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anonymous

The oldest story ever written - 1 views

www.salon.com/...gilgamesh

salon history ancient biblical

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 13 - Cached
  • David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.
  • Think of it: He asks you to be excited about what the characters in his story are discovering even before you know quite how important it is.
  • The recovery of the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was less dramatic, mostly because it was drawn out over decades, but the prize was even more fabulous than the treasures of King Tut’s tomb: the oldest story ever told — or, at least, the oldest one told in writing.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • It is the tale of a king, and full of sex, violence, love, thievery, defiance, grief and divine retribution. It’s the first buddy picture, the first depiction of the Underworld, the precursor to the legend of Noah and his ark.
  • If it were like hundreds of other great and ancient stories — the death and resurrection of Osirus, the quest of Orpheus, Sigurd’s slaying of the dragon Fafnir — it would have reached us through countless retellings, gradually morphing and splitting and fusing with other stories over the years.
  • Those stories come to us like the DNA of our ancestors, still present within us, but reshaped by generations of mutations and ultimately as familiar as our own faces.
  • Instead, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” preserved on 12 clay tablets, fell into a kind of time capsule in the fabled cradle of civilization.
  • much of the epic feels both fresh and alien, a piece of the past all Westerners (and many Asians) share, unsmoothed by the passage of the centuries.
  • The announcement that some of those old, broken slabs of clay seemed to confirm the biblical story of the flood and Noah’s Ark made headlines and instantly catapulted the brand-new discipline of Assyriology to public attention.
  • Smith, too, seized upon the scenes of the flood as validation of the Old Testament account; many early archaeologists were obsessed with biblical verification. Not everyone agreed, however.
  • The New York Times suggested that the inscription “may be regarded as a confirmation of the statement that there are various traditions of the deluge apart from the Biblical one, which is perhaps legendary like the rest.” (In fact, stories of global floods crop up in all sorts of disconnected mythologies.)
  • Certainly, the epic didn’t point to human sinfulness as the cause of the flood, as the Bible does. According to Uta-napishtim, the gods wiped out humanity because the exploding population was making too much noise and disturbing their sleep.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I love ancient gods. They have such personality.
  • largely because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible.
  • The story of the story, though, is something else again. Luck most definitely played a role. Had a roof beam or a column fallen a different way during the sacking and destruction of Ashurbanipal’s palace in 612 B.C., the tablets might not have been left broken but largely intact.
  • Had “The Epic of Gilgamesh” been taken to another library, the tablets might have been worn out by use and discarded or lost in other disasters like the burning of the great Library at Alexandria
  • Damrosch reminds us that only seven of Aeschylus’ 90 tragedies have survived to modern times. Without the work of dedicated Assyriologists we might have the tablets but be unable to read them.
  • To the ancient Mesopotamians, it probably seemed impossible that one day Gilgamesh would be forgotten — for us, that would be like forgetting Heracles or Superman or Little Red Riding Hood. After a while, people stopped telling his story, and if it weren’t for those buried tablets and the men who dug them up, his name would have vanished forever. In a way, Gilgamesh got his immortality after all.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 13
       
      I purposely didn't highlight the stories. You have to *read those* on the page to truly appreciate them. The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of those stories that I learned about during my difficult recovery from adolescent Fundy-Xtianity. In youthful, rebellious glee, I enjoyed that I could dismiss The Flood. With age, though, I see both - and many other heavily borrowed from stories - as part of a continuum of folklore and wisdom. Quite fascinating.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 13
     
    "There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of 'The Epic of Gilgamesh,' the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840." Hat tip to George Station (originally from Hsiao-yun Chan), both on Google+
anonymous

Generation X hits its midlife crisis - 0 views

www.salon.com/...genx_midlife_crisis

generations

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Welcome to the age of mixed blessings, you rapidly wrinkling Janeane Garofalo wannabes!
  • "Formerly Hot," inspired by Dolgoff's epiphany that "I was no longer who I'd always been -- a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks," will surely strike a chord with anyone who's ever realized she's never getting comped for drinks again.
  • But it's ironic that while this is likely the greatest time in human history to be middle-aged (for which I personally thank you for blazing that trail, baby boomers) we're still torn up about it. A person over 40 is no longer immediately set out to die on an ice floe, but that leaves the question, What's left? Are we MILFs and cougars, or just haggard old "formerlies"? We flail awkwardly to finesse this new stage of life, maybe because being older ain't what it used to be. There was a time we'd just consign ourselves to looking like a Dorothea Lange photograph by the time we had the second kid, but those migrant farmworkers weren't of the generation that got Viagra and Nirvana. Can we still rock out? Wear funny T-shirts?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On his cringe-worthily perfect series "Louie," Louis C.K. delivers the grim news to the Lloyd Dobler generation: "There's never going to be another year of my life that was better than the year before it. That's never going to happen again. I've seen my best years." And unlike those lucky enough to be able to make the wracked-with-baggage boast of being formerly hot, he says, "I've never gained from my looks at all. It's not like, oh, they're going, what am I going to do now?"
  • If I've got potentially 40 more years of living ahead, I won't spend it as the kind of woman Bowling for Soup writes songs about. In truth, like many people my age, I hated high school and my 20s sucked as much as they rocked. So while we may take the baby barrettes out of our graying hair and no longer fit the description of grrrl, my generation has been pretty busy spending the last few decades living its life, starting its zines, cranking out some great music and generally not giving much of a crap about its hotness to begin with. I'll gladly answer to "slacker," but even if it's with a wink and a self-deprecating laugh over pleather miniskirts gone by, don't call me "formerly" anything. Because I'm not ready to assume my best years are behind me. And I don't ever want to define myself by what I've been. 
  • anonymous on 09 Aug 10
     
