On Mishearing “Get Consent” as “Don’t Have Sex”, Miri, Professional Fun-Ruiner, Brute Reason, December 25, 2014
Countless writers, educators, and activists have weighed in on what consent is and what it is not and how to communicate around it. If you Google “what is consent,” the first page has numerous resources meant to help young people learn what consent is, such as this one and this one. Don’t like reading? There are graphics!
Yet (some) men insist that this is all so mysterious and perilous that they have no choice but to avoid the whole enterprise altogether.
I don’t want anyone to be lonely, insecure, and sexually unfulfilled. I don’t want anyone who wants to have sex to be unable to have it. I want everyone to have the confidence to pursue and find the types of relationships they’re interested in. I want everyone to feel worthy and valuable even if they haven’t found a partner yet.
But I also want people to pursue all of this ethically. That means that if you’re ever unsure if someone is consenting, you stop and ask. And if you don’t think you are able to do that, then you should abstain from sex until you are able to do it.
People Don’t Hate Millennials, Laura Bradley, Slate, December 26, 2014
Millennials, those born roughly between 1980 and 2000, are infamously narcissistic, entitled, lazy, arrogant, wild, politically disengaged suckers who will fall for any weird fad. But except for that last one, which is totally true, these clichés are silly and easily debunked. Yet people keep spitting out condescending explainers and bitter grumbles about “millennial” propensities like slacktivism, iPhone addiction, and irony culture.
Basically, if it involves sitting around and making no apparent contribution to the world, millennials are considered the worst offenders. But, for better or worse, these trends actually have more to do with the age we’re in and the tech we use than they do with kids today.
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In many ways, millennials embody what people tend to blame for the perceived American decay in the 21st century: tech addiction and a growing culture of mistrust and individualism. It’s easy to ignore the positives they also embody, including diversity and higher interest in social justice. No trend encapsulates people’s grumpy misgivings with—and their basic misunderstanding of—millennials better than slacktivism. As far as older generations are concerned, young adults and their Ice Bucket Challenges are befuddling at best, and downright annoying at worst.
Las Vegas mirrors America’s decline, Rebecca Solnit, Salon, December 4, 2014
The new Las Vegas invites you to defy or deny outright the desert that the old Vegas celebrated, and Paris, New York City, and other fantasias have sprung from the ruins of the old attractions. Maybe it was the shift from an earnest modernism, with its faith in the future, to a chameleon postmodernism; certainly, it marks a shift from a rough populist vision to fantasies of aristocracy and elitism.
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Nearly 40 million people pass through Las Vegas and its satellites annually, mostly inhabiting the 140,000 hotel rooms in the area, though second homes have increased. Transience defines the place. Imagine the tourists, the traffic, the airplanes, and the semi-trucks all sped up; imagine the place as a pulsating hive of comings and goings; and then imagine the massive engineering that sends power here from the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, from Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric works, and elsewhere; and finally imagine the water pumped in from the Colorado River. The place is a vortex of material consumption, a mirage of habitability created by massive imports from elsewhere.
Little of substance is produced here. Food, water, building materials, people, and power, all arrive in trucks, trains, planes, pipelines, and over transmission lines. Transience might be the most salient marker of the place, along with evanescence.
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Nothing has lasted here. A Mormon outpost had been set up in the oasis that Las Vegas’s name (“the meadows” in Spanish) memorializes, but it failed in the 1850s. There were various mining booms and busts in the vicinity, but the gold deposits all were further north, in Goldfield and Tonopah and some of the little towns whose ghosts now lie within the precincts of the Test Site. Nevada was so depopulated by 1900 — Las Vegas’s total population was a booming 25 at the time — that it was faced with losing its statehood.
The Union Pacific railroad turned Vegas into a maintenance depot for its lines, which brought a modest prosperity and some population growth. Then, when the workers tried to unionize in the early 1920s, the railroad “signed the town’s death warrant,” as Las Vegas-based historian Hal Rothman has put it, by moving the maintenance yard and the 300 jobs down the line to Caliente, near Utah. The town withered again.
Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) was the next thing to bring people to the region. From 1931 to 1935, hordes of Depression-era workmen lived in inhumane heat and working conditions and sometimes died in them as they built what was then the world’s biggest dam. Though people like to suggest that there’s a correlation between the massive dam — still one of the world’s 20 largest — and the neon on the Strip, about half the electricity generated at Hoover goes to southern California and another 18% to Arizona.
Nevada legalized gambling in 1931 and easy divorce around the same time: money and spouses were easier to part with in the Silver State than elsewhere in the U.S.A. The Las Vegas region began to grow, doubling its population over and over again, going from nearly nothing in 1900 to 273,000 in 1970, 741,459 in 1990, almost 1.4 million by 2000, and two million today. Gambling, more politely called gaming, became its principal economy, broadened into tourism, and growth itself produced jobs in construction. The region grew so fast a local mapmaker issued a new map monthly for delivery people seeking addresses that had just come into being.
