Racism Isn't Over « The Dish - 0 views
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The notion that racism can “end” misreads a core Christian truth about human nature. Our vulnerability to hatred, condescension, fear of others, resentment, and generalizations about “the other” are intrinsic to what it means to be human. Racism, like greed or envy or pride, will never end. We are all always susceptible to these flaws, to what Christians have called “original sin,” and which is perhaps better expressed in the concept of the “The Human Propensity To Fuck Things Up.”
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hatred is for ever. It knows no geographical or historical boundaries. It is intrinsic to being human, which means it is intrinsic to being American.
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What Parks and so many others did was chip away at the legal architecture of institutionalized hatred and loathing.
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Secret Fears of the Super-Rich - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the overwhelming concern of the super-rich—mentioned by nearly every parent who participated in the survey—is their children. Many express relief that their kids’ education was assured, but are concerned that money might rob them of ambition. Having money “runs the danger of giving them a perverted view of the world,” one respondent writes. Another worries, “Money could mess them up—give them a sense of entitlement, prevent them from developing a strong sense of empathy and compassion
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Enormous wealth takes care of so many day-to-day concerns, that the remaining ones grow that much more frustrating. The rich “want their children to make wise choices,” says Schervish, “because that’s what they can’t control.”
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Many wealthy parents structure their children’s inheritances such that the money arrives only in discrete packets, timed to ensure that during their formative years they have no choice but to find a vocation. But Kenny hasn’t seen the strategy work, he says, because the children always know that the money is out there, and usually their friends do too.
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SSRN-What Drives Views on Government Redistribution and Anti-Capitalism: Envy or a Desi... - 0 views
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In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.
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compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.
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In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.
When Bad Things Happen to Do-Good People - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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What interests me is not the details of what happened, but that implicit in the lack of sympathetic hand-wringing over Mr. Mortenson’s exposure is a kind of righteous vindication.
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we knew all along that nobody could be that good. How did we know? Because we’re not that good. Mr. Mortenson’s altruism is an indictment of our own sloth, and so some punishment — of him — might be in order.
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that unspoken challenge innate in public acts of courage and altruism: “What are you doing?” Speaking for myself, the answer is usually a highly uncomfortable, “Nothing.”
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Wait a Minute. How Can They Afford That When I Can't? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Sharon (not her real name), who lives in Westchester County, N.Y., has relatives who have paid her children’s full college tuition and give the family additional help.
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Not only do people want to play down their inherited wealth or money from family “but they actively try to hide it,” Mr. Conley said. “We have this ideology of individualism and worshiping of the self-made man or woman.”
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theoretically, there’s a correlation between getting more because you work harder, said Evan Polman, a professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison School of Business. “Inheritance is a violation of that correlation.”
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Wells Fargo will pay $190 million to settle customer fraud case | Reuters - 0 views
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Wells Fargo has long been the envy of the banking industry for its ability to sell multiple products to the same customer, but regulators on Thursday said those practices went too far in some instances.
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The largest U.S. bank by market capitalization will pay $185 million in penalties and $5 million to customers that regulators say were pushed into fee-generating accounts they never requested.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will receive $100 million of the total penalties - the largest fine ever levied by the federal agency.
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President Obama's Interview With Jeffrey Goldberg on Syria and Foreign Policy - The Atl... - 0 views
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The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq.
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Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. “If you were to say, for instance, that we’re going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.
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Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.
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The Cause Of Inequality: Institutions, Culture Or Taxes? - The Dish | By Andrew Sulliva... - 1 views
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It’s therefore wrong to interpret public outrage about CEO pay as a protest against high compensation in and of itself. This outrage is not driven by the class envy about which the GOP presidential candidates so frequently complain. It is, rather, a protest against rationing, corruption, sweetheart deals, and foxes guarding the henhouse. It is a protest, in other words, against the corruption of markets by power.
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It doesn’t make much sense to think about rents and market failures when inequality is mainly a product of our impoverished ideas about autonomy, community, and solidarity. The failures here are political, not economic, and they are likely to be remedied only by a politics of cross-class and cross-race solidarity
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the top tax rate could be as high as 83 percent—as opposed to 57 percent in the pure supply-side model—without harming economic growth.
Physical attractiveness and careers: Don't hate me because I'm beautiful | The Economist - 1 views
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AT WORK, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise.
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Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.
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Mr Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis”—that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and pulchritude.
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Why French Parents Are Superior by Pamela Druckerman - WSJ.com - 1 views
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Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.
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Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
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Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.
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The Launching Pad - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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we should aspire to be the world’s best launching pad because our work force is so productive; our markets the freest and most trusted; our infrastructure and Internet bandwidth the most advanced; our openness to foreign talent second to none; our funding for basic research the most generous; our rule of law, patent protection and investment-friendly tax code the envy of the world; our education system unrivaled; our currency and interest rates the most stable; our environment the most pristine; our health care system the most efficient; and our energy supplies the most secure, clean and cost-effective.