    "An author calls for women to embrace their "formerly hot" years. Oh please: Don't call me "formerly" anything." By Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com on August 9, 2010.
anonymous

In a pure coincidence, Gaddafi impeded U.S. oil interests before the war - 1 views

www.salon.com/...libya

geopolitics libya

shared by anonymous on 13 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Why -- at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war -- would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war?  Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations -- even from his own Party -- that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval?  Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war?  And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes -- including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria -- engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
  • I have two points to make about all this:
  • The reason -- the only reason -- we know about any of this is because WikiLeaks (and, allegedly, Bradley Manning) disclosed to the world the diplomatic cables which detail these conflicts. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Is there anyone -- anywhere -- who actually believes that these aren't the driving considerations in why we're waging this war in Libya?  After almost three months of fighting and bombing -- when we're so far from the original justifications and commitments that they're barely a distant memory -- is there anyone who still believes that humanitarian concerns are what brought us and other Western powers to the war in Libya?
  • Instead, what distinguished Gaddafi and made him a war target was that he had become insufficiently compliant -- an unreliable and unstable servant to the West.
  • Wars are typically caused by the interests of multiple factions and rarely have just one motive.  As Jim Webb explained in arguing that the U.S. has no vital interest in Libya, the French and British are far more reliant on Libyan oil than the U.S. is (and this reader offers a rational dissent and alternative explanation for the war).  But the U.S. has long made clear that it will not tolerate hostile or disobedient rulers in countries where it believes it has vital interests, and that's particularly true in oil rich nations (which is one reason for the American obsession with Iran).
  • anonymous on 13 Jun 11
     
    "When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued -- regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point." - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
anonymous

5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ressives_must_face_about_obama

shared by anonymous on 20 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • We’ve now dodged the bullet of a Mitt Romney White House, so let’s get back to reality. Despite his campaign-trail populism, the president will continue the politics of accommodation to conservatives. Two of the three priorities he has set out for his next term are at the top of the GOP agenda: a “grand bargain” to cut government spending over the next 10 years and corporate tax reform that would cut rates—don’t hold your breath—and close loopholes. The third priority, rationalizing immigration law, is one of the few progressive ideas that also has the support of the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.
  • President Obama says his top priority is a deal with House Republicans to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years. His “liberal” position starts with a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases of 2.5-to-1. The only real dispute between the president and Republicans is whether the rich will have to give back the tax breaks George W. Bush gave them. So when the eventual deal is struck, the federal government will be taking more out of the economy over the next decade than it is putting in.
  • Off-shoring and automation will continue to shed jobs with no offsetting increase in the demand for labor. Budget cuts—including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—will widen the holes in the social safety net and further limit investments in education, infrastructure and technology upon which any chance at future prosperity depends.
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  • The president’s Council of Economic Advisers will not admit it, but their default strategy for growth is to let American wages drop far enough to undercut foreign competition.
  • That is the only possible policy rationale for Obama’s enthusiasm for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a further deregulation of trade that will strip away the last protections for American workers against a brutal global marketplace of dog-eat-dog.
  • The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was a victory for corporate America. In exchange for giving up their rules against covering pre-existing conditions and agreeing to raise the age limit in which children could be covered under their parents’ policy, the health insurance corporations got the federal government to require every citizen to buy their product and commit to subsidizing those that can’t afford the price.
  • Although it abandoned the public option, the White House whispers to Democrats that Obamacare will pave the way for single-payer. Fat chance. The bill was inspired by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and largely drafted by a former insurance company executive precisely to stop single-payer from ever happening.
  • The largest companies now have a bigger share of the financial markets than they had in 2008 and their “too-big-to-fail safety net” is even more explicit.Perhaps most important, nothing has been done to lengthen the horizons of U.S. investors from short-term, get-rich-quick financial speculation to the long-term investment in producing things and high-value services in America.
  • With the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, the transformation from democracy to plutocracy is virtually complete.
  • The corruption of our governing class goes beyond just campaign contributions. It can include the hint of a future job or lobbyist contract when you leave office, a hedge fund internship for your daughter, a stock market tip. But all this depends on your remaining in power, so nothing matches the importance of raising enough money to get yourself reelected.
  • Democratic leaders’ primary response to Citizens United has been a tepid proposal to require more transparency in campaign contributions.
  • But even areas where the president could act alone—as with an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political contributions or even filling vacant seats on the Federal Election Commission—Obama took a pass
  • In response to an interviewer’s question in August, he said that “in the longer term” we may need a constitutional amendment to undo Citizens United. He is right. But the “longer term” certainly means sometime after he leaves office.
  • Without a radical shift away from the policies of the last four years, living standards of most people in the United States will continue to drop, with potentially ugly social and political consequences.
  • The stakes for Democrats are also high. Obama’s victory has reinforced the widespread notion among pundits that the projected future increase in the non-white voting population and the party’s advantage with women already makes it the favorite for 2016 and beyond. But it is precisely these constituencies that economic stagnation has hit the hardest. Whatever the demographic changes, if the Democratic Party produces another four years like the last four, it can kiss goodbye to the next election and probably several after that.
  • anonymous on 20 Nov 12
     
