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Saigon's Fall Still Echoes Today - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-still-echoes-today-1430348832 vietnam lessons war politics propaganda
shared by Javier E on 04 May 15 - No Cached
  • the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by PresidentLyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
  • and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.
  • As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”
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  • Perhaps the cruelest myth was that—in the long-ago words of the current U.S. secretary of state while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971—U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were regularly committing “war crimes” and behaving in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
  • a brilliant psychological warfare campaign by this country’s enemies misinformed and divided the American people, with tragic consequences—a reflexive hostility, in many quarters, to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world—that still weaken the nation today.
  • Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory
  • By resisting Communist insurgencies in the region the U.S. bought time for vulnerable targets such as Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger
  • the real tragedy is that on almost every major point of contention war protesters got the facts wrong. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a nationalist who would likely be a buffer against Chinese expansion if we supported him. This ignored Hanoi’s official biographies, which acknowledged Ho’s role as a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, his subsequent training in Moscow, followed by years traveling the world on behalf of the Communist International.
  • we would do well to clear away the myths that still adhere to that bloody conflict and understand why America got involved, what went wrong and what the consequences were.
  • We went to war because by ratifying the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) treaty a decade later, the U.S. pledged to oppose armed international aggression
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In Vietnam, Callous Use of Power Led to Years of Civilian Misery - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-to-years-of-civilian-misery-3 vietnam lessons debate war foreign policy American way of war
shared by Javier E on 04 May 15 - No Cached
  • I once listened to Henry Kissinger, who helped prolong the Vietnam War for more than five years, assert that its “tragedy” lay in the fact “that the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process.” It was, he claimed, “America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept.”
  • In more than a decade spent poring over long-classified U.S. military war crimes investigations, speaking to hundreds of veterans, and traveling through rural Vietnam interviewing survivors about what is known there as the American War, I learned of a very different set of tragedies and very different kinds of pain.
  • the pain endured by millions of survivors in Vietnam who lost family, the pain of millions who were wounded, of millions who were killed, of millions driven from their homes into slums and camps reeking of squalor, seem to me to be so much greater.
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  • The most painful realization for me was that civilian suffering was the essence of a war caused by America's callous use of power. I question whether the Henry Kissingers of today, Washington’s latest coterie of war managers, are any more willing to consider this than Kissinger has been.
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American Dream? Or Mirage? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...american-dream-or-mirage.html American idea American dream inequality psychology research
shared by Javier E on 03 May 15 - No Cached
  • ECONOMIC inequality in the United States is at its highest level since the 1930s, yet most Americans remain relatively unconcerned with the issue. Why
  • One theory is that Americans accept such inequality because they overestimate the reality of the “American dream” — the idea that any American, with enough resolve and determination, can climb the economic ladder, regardless of where he starts in life.
  • The American dream implies that the greatest economic rewards rightly go to society’s most hard-working and deserving members.
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  • studies by two independent research teams (each led by an author of this article) found that Americans across the economic spectrum did indeed severely misjudge the amount of upward mobility in society.
  • The data also confirmed the psychological utility of this mistake: Overestimating upward mobility was self-serving for rich and poor people alike. For those who saw themselves as rich and successful, it helped justify their wealth. For the poor, it provided hope for a brighter economic future.
  • Participants in the survey overshot the likelihood of rising from the poorest quintile to one of the three top quintiles by nearly 15 percentage points. (On average, only 30 percent of individuals make that kind of leap.)
  • When asked to estimate how many college students came from families in the bottom 20 percent of income, respondents substantially misjudged, estimating that those from the lowest income bracket attended college at a rate five times greater than the actual one
  • they were also asked to estimate upward mobility for people who were similar to them “in terms of goals, abilities, talents and motivations.” In this case, respondents were even more likely to overestimate upward mobility.
  • Those with the most room to move up were more likely to think that such movement was possible.
