That is 20 minutes of my life I’ll never get back arguing that vaccines don’t cause autism with Deuce Bigalow, male gigolo.
– California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), on a recent political kerfuffle (h/t Todd W.)
Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person, Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, February 3, 2015
If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that human beings are terrible and everything is appalling. Yet the sheer range of ways we find to sabotage our efforts to make the world a better place continues to astonish. Did you know, for example, that last week’s commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz may have marginally increased the prevalence of antisemitism in the modern world, despite being partly intended as a warning against its consequences? Or that reading about the eye-popping state of economic inequality could make you less likely to support politicians who want to do something about it?
These are among numerous unsettling implications of the “just-world hypothesis”, a psychological bias explored in a new essay by Nicholas Hune-Brown at Hazlitt. The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep. Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can – but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.
Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.
Lunging towards lunacy. What has happened to conservatism? Rudolph Bush, Dallas Morning News, February 3, 2015 Continue reading
I’m not in the habit of quoting the Daily Mail, but this headline caught my eye: “Former top presidential adviser says Obama LIED about his support for gay marriage for years so he could get elected.”
Gosh, the use of caps lock really drives the point home, doesn’t it?
Anyway, it’s an interesting allegation:
Longtime Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod writes in his new memoir that Barack Obama lied about his position on gay marriage so he could get elected president in 2008.
And documents reveal that Obama responded to a questionnaire in 1996 from the Chicago-based Outlines newspaper, as he was making his first run for the state Senate in Illinois, that he strongly favored legalizing same-sex unions.
‘I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,’ Obama wrote then.
Two years later, though, as his political future began to take shape, he told the same newspaper that he was ‘undecided.’
In 2008, under the glare of a presidential campaign and the weight of history, his public rhetoric swung to a position that America’s Bible belt could embrace – support for only a traditional definition of marriage.
But as president in 2010 he returned publicly to his original position 14 years after he first articulated it.
Oh, and if you’re thinking this is some sort of smear job against the president, Axelrod also apparently says it was at least partly his idea: Continue reading
Progressives Have Hope; Just Don’t Ask Jonathan Chait About It. Lisa Factora-Borchers, Truthout, January 30, 2015
Enlisting a philosophical argument that peaked in the ’90s, Jonathan Chait brought it back to 2015 with an article in New York magazine published earlier this week with a lukewarm punch: The PC movement is leading to the downfall of the liberal social agenda in the United States. In one of the most “This isn’t about me at all or personal whatsoever” personal essays in recent memory, a White, liberal, middle-age, cisgender male journalist declares the rise of tone-policing and trigger warnings as bad for democracy and just plain bad for the United States.
It’d be easy to dismiss Chait’s oddly outdated, half-thunk think piece, which conveniently blames women of color for complicating the social liberal landscape with their demand to be treated as equal stakeholders. But to overlook Chait’s self-appointed superiority complex as the work of one anachronistic guy would be to ignore the growing litany of complaints emerging from straight White men – claiming their own marginality.
***
By skewering “PC” culture to make his case, Chait stumbles into an argument usually reserved by the right: The powerless are threatening the powerful.
I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet, Paul Miller, The Verge, May 1, 2013 Continue reading
I’d like to see a few corporations appoint CEOs and CFOs who think the corporate model is inherently flawed and unable to deliver goods and services in nearly as efficient a manner as the public sector. I’ll bet you anything those corporations fail to do much of anything efficiently.
In case you’re wondering, I’m making an analogy to this (h/t Jason):
Fox Business host John Stossel on Sunday asserted that most government was unnecessary because companies like Walmart would spontaneously provide assistance to disaster victims “in many more ways” than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could.
“Ever feel like government makes too many plans that come to naught?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Stossel during a segment on Fox & Friends. “It’s kind of a bold idea. You’re saying that not every human activity needs to be planned from above. Some things spontaneously work themselves out pretty well.” Continue reading
With job creation suddenly “on fleek,” Republicans realize that they have to say they’re worried about income inequality or what Jeb Bush calls “the Opportunity Gap” but all they have policies that would make it worse.
Republicans can’t even convince themselves to stop calling for more tax breaks for the rich.
There are serious ideas that could tackle this man-made wealth gap: Reforming how executives are compensated, asking workers to participate in corporate governance, eliminating open-market stock buybacks, making child care universal, free college tuition, a tax on risky high-frequency stock trades, child allowances, and ending tax breaks on the richest.