    "5 hard truths progressives must face about Obama Now that the joy of election night has subsided, it's time for a reality check: The president's still a centrist"
anonymous

What does Israel fear from media coverage? - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Isn't it strange how Plucky, Democratic Israel goes to such extreme lengths to prevent any media coverage of what they do, any journalistic interference with their propaganda machine, in light of the fact that -- as always -- They Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong?  Is physically blocking the media from covering what happens the act of a government that is in the right?
  • anonymous on 01 Jun 10
     
    By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on June 1, 2010.
anonymous

Facing extinction: The "responsible Republican" - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

media generations

shared by anonymous on 10 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Jul 10
     
    "Warnings about right-wing extremism from Michael Gerson and ousted Bob Inglis are too little -- and much too late." By Joe Conason at Salon.com on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

"Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

society politics culture

shared by anonymous on 29 Aug 10 - Cached
  • even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.
  • Aren’t we at least more productive by virtue of the amount of time we’re putting in? No. Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours.
  • How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world.
  • You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing.
  • So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives
  • anonymous on 29 Aug 10
     
    "Germany's workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?" By Alex Jung at Salon.com on August 25, 2010.
anonymous

The perils of false equivalencies and self-proclaimed centrism - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

media politics

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too -- the proposition that Bush is a "war criminal" -- is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion. Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party. The claim that Bush is "a war criminal" has ample basis, and it's deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one's centrist bona fides." By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on September 19, 2010.
anonymous

The self-absorption of America's ruling class - 0 views

www.salon.com/...politico

partisan politics

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "There, ladies and gentlemen, is the mentality of the "groups that matter in American politics." That's what these people are worried about and focused on. Some of the anti-Obama grievances cited by Politico are marginally less trivial though still on the level of political process complaints (rhetorical and communication failures on the part of the White House). But almost all of them are voiced anonymously. That Wall Street and other financial executives have spent the last year petulantly complaining about how unfairly they are treated -- as their wealth continues to boom while the rest of the population suffers -- was, in my view, one of the year's most vivid expressions of the degradation of America's political culture. That "the groups that matter" are preoccupied with these sorts of prerogative-denying slights -- while Politico gives them front-page anonymity to whine about those grievances -- is definitely another. We have the country we have because of the character of the people who run it." Thanks for the pointer, @pyromanfo - By Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on November 8, 2010
anonymous

Repulsive progressive hypocrisy - Salon.com - 2 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

politics partisan hypocritical

shared by anonymous on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Feb 12
     
    "During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the "assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution": so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices - rather than a big, bad, scary Republican - all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates" Thanks to Erik Hanson for the pointer.
  • Erik Hanson on 09 Feb 12
     
    I don't know that this was me. My take on this whole thing is that liberals mostly feel that Obama has let them down by being too centrist, but that they'll still vote for him over Rom-tor-rich anyday.
  • anonymous on 09 Feb 12
     
    I coulda sworn you did...sorry. And I share your sentiment. That's the kind of trap left-centrists and leftists have. I surely don't hate Obama. I think I understand that presidents make concessions. But when you made such a big, _big_ stink about it during the race, at the very least, don't... say... _increase_ drone strikes. The crux, though, doesn't have anything to do with this stuff. It's about rhetorical inconsistency. Someone yesterday remarked "This is why I think Obama is not the lesser of evils." Keeping Guantanamo open and increasing drone strikes is exactly the kind of thing that self-described Conservatives *supported* during G.W.'s administration. But, we're really not that different after all. Once 'our man' gets the office, we make retroactive justifications. Isn't it fun to be a human animal?
anonymous