  • The higher up people said they were, the more they overestimated the likelihood of upward mobility. Being aware of your position at the top of a low-mobility hierarchy can be uncomfortable, because without mobility, sitting at the top is the result of luck, rather than merit.
  • political liberals were less likely to overestimate upward mobility relative to conservatives — a finding consistent with other research suggesting that conservatives see our society as more merit-based than do liberals.
  • members of ethnic minority groups tended to overestimate upward mobility more than did European Americans. This result indicated that those with the most to gain from believing in an upwardly mobile society tended to believe so more strongly.
  • belief in the American dream is woefully misguided when compared with objective reality. Addressing the rising economic gap between rich and poor in society, it seems, will require us to contend not only with economic and political issues, but also with biases of our psychology.
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ZPM Espresso and the Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-the-jilted-crowdfunder.html crowdsourcing startup financing
shared by Javier E on 02 May 15 - No Cached
  • The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never
  • On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.
  • Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution
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  • it wasn’t until 2010, when the founders were faced with an iPhone tripod proposal, that they had to decide if such commercial projects qualified as “creative” in the way they intended. As Strickler remembers it, the tripod’s creators responded that their particular tools happened to be injection molding and AutoCAD software, but that their enterprise was absolutely in the spirit of the platform. Kickstarter agreed to host the project, but that decision inspired a sustained effort to shape best practices for gadget campaigns. Its new rules included a requirement that there be a working prototype, and a prohibition on fancy computer renderings
  • Until last October, Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulated that project creators had only two options to discharge their obligations: ship or refund
  • Today, in response to situations like ZPM’s, creators can refund, ship or explain, and if a full audit — financial or narrative — shows that the creators have made “every reasonable effort” toward a decent outcome, the backers are encouraged to feel satisfied. Strickler told me he feels it undermines the whole concept of crowdfunding to guarantee that products will be delivered or that refund money will be held in escrow; the acceptance of some risk, after all, is an integral part of patronage
  • Ethan Mollick, who has published several papers on crowdfunding, has found that more than 80 percent of hardware projects ship with significant delays. Most of those do ultimately deliver something, but Mollick has found that 14 percent of the projects studied have, since 2012, shipped either nothing at all or something too shoddy to use
  • If backers lack an absolute right to a product, and their legal options are limited, the policy only heightens their feeling of entitlement to full disclosure. “I long ago gave up on getting a machine, but I want my $250 of information,”
  • A chief tenet of the Internet age is belief in the natural proliferation of democracy and decentralization, in the ability of distributed networks of everyday people to achieve what once required top-down hierarchies and a great concentration of power. When you contribute to a Kickstarter campaign that funds an album or a documentary, you’re participating in the creation of cultural value outside the risk-averse bureaucracies of mass cultural production. You’re kicking in to cut out the middlemen of music labels or Hollywood studios.
  • Projects like the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset or the Pebble watch (both of which were Kickstarter successes that went on to become big independent businesses; the former was acquired last year by Facebook for $2 billion) course with a special energy that derives from the exchange of far-flung resources among the sympathetic and like-minded. The realized object takes on a kind of totemic significance through the aspirations and the values of the community that brought it into being
  • At the same time, like all 21st-century consumers, Kickstarter backers have been trained to expect a world custom-engineered for total frictionlessness. Everything is supposed to work easily, right away and well. O
  • manufacturing remains a supremely difficult process, the success of which continues to rely on marshaling a lot of resources: development money, an extensive network of trusted vendors, the dedicated personnel to sit in conference rooms in concrete campuses in Shenzhen and Dongguan and refuse to budge until the product is streaming off the assembly line in the right amounts, at the right quality and at the agreed-upon price.
  • the advice became overwhelming. “They’re doing it on their own schedule, nights and weekends, taking up a huge amount of Igor’s time when he’s got a ton of work to do,” she said. “People got insulted because they couldn’t be involved as much as they wanted.”