Republicans support a total of none of them.
Instead, the GOP wants to get rid of the one thing we’ve done to seriously take on inequality — Obamacare.
–LOLGOP, “Even Fox News knows Republicans can’t take credit for the best job creation of the century,” EclectaBlog, February 7, 2015
Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman Are Black Heroes, Jaleesa Jones, Huffington Post, January 30, 2015
The systematic iteration of the word “thug” in reference to black bodies is problematic because it perpetuates white supremacist ideologies about black people, namely that we are pathological, violent and lawless.
I’ve grown particularly weary of the phrase recently as the media have lampooned Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman and running back Marshawn Lynch with it.
The duo presents an interesting case study as both have been labelled “thugs” for polar reasons.
Sherman has been criticized for his “arrogance,” from his assertion that he’s “the best corner in the game” to his refusal to entertain inane questions. Conversely, Lynch has been attacked for his ostensible unwillingness to speak to the press. Of note, media have tended to practice selective attention — effectively ignoring friends’ speculation that Lynch has a fear of public speaking and is wary of sharing his intimate thoughts and disadvantaged past with strangers — and write Lynch off as stony and impersonal, even inhospitable.
Death of a Boogeyman: Why We Must Dispel the Black Fatherhood Myth, Goldie Taylor, Blue Nation Review, January 30, 2015 Continue reading
Freedom doth not reign supreme in the restrooms of food service establishments all over these great United States, at least according to one Republican senator (h/t Bob):
A freshman GOP senator argued this week that the government should not require food workers to wash their hands after using the toilet, saying “the market will take care of that.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) called routine hygiene rules an example of government overreach at an event hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center on Monday.
“I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,’ ” Tillis said to audience laughter in a clip captured by C-SPAN.
“That’s probably one where every business that did that would go out of business,” he conceded, “but I think it’s good to illustrate the point, that that’s the kind of mentality we need to have to reduce the regulatory burden on this country.”
Three observations about this:
1. He might have just been kidding, in which case my only definitive beef with him is that his sense of humor is terrible.
2. In a truly laissez-faire free market, he’s probably right that the market will take care of businesses with poor sanitation, because no one would want to eat at an establishment whose customers keep getting sick. Please note, however, that this requires people to get sick before market forces kick in, and it assumes that consumers have access to accurate information about restaurant cleanliness. That leads me to my third point. Continue reading
An article entitled “Ranking the 20 Hottest US Congress Women” seems problematic enough, but this was the thumbnail image for the sponsored link at Raw Story:
It’s kind of hard to tell how tongue-in-cheek the article intends to be. Here is their entry for Nancy Pelosi, who ranks fourth on the list: Continue reading
McMorris-Rodgers and Anti-Choice Marchers All For ‘Life’ Until It’s Born, Nathalie Baptiste, The American Prospect, January 22, 2015
Currently, 43 million American workers have no paid sick leave. For them, an illness or the illness of a loved one comes with the risk of losing wages, or worse, their jobs. One would think that Obama’s renewed vigor on paid family leave should be extremely attractive to anti-choice activists, with their love of large families.
Why should policies that support families be a top priority for anti-choice activists? Having a child in this country is remarkably pricey—and this is why a majority of women who choose to terminate a pregnancy do so. According to a 2004 Guttmacher Institute survey, 73 percent of women who have an abortion say they made that choice because they could not afford to raise a child. Of those women, 28 percent said that they could not afford childcare, with another 23 percent of respondents saying that they could not afford to provide a child the basic needs of life. The average cost of raising one child is now $245,000 dollars. In 31 states, daycare alone costs more than college.
Essentially, proponents for the March for Life, and others who don’t believe in the right to choose, have forced women between a rock and a hard place: demonized for having a perfectly safe and legal procedure, but given absolutely no aid if she chooses to carry to term. Implementing policies that value families—like paid family leave—would be the true pro-family thing to do. Restricting a woman’s right to abortion while opposing the ways that would allow her take care of herself and her child proves that anti-choicers don’t care about families, they care about control over women’s bodies—and women’s lives.
Stop Blaming Women for Holding Themselves Back at Work, Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, December 1, 2014 Continue reading