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building America into this launching pad for more start-ups is precisely what an Obama second term should be about, so more Americans can thrive in a world we invented. If we can make America the best place to dream something, design something, start something, collaborate with others on something and manufacture something — in an age in which every link in that chain can now be done in so many more places — our workers and innovators will do just fine.
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a narrative is not just a business plan. It has to be infused with values, and, in our case, the most obvious is “sustainability,” which doesn’t simply mean “green” or “no growth.” It means behaving responsibly in the market and with Mother Nature so we can have growth that lasts. What “freedom” was for our parents’ generation, “sustainability” has to be for ours.
Who's On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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dismissal of Arendt’s work — essentially a rejection of the “banality of evil” argument — is by no means new, but it does not hold up when one truly understands the meaning of her phrase. Couldn’t Eichmann have been a fanatical Nazi and banal?
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It is this strange mixture of bravado and cruelty, of patriotic idealism and the shallowness of racialist thinking that Arendt sensed because she was so well attuned to Eichmann’s misuse of the German language and to his idiosyncratic deployment of concepts like the Categorical Imperative. As Stangneth puts it, “Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classical German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy and incredible human wretchedness.”
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Commenting on Eichmann’s claim that he was “neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,” Stangneth writes that his “’inner morality is not an idea of justice, a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection…. Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.” Stangneth explains that for Eichmann “Conscience was simply the ‘morality of the Fatherland that dwells within’ a person, which Eichmann also termed ‘the voice of the blood.’ ”
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Trump-ward, Christian Soldiers? - The New York Times - 0 views
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Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?
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No matter. The holy rollers are smiling upon the high roller. And they’re proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.
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What’s different and fascinating about the Trump worship is that he doesn’t even try that hard for a righteous facade — for Potemkin piety. Sure, he speaks of enthusiastic churchgoing, and he’s careful to curse Planned Parenthood and to insist that matrimony be reserved for heterosexuals as demonstrably inept at it as he is
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Bonfire of the Assets, With Trump Lighting Matches - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Wall Street Journal reported on July 30 that the “state-owned China Securities Finance Corporation has been spending up to 180 billion yuan a day ($29 billion) to try to stabilize stocks.” Since the Shanghai exchange has fallen sharply since then, the amount of money China burned trying to prop up already unrealistic valuations must be staggering.
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eaders do funky things when the ruling party’s bargain with its people is “we get to rule and you get to get rich.” Collapsing markets can quickly lead to collapsing legitimacy.
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Ask the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. He burned the eastern quarter of Ukraine to distract the Russian middle class from his economic mismanagement and illegitimacy.
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China's Winning Schools? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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An international study published last month looked at how students in 65 countries performed in math, science and reading. The winner was: Confucianism!
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Three of the next top four performers were also societies with a Confucian legacy of reverence for education: Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. The only non-Confucian country in the mix was Finland.
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Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority
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Inequality Is Not Inevitable - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times for which I have served as moderator, has also presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn’t apply in the democracies of the 21st.
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We don’t need to have this much inequality in America.
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Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism.
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State of the Union 2016: Obama sells optimism to nervous nation - CNNPolitics.com - 1 views
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urged Americans in his final State of the Union address to reject the politics of tribalism and fear that have rocked the campaign to find his successor and to build a "clear-eyed, big-hearted" and "optimistic" nation.
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did not name Republican 2016 candidates
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imperiled by a political system festering in malice, gridlock and in the grip of the rich and the powerful
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Polarization in Poland: A Warning From Europe - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half. The estrangements are political, not personal. Poland is now one of the most polarized societies in Europe, and we have found ourselves on opposite sides of a profound divide, one that runs through not only what used to be the Polish right but also the old Hungarian right, the Italian right, and, with some differences, the British right and the American right, too.
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Some of my New Year’s Eve guests continued, as my husband and I did, to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center-right—remaining in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of Germany and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some now consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place, supporting a nativist party called Law and Justice—a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland), from 2005 to 2010.
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My husband was the Polish defense minister for a year and a half, in a coalition government led by Law and Justice during its first, brief experience of power; later, he broke with that party and was for seven years the foreign minister in another coalition government, this one led by the center-right party Civic Platform; in 2015 he didn’t run for office. As a journalist and his American-born wife, I have always attracted some press interest. But after Law and Justice won that year, I was featured on the covers of two pro-regime magazines, wSieci and Do Rzeczy—former friends of ours work at both—as the clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland. Similar stories have appeared on Telewizja Polska’s evening news.
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Capitalism in crisis: U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system that mad... - 0 views
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In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.
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Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.
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Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.
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