  • The ongoing calls for transparency put pressure on ZPM to carry on all of its business in public, but transparency and efficacy can be incommensurable ideals. ZPM couldn’t blame its vendors in updates, even for the mistakes they were consistently making, if the company wanted to keep working with them — or with anyone at all. The backers had a hard time understanding this; they continued to operate under the shared assumption that more demo­cracy, more engagement and more transparency lead inexorably to more success.
  • ZPM also could not publish a full financial audit, because open books make meaningful cost negotiation impossible. “I just can’t publish our financials, our cost breakdown,” Tambasco said. “If I do that then when I go to get this thing made, then everybody knows how much I have in the bank. Then what they’re going to do is just drain that money.”Which is exactly what happened.
  • When one of those consultants demanded, in the spring of 2014, that the project act like a “real start-up” and go into what people in Silicon Valley often call “stealth mode,” the updates came to an abrupt halt. The founders hoped that by posting their email addresses and phone numbers, and offering to field queries and complaints in person, they might assuage the backer community, but this plan, in hindsight, seemed misbegotten. It only confirmed for the backers that their one plank of accountability — the public nature of the story on offer — had been withdrawn.
  • the reality of ZPM’s failure was pretty banal: The founders were naïve and inexperienced, well intentioned but clumsy, and they serially trusted and paid the wrong people for ineffective help.
  • The backers suspected that Polyakov would try to sell the intellectual property and pocket the proceeds, but in fact Polyakov’s total asking price for the company was $35,000 to settle the founders’ legal and professional debts, equity consideration for their angel investors and, most important, a guarantee that Buckman would honor ZPM’s commitment to its backers.
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Violence in Baltimore - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...low-violence-in-baltimore.html violence racism Clinton crime incarceration non-violent
shared by Javier E on 01 May 15 - No Cached
  • “Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has called for an end to mass incarceration, admitting that changes in penal policy that happened largely under his watch put ‘too many people in prison and for too long’ and ‘overshot the mark.’”
  • “In 1994 Clinton championed a crime bill that laid down several of the foundations of the country’s current mass incarceration malaise. Vowing to be ‘tough on crime’ — a quality that had previously been more closely associated with the Republicans and which Clinton adopted under his ‘triangulation’ ploy — he created incentives to individual states to build more prisons, to put more people behind bars and to keep them there for longer. His also presided over the introduction of a federal three-strikes law that brought in long sentences for habitual offenders.”
  • The black community in America has been betrayed by Democrats and Republicans alike — it has been betrayed by America itself.
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  • Therefore, it can be hard to accept at face value any promises made or policies articulated.
  • violent revolt has often been the catalyst for change in this country and that nonviolence, at least in part, draws its power from the untenable alternative of violence.
  • We can’t rush to label violent protesters as “thugs” while reserving judgment about the violence of police killings until a full investigation has been completed and all the facts are in.
  • We can’t condemn explosions of frustration born of generations of marginalization and oppression while paying only passing glances to similar explosions of frustration over the inanity of a sports team’s victory or loss or a gathering for a pumpkin festival.
  • Nonviolence, as a strategy, hinges on faith: It is a faith in ultimate moral rectitude and the perfectibility of systems of power.
  • The time that any population will silently endure suffering is term-limited and the end of that term is unpredictable, often set by a moment of trauma that pushes a simmering discontent over into civil disobedience.
  • in those moments, America feigns shock and disbelief. Where did this anger come from? How can we quickly restore calm? How do we instantly start to heal?
  • That is because America likes to hide its sins. That is because it wants its disaffected, dispossessed and disenfranchised to use the door under the steps. That is because America sees its underclass as some sort of infinity sponge: capable of quietly absorbing disadvantage, neglect and oppression forever for the greater good of superficial calm and illusory order.
  • Zora Neale Hurston: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
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Book Review: 'The Deluge' by Adam Tooze - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eluge-by-adam-tooze-1416000347 Interwar international finance international relations international finance loan WWI wilson germany
shared by Javier E on 30 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The American Century, contends the historian Adam Tooze, began in 1916
  • In “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” Mr. Tooze identifies those struggles as the crucial moment when the Allies ran out of funds. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Reserve to block additional loans by J.P. Morgan & Co. that would have kept the Allies going, because nothing, in his view, justified further slaughter.