Ayn Rand is for children - 1 views

www.salon.com/...ayn_rand_is_for_children

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 13 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • Since I first met Objectivists (read: libertarians) in college, my Unified Theory of Rand Groupies posited that they all probably fit into at least one of three groups: those who 1) never grew out of the usual “the world is persecuting me and doesn’t see my true genius” phase that momentarily afflicts the typical high schooler 2) think saying “Ayn Rand” in any context makes them sound intelligent, even though they’ve never actually read her work or 3) have read Rand’s work, don’t genuinely believe in her ideology as evidenced by their lifestyle/politics, but still say they love her because it serves to make them feel good about their own avarice.
  • Typically, they are more than happy to (among other things) drive on taxpayer funded roads; to have their assets defended by government agents (aka police and firefighters); to have their property rights protected by a law enforcement collective known as the judiciary; and to pocket their share of handouts. Some alleged Randian individualists are even willing to decry the social safety net for others but not for themselves, and still others are happy to to vote in Congress for the epitome of what Randianism stands against.
  • Nonetheless, after my three-week voyage to the poorest province in China in 2009 (which you can read about here), I can say with confidence that if you have been to the non-Tom-Friedman developing world – aka the actual developing world – you don’t need Saunders’ MacArthur Genius-worthy intellect to arrive at his very same conclusion.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Simply put, once you actually see laissez faire capitalism and greed-is-good extremism at work, it doesn’t look as nice as it sounds in Rand’s works. On the contrary, as Saunders implies, it makes “Fountainhead Shrugged” look less like serious treatise than bad young adult fiction, with all the corresponding misguided parables and oversimplified conclusions.
  • To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 13
     
    "With this week's news that Glenn Beck and others are preparing to build libertarian communes and "Going Galt," I figure now is the time to finally refine my theory about those who claim to be Ayn Rand acolytes or who brag that their favorite book is "Fountainhead Shrugged" (they are the same book written twice in order to double Rand's profit, so for brevity, let's just use one name)."
anonymous

Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - 2 views

www.salon.com/...net_destroyed_the_middle_class

technology

shared by anonymous on 15 May 13 - Cached
  • His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.
  • This week sees the publication of “Who Owns the Future?,” which digs into technology, economics and culture in unconventional ways.
  • Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • “Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
  • But more important than Lanier’s hopes for a cure is his diagnosis of the digital disease. Eccentric as it is, “Future” is one of the best skeptical books about the online world, alongside Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” and Lanier’s own “You Are Not a Gadget.”
  • One is that the number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.
  • And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networks for them to be functional besides being valuable.
  • So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.
  • Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea of the informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talking about how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informal economy. He’s a friend so I don’t want to rag on him too much. But he was talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economy and how beautiful trust is and all that.
  • And you know, that’s all kind of true when you’re young and if you’re not sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums, you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you’re a person in the West, in the developed world.
  • So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees, and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intense concentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feeling is not just for the people who are on the computers but also from the people who are using them. So there’s this tiny token number of people who will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody else lives on hope. There’s not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.
  • the person who lost his job at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or she is no longer earning. He can’t pay his rent with cultural capital that’s replaced it.
  • The informal way of getting by doesn’t tide you over when you’re sick and it doesn’t let you raise kids and it doesn’t let you grow old. It’s not biologically real.
  • If we go back to the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-saving device, although we don’t think of it that way.
  • And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time early audio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, were indistinguishable between real music to people who did double blind tests and whatnot.
  • So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor saving device. And whenever you have a technological advance that’s less hassle than the previous thing, there’s still a choice to make. And the choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that’s easier?
  • And so you could make the argument that a transition to cars should create a world where drivers don’t get paid, because, after all, it’s fun to drive.
  • We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I think that's a worthy question considering the high-speed with which we adopt every possible technology; to hell with foresight.
  • Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible.
  • I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct. The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn’t have jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you can participate in a formal economy even if you’re not a baron. That there can be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and the benefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, there are annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is really annoying sometimes.
  • But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-class distribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspend the top, and if you don’t have that you can’t really have democracy. Democracy is destabilized if there isn’t a broad distribution of wealth.
  • And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, if you’re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can only function if there are customers and customers can only come if there’s a middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Ha ha. Ayn Rand people don't have to admit to *anything,* trust me, dude.
  • It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to get to your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.
  • But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it’s a kind of capitalism that’s totally self-defeating because it’s so narrow. It’s a winner-take-all capitalism that’s not sustaining.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      This makes me curious. Is he arguing that there are fewer *nodes* because the information access closes them?
  • You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and the poor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through some kind of intervention.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      My understanding was that the U.S. heads of business got the nod to go ahead and start manufacturing things *other* than weapons, because our industrial capabilities weren't anhialated (sp?) relative to so many others.
  • There’s always academic tenure, or a taxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There’s often some kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allows people to keep their middle-class status.
  • In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events that wipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor. So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that is called the digital open network.
  • Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you have it, again it’s this winner-take-all thing where the people who really win are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, an incredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successful YouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with their parents or something.
  • I guess all orthodoxies are built on lies. But there’s this idea that there must be tens of thousands of people who are making a great living as freelance musicians because you can market yourself on social media.
  • And whenever I look for these people – I mean when I wrote “Gadget” I looked around and found a handful – and at this point three years later, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists of people who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now. But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could find about 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason I mention hip-hop is because that’s where it happens the most right now.
  • The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, “Oh, what an incredible life. She’s this incredibly lucky person who’s worked really hard.” And that’s all true. She’s in her 20s, and it’s great that she’s found this success, but what this success is that she makes maybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that’s worth $1.1 million in L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.
  • And that’s good for a 20-year-old, but she’s at the very top of, I mean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as well as what used to be considered good for a middle-class life.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Quite true. She's obviously not rolling in solid gold cadillacs.
  • But for someone who’s out there, a star with a billion views, that’s a crazy low expectation. She’s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny token number of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they’re not even making it into the 1 percent.
  • The issue is if we’re going to have a middle class anymore, and if that’s our expectation, we won’t. And then we won’t have democracy.
  • I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number of hundreds. It’s really small. I wish all of those people my deepest blessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it’s just not a way you can build a society.
  • The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is getting back to the informal economy where you’re living in the slum or something, so you’re desperate to get out so you impress the boss man with your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea of doing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be the reverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who are in that into the formal economy. That’s what’s called development. But this is the opposite of that. It’s taking all the people from the developed world and putting them into a cycle of the developing world of the informal economy.
  • We don’t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest on the stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians and socialists, they have this weird belief that everybody’s this abstract robot that won’t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It’s like everybody’s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and can self-fund until they find their magic moment or something.
  • The way society actually works is there’s some mechanism of basic stability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so we can have a democracy. That’s the thing we’re destroying, and that’s really the thing I’m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musicians and artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, and is this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors and lawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get to everybody eventually.
  • I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians.
  • It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.
  • You’re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. And yet you don’t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of the left — why not?
  • I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left. I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world where outcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.
  • The problem I have with socialist utopias is there’s some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people’s lives. So in a spiritual sense there’s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. So it has to be moderated.
  • I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
  • All of these things are magisterial, where the people who become involved in them tend to wish they could be the only ones.
  • Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its own loops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that in the book. There are other people who believe that if you could get everybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate, we wouldn’t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in a group house and then they’ll see it’s not true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Group House. HAH!
  • So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not try to be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balances the excess of the other magisteria.
  • And that is doesn’t concentrate power too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we’ll really be fine. I’m actually modest. People have been accusing me of being super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I’m the most modest person in the conversation.
  • I’m just trying to avoid total dysfunction.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      See, now I like this guy. This is like the political equivalent of aiming for the realist view in geopolitics. We separate what is likely from what is unlikely and aim not for "the best" situation, but a situation where the worst aspects have been mitigated. It's backwards thinking that both parties would have a hard time integrating into their (ughhh) brand.
  • Let’s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonant about the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have been created with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars?
  • Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of this thing was really funded by either the military or public research agencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
  • I don’t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There’s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it’s misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.
  • Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      Again, a take I rarely encounter.
  • I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 May 13
       
      I have had this very thing happen to. I didn't get to have my moment of discovery. I think Google Glass is going to fix that. Hah. :)
  • And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.
  • I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.
  • So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as human interfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digital enterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist, actually.
  • Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the whole music-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essays where I was trying to articulate the thing that’s now the orthodoxy. Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman and this will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. I know a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn’t actually working. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I just saw that in the real lives I know — both older and younger people coming up — I just saw that it was not as good as what it had once been. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as good as it sounded. It was really that simple.
  • anonymous on 15 May 13
     
    "Kodak employed 140,000 people. Instagram, 13. A digital visionary says the Web kills jobs, wealth -- even democracy"
anonymous

The question libertarians just can't answer - 1 views

www.salon.com/..._libertarians_just_cant_answer

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 13 - Cached
  • There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?
  • Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.
  • Some political philosophies pass this test. For much of the global center-left, the ideal for several generations has been Nordic social democracy—what the late liberal economist Robert Heilbroner described as “a slightly idealized Sweden.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.
  • If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?
  • Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.
  • But none of these countries, including the U.S., is anywhere near a libertarian paradise.
  • Even worse, the economic-freedom country rankings are biased toward city-states and small countries.
  • With the exception of Switzerland, four out of the top five were small British overseas colonies which played interstitial roles in the larger British empire.
  • Even though they are formally sovereign today, these places remain fragments of larger defense systems and larger markets. They are able to engage in free riding on the provision of public goods, like security and huge consumer populations, by other, bigger states.
  • These countries play specialized roles in much larger regional and global markets, rather as cities or regions do in a large nation-state like the U.S. Hong Kong and Singapore remain essentially entrepots for international trade.
  • Switzerland is an international banking and tax haven. What works for them would not work for a giant nation-state like the U.S.
  • The Heritage Foundation is free to define economic freedom however it likes, by its own formula weighting government size, freedom of trade, absence of regulation and so on. What about factors other than economic freedom that shape the quality of life of citizens?
  • According to the CIA World Fact book, the U.S. spends more than Mauritius—5.4 percent of GDP in 2009 compared to only 3.7 percent in Mauritius in 2010.
  • In economically-more-free Mauritius there are about 11 deaths per 1,000 live births—compared to 5.9 in the economically-less-free U.S.
  • Libertarians seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no significant trade-off between less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy and more infant and maternal mortality, among other things.
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 13
     
