people in their own jobs and occupations, and that info can help one hell of a lot for us to each understand much better the society we live in, and to also give us much more control over our own lives.

I've been choosing blogs that are informative and not too ranty. I have no admiration for rants, no matter how well worded; I prefer to be effective rather than just entertained.

I will be slowly making new threads of blogrolls for various fields. You are extremely welcome to suggest blogs, and if I like 'em I will add them to the lists I make in my OP's; and if you don't like my own blogroll lists, you are of course very free and very welcome to post your own. I hope it is now clear on how and why I do pick the blogs I pick. Pretty much all I do is done on the basis of a tolerant but effective secular humanism, though occasionally with the odd bit of black humour.

Over to you, and please feel very free to comment, suggest, criticise, argue, and so on.