  • Perceiving minimal differences in the two sides’ war aims, Wilson first offered mediation and then called for “peace without victory.”
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  • He considers the president a hyper-nationalist, a hypocrite and a covert imperialist intoxicated by his own rhetoric. Wilson, he claims, aspired to global hegemony not militarily, as did Wilhelmine Germany, but through the imposition of a capitalist new order.
  • His formulary included industrial pre-eminence, preferential finance, an Open Door policy for trade everywhere, and a backward-looking presumption of white supremacy. That felicitous combination would at once maintain the peace and perpetuate American advantage.
  • Other nations, he believed, would necessarily shuffle along in an international “chain gang,” possessing the trappings but not the substance of sovereignty.
  • he seeks to elaborate an integrated planetary history. Trained in economics as well as history, he illuminates the interconnections between politics and finance. His geographical purview seems limitless.
  • Mr. Tooze sustains his argument through a close and often imaginative reading of the Wilson papers.
  • Wilson’s assertion of moral supremacy, he contends, finds roots in a “distinctive vision of America’s historic destiny” to which statesmen of both parties subscribed. Mr. Tooze expresses as much impatience with “strong-arm nationalists of the Teddy Roosevelt variety” as with Wilson. In short, both Democrats and Republicans sought to transform America into a “de facto super-state.”
  • The country’s failure to join the League of Nations after the war and its refusal to participate in European political affairs, even while it pulled the strings of international finance, made the “absent presence of US power” the defining characteristic of the 1920s
  • Mr. Tooze discerns an institutional problem here that goes deeper than the idiosyncrasies of politicians or voters’ naïveté. Americans clung to an obsolete Constitution, he maintains, a “vestigial thing” ill-suited to the modern world. Not until 1945 did the federal government acquire both the domestic tax resources and the power over international institutions necessary to properly exercise global hegemony.
  • Wilson never changed his objective. At the 1919 peace conference he aimed at “the collective humbling of all the European powers.”
  • When the European nations stopped payment on their debts in 1933, Congress passed a law forbidding loans to defaulting governments.
  • Once the U.S. joined the war, it lent to Great Britain, France and Italy some $10 billion (equivalent to $170 billion today) raised from U.S. citizens through the issue of “Liberty Bonds.” Britain had advanced a comparable sum but largely to czarist Russia and other polities unlikely to repay.
  • Since it could never collect on its own credit extensions, the U.K. pushed successive schemes to write down debts all around. The U.S. Treasury offered a brief moratorium in 1919 but thereafter summoned the borrowers to settle. The U.S. Debt Commission proved relatively generous, given adverse sentiment in the heartland
  • the sum required from London amounted to only 0.8% annually of British foreign investment.
  • Mr. Tooze nonetheless considers the British debt settlement outrageous, comparing its size to that of the U.K.’s national education budget or the sum needed to clear the country’s slums.
  • Mr. Tooze provides readers with additional graphic evidence of the subterranean animosity that characterized Anglo-American relations. He cites Wilson’s 1918 boast that if the British declined to limit their navy the U.S. would build a bigger one. In another bloody war, “England would be wiped off the face of the map.”
  • He sympathizes with the difficulties that Berlin governments encountered in the early 1920s and considers the notion of stabilizing the depreciating paper mark a chimera. As a result of the 1918 revolution, organized labor held effective veto power over tax and social policy. Nor could Weimar’s fractured society tolerate the level of unemployment that deflation would have imposed.
  • Under the circumstances, Mr. Tooze contends, the German government simply took the path of least resistance; it did not intentionally bring about the 1923 hyperinflation to undermine reparations.