    A most cogent argument. I don't think it's the author's job to balance itself out (as was suggested in G+). Against what, exactly? The piece had nothing to do with the two-party system. I completely agree that our two party system is a joke, but I fail to see how inserting an additional joke adds anything. The LP serves a vote-getting purpose for the GOP. That is all. Once the GOP gets enough votes, they reserve the right to kick the LP ideas/candidates to the curb - and often do. That's been the cycle for decades. Years back, it made me angry. I'm pretty ambivalent now. Circle of political life. The official LP positions on a whole host of issues is beyond unpalatable even for our heavily right-leaning electorate. Abolishing the WoD is a great policy idea, but it needs to be accompanied by more great ideas before Americans do more than pay lip service and pretend to Go Galt. Oh, and they have to rip out their Objectivist-center and hurl it into the sun.
anonymous

Leaked report shows high civilian death toll from CIA drone strikes - 0 views

www.salon.com/...th_toll_from_cia_drone_strikes

shared by anonymous on 22 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The leaked document – which the Bureau obtained from three separate sources – is based on field reports by government officials rather than on media coverage. The Bureau understands that the document is continually updated as attacks occur – although the copy obtained ends with a strike on October 24 2009.
  • Read the full internal Pakistani document.
  • Each tribal area such as North Waziristan is administered by a Political Agent and his assistants. Beneath them are agents known as tehsildars and naibs who gather information when drone strikes occur – the names and identities of those killed, damage to property and so on. Additional information is also drawn from the khassadar - the local tribal police – and from paid informants in villages.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Ambassador Rustan Shah Mohmand, who was a senior administrator in the tribal areas for 25 years between 1973 and 1998, cautions that the released file might not be the fullest data available.Noting that Pakistan’s military is responsible for security in FATA, he told the Bureau: ‘Tribal documents might present a broad picture. But any accuracy is dependent on what data the military chooses to release to or withhold from the political agents. In the last eight years, for example, no precise casualty figures have ever been submitted to Pakistan’s parliament.’
  • ‘How come the same civil servants are feeding one kind of data to the Peshawar High Court and another kind of data to the FATA secretariat?’ asked Shahzad Akbar, the Pakistani barrister behind the successful Peshawar case. ‘Are they fudging the numbers based on who was on the receiving end?’US counter-terrorism officials declined to comment on the specifics of the leaked document, though referred the Bureau to recent comments by both President Obama and CIA Director Brennan stating that the US goes to great lengths to limit civilian deaths in covert drone strikes.
  • anonymous on 22 Jul 13
     
    "A secret document obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals for the first time the Pakistan government's internal assessment of dozens of drone strikes, and shows scores of civilian casualties."
anonymous

Sears is dying: What the ubiquitous store's death says about America - 1 views

www.salon.com/...0%99s_death_says_about_america

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In 1972, the year Sears began building the world’s tallest building in downtown Chicago, three out of every four Americans visited one of its locations every year — a larger proportion than have seen “The Wizard of Oz.” Half of all households held a Sears credit card — more than go to church on Christmas. Sears’s sales accounted for 1 percent of the Gross National Product.
  • In an internal merchandising plan written later that decade, a Sears executive identified the company’s audience, and its identity: “Sears is a family store for middle-class, home-owning America. We are not a fashion store. We are not a store for the whimsical, nor the affluent. We are not a discounter, nor an avant-garde department store…We reflect the world of Middle America, and all of its desires and concerns and problems and faults.”
  • Unfortunately, it’s been all downhill for middle-class, home-owning America since then, and it’s been all downhill for Sears, too.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Sears is dying as a result of two not unrelated phenomena: the shrinking of the middle class and the atomization of American culture. It’s still an all-things-for-all-shoppers emporium that sells pool tables, gas grills, televisions, beds and power drills, then cleans your teeth, checks your eyes and fills out your taxes. But that niche is disappearing as customers hunt for bargains on the Internet and in specialty stores, and as the retail world is pulled apart into avant-garde department stores and discounters — exactly what Sears promised it would never be.
  • Maybe in 1975, a salesman and his boss both bought their shirts and ties at Sears, but now the boss shops at Barneys, and the salesman goes to Men’s Wearhouse. This divide is a result of the fact that, over the last two decades, the top 5 percent of earners have increased their share of consumption from 28 percent to 38 percent.
  • Sears has other problems. Image problems. As Ashanta Myers indicated, it’s still a place to go for durable items. You don’t want to cheap out on appliances, or on winter coats, especially in Chicago. But Sears’ clothing is both too expensive and too bland for modern shoppers. A generation used to working for dirt wages and expressing its individuality isn’t in sync with the mid-20th-century mass culture Sears still represents — a culture in which everyone dressed the same, lived in the same little bungalows and earned roughly the same amount of money.
  • It says a lot about America’s class stratification that Sears — which caters explicitly to the middle class — long ago lost its role as the nation’s number one retailer to Wal-Mart, which caters explicitly to the underclass.
  • It also says a lot that Sears’ decline in profitability began during the recession of 1974, the moment that America’s post-World War II economic boom finally hit a wall, as a result of inflation, the Arab Oil Embargo and competition from foreign manufacturers. The “real wage” had peaked the year before, at $341 a week, so Sears’ model customer — the blue-collar middle-class homeowner — never again had as much purchasing power.
  • Where does America shop now? In the country it shops at Wal-Mart, and in the cities, it shops places like Howard Street, a strip on the Far North Side of Chicago that has a liquor store, a pawn shop, a walk-in dental clinic, four sneaker boutiques, a Ready Refund tax service, a dollar store, a Bargain Paradise furniture emporium, a currency exchange and a cell phone store.
  • Pretty much everything Sears sells, at lower-class prices.
  • By throwing a going-out-of-business sale at its State Street store, and finally cutting its prices to a level everyone can afford, Sears accomplished something it hasn’t done since its heyday. The bargain hunters roaming the floors constituted one of the most diverse crowds I’ve ever seen — African Americans from the South and West Sides, old ladies with perfume and purses, Asian immigrants, white college students, bearded Middle Easterners, Latinos, and middle-aged professional men in trench coats. Once again, America was shopping at Sears.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 14
     
    "The middle class shrunk, American culture became atomized and a nation's beloved department store was the casualty"
  • Erik Hanson on 15 Apr 14
     
    What's weird to me is that so many of the department store companies had catalog-company roots, so you'd think it'd be easy to transition to internet sales.
anonymous

The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the "free m... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...the_fantasy_of_the_free_market

shared by anonymous on 18 Sep 14 - Cached
  • To believe that markets operate and exist in a state of nature is, in itself, to believe in the supernatural.
  • According to the American Values Survey, a mere 7 percent of Americans identify as “consistently libertarian.” Compared to the general population, libertarians are significantly more likely to be white (94 percent), young (62 percent under 50) and male (68 percent). You know, almost identical to the demographic makeup of atheists – white (95 percent), young (65 percent under 50) and male (67 percent). So there’s your first clue.
  • Your second clue is that atheist libertarians are skeptical of government authority in the same way they’re skeptical of religion.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In their mind, the state and the pope are interchangeable, which partly explains the libertarian atheist’s guttural gag reflex to what they perceive as government interference with the natural order of things, especially “free markets.”
  • Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.
  • “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,”
  • Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them.
  • “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”
  • Atheists are skeptics, but atheist libertarians evidently check their skepticism at the door when it comes to corporate power and the self-regulatory willingness of corporations to act in the interests of the common good.
  • Corporations pollute, lie, steal, oppress, manipulate and deceive, all in the name of maximizing profit. Corporations have no interest for the common good.
  • In the 1970s, consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader became famous for helping protect car owners from the unsafe practices of the auto industry. Corporate America, in turn, went out of its way in a coordinated effort, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, to destroy Nader.
  • The documentary “Unreasonable Man” demonstrates how corporate CEOs of America’s biggest corporations had Nader followed in an attempt to discredit and blackmail him. General Motors went so far as to send an attractive lady to his local supermarket in an effort to meet him, and seduce him. That’s how much corporate America was fearful of having to implement pesky and costly measures designed to protect the well-being of their customers.
  • Today America is the most income unequal among all developed nations, and we find ourselves here today not because of government regulation or interference, but a lack thereof.
  • The unilateral control that Wall Street and mega-corporations have over economic policy is now extreme, and our corporate overlords have seen to the greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S. history, while corporations contribute their lowest share of total federal tax revenue ever.
  • By every measure, Australians, Scandinavians, Canadians, Germans and the Dutch are happier and more economically secure. The U.N. World Development Fund, the U.N. World Happiness Index and the Social Progress Index contain the empirical evidence atheist libertarians  should seek, and the results are conclusive: People are happier, healthier and more socially mobile where the size of the state is bigger, and taxes and regulations on corporations are greater. You know, the opposite of the libertarian dream that would turn America into a deeper nightmare.
  • anonymous on 18 Sep 14
     
    "Atheist libertarians pose as skeptics -- except when it comes to free markets and the nature of corporate power"
  • Ed Webb on 19 Sep 14
     