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A Son of Football Calls His Mother - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...football-calls-his-mother.html football sports injuries brain injjury culture
shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • These articles are important, & I'm glad the Times is bringing this issue to awareness. However, the hyper focus on football alone creates a misperception that only football is dangerous & risky. That is simply not true. Parents here who pat themselves on the back for not enrolling their child in football - or in leveling charges of child abuse on those who do - are the same parents who enroll their child in: lacrosse, ice hockey, cheerleading, competitive soccer, skiing, ice skating, wrestling, & many other sports that have very high risks of brain injury as well. I realize some of the spotlight is on football because of all the money involved, but I have to wonder if it's also because football is filled with African American & lower income parents.It's definitely disgusting how college football uses their players like meat, risking players' health & reaping millions. By the time they're at NFL level, it can be egregious. But let's not lose sight of the risks in so many competitive sports. My friend's daughter actually broke her neck because of the style of dance where you whip your head all over (most competitive hip hop). When I taught high school, the worst concussions I saw were girls basketball & wrestling. Wrestling had the highest concussion rate, far over football. And they were treated less.The bigger issue is our culture, which awards so much $ in scholarships & extracts so more $ for those who risk nothing. And all for sports. Not learning. Sports.
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'You Have to Know History to Actually Teach It' - David Cutler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282957 teaching history
shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • the number one thing is to have a real passion for your subject and to be able to convey that to your students. Obviously the content is important, but that's not as unusual as being able to really convey why you think history is important.
  • I'm strongly in favor of students knowing the facts of history, not just memorizing or having it drilled into their heads.
  • also I think what I see in college students, that seems to be lacking at least when they come into college, is writing experience. In other words, being able to write that little essay with an argument.
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  • the very selection of what is a fact, or what is important as a fact, is itself based on an interpretation. You can't just separate fact and interpretation quite as simply as many people seem to think. I would love to see students get a little more experience in trying to write history, and trying to understand why historical interpretation changes over time.
  • I'm less interested in pedagogical approaches than the training of the teacher, the ability of the teacher, the knowledge of the teacher, and the teacher's ability to inspire students by conveying his or her own enthusiasm for the subject.
  • My experience as a teacher and as a student long ago, is that there is no substitute for a good teacher. I don't care what bells and whistles that you're using, it's the teacher in the classroom. That's why I'm a little skeptical about MOOCs, online education. I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that the presence of a teacher is actually critical to learning.
  • The first thing I would say is that we have to get away from the idea that any old person can teach history.
  • They wouldn't put him in a French course, or a physics course. The number-one thing is, you have to know history to actually teach it. That seems like an obvious point, but sometimes it's ignored in schools. Even more than that, I think it's important that people who are teaching history do have training in history. A lot of times people have education degrees, which have not actually provided them with a lot of training in the subject. They know a lot about methodology. [That’s] important, but as I say, the key thing is really to love the subject, to be able to convey that to your students, and if you can do that, I think you'll be a great teacher.
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The Glut of Unqualified History Teachers - 0 views

www.slate.com/...ualified_history_teachers.html history teaching teachers
shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (1998) show that 55.6 percent of those who teach two or more classes of social studies in grades 9-12 do not have either a major or a minor in history. (There is no reason to believe that the situation has improved since these data were collected.
  • it takes a well-educated teacher to bring these developments to life, to enable students to understand the connection among events, and to truly grasp the importance of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments.
  • there is no getting away from the fact that teachers will not be able to bring the study of history to life unless they know enough history to get beyond whatever the textbook says.
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Movie Review: Inside Job - Barron's - 0 views

online.barrons.com/...111904502004575562621077193024 financial crisis great recession government economics
shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • anyone leaving a screening of Inside Job will still be left with a dim understanding of the root causes of what happened, and thus a dim grasp of what should be done to prevent it from happening again. Government officials are presented as either failed reformers or as the agents of greedy capitalists. How government, a la Barney Frank, can take an active role in upending the economic system—in this case, with the aim of promoting such otherwise commendable goals as full employment and affordable housing for the poor—was apparently not the job of Inside Job to enlighten us about.