    If Ayn Rand hadn't existed, the corporations would have found it necessary to invent her...
anonymous

On Executive Power, Obama as Frodo - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...tive-power-obama-as-frodo.html

geopolitics politics realism

shared by anonymous on 17 Jun 10 - Cached
  • As Glen Greenwald notes, it's not just that Obama has continued the dodgy policies of his predecessor. No - it's that he has embraced and adopted these policies as his own -- and even innovated on them.
  • Arar is a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen who was mistakenly detained at JFK in 2002 for alleged links to terrorist groups; he was then kept in US custody for several weeks before he was quietly renditioned to Syria. In a Syrian dungeon, he was tortured and kept imprisoned in a tiny, rat-infested cell for roughly a year.
  • But it was all a mistake.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Sadly, presidential candidates run on one platform. Presidents themselves govern from another. The disconnect between the two is incredibly depressing.
  • anonymous on 17 Jun 10
     
    An excellent overview of the metamorphosis of the Obama administration where it regards presidential power. By Jeb Koogler at Foreign Policy Watch on June 17, 2010.
anonymous

"The Coming Population Crash": The overpopulation myth - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

layscience longnow

shared by anonymous on 20 Apr 10 - Cached
  • earce argues that the world’s population is peaking. In the next century, we’re heading not for exponential growth, but a slow, steady decline. This, he claims, has the potential to massively change both our society and our planet: Children will become a rare sight, patriarchal thinking will fall by the wayside, and middle-aged culture will replace our predominant youth culture. Furthermore, Pearce explains, the population bust could be the end of our environmental woes. Fewer people making better choices about consumption could lead to a greener, healthier planet.
  • the carbon emissions of one American is the same as that of 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians and 250 Ethiopians. If, as economists suggest, the world economy will grow by 400 percent by 2050, then no more than a tenth of that will be a result of population growth. The issue is consumption, and that puts the onus right back on the conspicuous consumers to do something about their economic systems, not least before more developing countries follow the same model.
  • When Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book ["The Population Bomb"], women were having an average around the world of five or six children; now they’re having an average of 2.6.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger.
  • thanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, women no longer need to have five or six children to make sure that two of them will live to adulthood.
  • Feminism, I suspect, is as much a consequence of falling fertility as a cause, though I am sure they reinforce each other.
  • But once you’re in cities, kids are an economic drain for much, much longer. They can’t help out in the fields because you haven’t got any fields. If they’re going to get a job, they’ve got to be educated, and in most countries that costs money.
  • see the failure of the Catholic Church: It ends up encouraging patriarchal social norms that push women toward ultra-low fertility, such as in Italy.
  • Much of the reproductive revolution happened by keeping young kids from dying. Now we need another revolution to keep the old fitter for longer.
  • If chaos theory taught us anything, it’s that societies head off in all kinds of directions we couldn’t predict. Fifty years ago, if we had taken a slightly different path in industrial chemistry and used bromine instead of chlorine, we’d have burned out the entire ozone layer before we knew what the hell was going on, and the world would have been very different. There’s always scary stuff out there that we may not know about. You can’t predict the future. You can just try and plan for it.
  • anonymous on 20 Apr 10
     
    "How feminism and pop culture saved Earth from getting too crowded -- and are helping to avert planetary catastrophe" - An interesting article that's buttressed by a wide variety of easily available demographic data.
anonymous

China, Infrastructure, Economic Development and Oligarchy - 0 views

fpwatch.com/?p=1659

geopolitics china U.S.

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - Cached
  • For all China’s economic might, it’s worth remembering that it remains a) quite poor in per-capita terms and b) governed by an opaque, corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democratic single party apparatus that, for all the  dazzle of its economic accomplishments in recent decades, continues to immiserate large swathes of its population through internal migration controls, currency manipulation and, you know, large-scale denial of basic human rights.
  • I think it’s a bit too easy to let the U.S. off the hook, both in terms of the economics and the politics.
  • There really is a serious infrastructure problem in the United States, though, and not all of it can be explained by the fact that our infrastructure is old. Part of it can, to be sure. One of the advantages of developing late and/or having your entire continent reduced to rubble after the initial round of industrialization has run its course is that you’re allowed/forced to build new stuff rather than trying to upgrade/repurpose old stuff.
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  • we have an oligarchy here too. One that’s answerable to the larger populace through an electoral system that provides, at best, tenuous democratic accountability and uneven rule of law. And that’s fine as far as it goes. Most societies are more or less oligarchic.
  • It’s not like the wealth doesn’t exist. It’s simply so concentrated among such a small group of people who have become so good at exploiting a political system rife with veto points, useless anti-democratic institutions and geographically-dispersed power centers that it can’t be tapped. It’s not simply a matter of “reaching consensus.”
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "Last week James Joyner had at post up over at OTB breaking down some of the unwarranted CCP-oriented Sinophilia that occasionally overtakes otherwise sensible people." By Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on July 18, 2011.
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