  • it's impossible to understand what happened without grasping the proactive role played by government. "The banking sector did not decide out of the goodness of its heart to extend mortgages to poor people," commented University of Chicago Booth School of Business Finance Professor Raghuram Rajan in a telephone interview last week. "Politicians did that, and they would have taken great umbrage if the regulator stood in the way of more housing credit."
  • On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.
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The world's languages, in 7 maps and charts - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...languages-in-7-maps-and-charts languages charts language
shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Some language skills could be more rewarding than others. If you are able to speak German, Americans could earn $128,000 extra throughout their career, according to MIT scientist Albert Saiz. At least financially, German is worth twice as much as French and nearly three times as much as Spanish, for instance.
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Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-unbelievably-gets-worse.html inequality analysis taxes redistribution international politics economics
shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Before the impact of tax and spending policies is taken into account, income inequality in the United States is no worse than in most developed countries and is even a bit below levels in Britain and, by some measures, Germany.
  • However, once the effect of government programs is included in the calculations, the United States emerges on top of the inequality heap.
  • our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.
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  • Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.
  • And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.
  • Conservatives may bemoan the size of our government; in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.
  • Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.
  • All told, social spending in the United States is below the average of that of the wealthiest countries. And other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics
  • The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.
  • , on the programmatic side, among the many meritorious aspects of the much-maligned Affordable Care Act are its redistributionist elements: higher taxes on investment income and some health care businesses are being used to provide low-cost or free health care to a projected 26 million Americans near the bottom of the income scale.
  • more can and should be done — like raising the minimum wage nationwide and expanding the earned-income tax credit (a step supported by Republicans).
  • Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.
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Jon Stewart: why I quit The Daily Show | Media | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...wart-why-i-quit-the-daily-show role model satire media lib liberalism culture politics discourse humor
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew
  • Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story.
  • “[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?”
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  • When George Bush left office in 2008, some worried that Stewart would run out of material. This proved as shortsighted as the hope that Obama would be America’s grand salvation. Stewart, who describes himself as “a leftist”, has always hammered the Democrats with the vigour of a disappointed supporter, and subjected Obama to one of his most damaging interviews during his first term: the president admitted that his 2008 slogan probably should have been “Yes We Can, But...” At the time, Stewart laughed, but today he admits with a shrug, “It was heartbreaking. It’s generally heartbreaking – that’s what the gig is.”
  • His seemingly effortless interview with Tony Blair in 2008 cut through Blair’s crusader mentality in a mere six minutes, as Stewart calmly rejected Blair’s theory that any kind of military action can keep the west safe. As Blair stammered, huffed and shifted in his seat, Stewart concluded that: “19 people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough, to make the world safe enough, that 19 people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based.”
  • it’s also fair to say that some of the interviews, generally those with actors and authors, seem like mere puffery, a point with which Stewart agrees (he embraces criticism as eagerly as he deflects compliments).
  • How often does he really connect with his interviewees? “Have you seen the show? Mostly, I’m not even listening. But I can bullshit anyone for six minutes.”
  • It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family.
  • “Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.”
  • Stewart likes to credit “the team”, but given that he has always been deeply involved in the script (unusually for a host), writing and rewriting drafts right up to the last minute, the show will be a pretty different beast without him
  • He can be brutal about the leftwing media, too (CNN has been a frequent target, for being mediocre and too attached to pointless computer graphics). MSNBC, the liberal 24-hour news network, is, Stewart says, “better” than Fox News, “because it’s not steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”
  • Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”
  • Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realise, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”
  • Isn’t he being a bit faux modest, I ask, especially when he insists that what he does is comedy and not news? That comes with a certain profile. He thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s not that I… I mean, it’s satire, so it’s an expression of real feelings. So I don’t mean that in the sense of, ‘I don’t mean this.’ What I mean is, the tools of satire should not be confused with the tools of news. We use hyperbole, but the underlying sentiment has to feel ethically, intentionally correct, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”
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