What I’m Reading, September 17, 2014

Posted on September 17, 2014 by wellsdc

The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, September 12, 2014 (h/t Kjerstin Johnson)

It’s all very well to discuss feminism as a force of cultural liberation expressed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Lena Dunham, but for millions of women in the Western world it has also been an economic imperative, one that set them free from some (but not all) traditional expectations and thrust them into a job marketplace where they are often underpaid relative to their male counterparts. This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor – the bearing and nurturing of children – that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for 30 years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.

Fox News Correspondent Tries to Slam Obama, Instead Proves Trickle-Down Economics is a Scam, Allen Clifton, Forward Progressives, August 16, 2014 Continue reading →

No Otisburg…….Yet……..

Posted on September 16, 2014 by wellsdc

The “Six Californias” initiative will not be on the ballot in 2016, after the California Secretary of State disqualified the petition for having too few legitimate signatures. I see two lessons here:

1. As karoli at Crooks and Liars says, “professional petition gatherers [are] terrible at what they do,” charging “Six Californias” mastermind Tim Draper around $1.5 million for signatures rejected by the state.

2. Trying to carve your own personal fiefdom out of the nation’s most-populous state never seems to work: Continue reading →

An Open Letter to the Chinese Government

Posted on September 15, 2014 by wellsdc

Look, we get it. You’re powerful. You have a great deal of power over most facets of Chinese society.

But even you cannot compel the Dalai Lama to reincarnate if he doesn’t want to.

Maybe a better (or at least more scientific) way of putting it is that you cannot force Buddhists to accept your own Dalai Lama appointee if the current Dalai Lama doesn’t want to reincarnate, because come on, everybody would see right through that.

Get over it.

"Bos grunniens at Yundrok Yumtso Lake" by Dennis Jarvis [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a Tibetan yak, for no reason.

Photo credit: “Bos grunniens at Yundrok Yumtso Lake” by Dennis Jarvis [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

An Unfair Comparison?

Posted on September 13, 2014 by wellsdc

The following picture was posted to the Facebook page “Being Liberal” with the caption “Can you see the differences?” (h/t Jen).

Via Being Liberal on Facebook

I’m not a fan of the meme, in part because I think it takes some very complex issues and drastically oversimplifies them.

The top picture is Holly Fisher, a/k/a Holly Hobby Lobby, who posted a picture of herself in front of a Hobby Lobby in a “pro-life” t-shirt whikle holding a Chick-fil-A cup in July, pretty much just to piss off liberals. When people said that she forgot a flag, a Bible, and a gun, she obliged.

The bottom picture is Samantha Lewthwaite, a/k/a the White Widow, a British citizen who is suspected of being a member of the Somali group al-Shabaab, but is not affiliated with the Taliban in any known way.

I have nothing kind to say about either woman, but in a one-on-one fight, my money’s on the Brit. Anyway, the Taliban ≠ al-Shabaab. That’s the sort of mix-up people like Holly Fisher make. Continue reading →

There Ain’t Enough Room for Both of Us to Be Exceptional

Quote

Posted on September 13, 2014 by wellsdc

Russian exceptionalism is no less ridiculous than American exceptionalism.

—Ed Brayton

What I’m Reading, September 8, 2014

Posted on September 8, 2014 by wellsdc

The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place, Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne, Washington Post, August 25, 2014

This week’s Newsweek magazine cover features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America. (The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.) While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.

Far from presenting a legitimate public health concern, the authors of the piece and the editorial decision to use chimpanzee imagery on the cover have placed Newsweek squarely in the center of a long and ugly tradition of treating Africans as savage animals and the African continent as a dirty, diseased place to be feared.

Bob McDonnell Showed Us The Meaning of Conservative Family Values Depends On The Circumstances, Adalia Woodbury, PoliticusUSA, September 6, 2014 Continue reading →

Let Local Government Compete!

Posted on September 5, 2014 by wellsdc

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has claimed that it has the authority to nullify state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that would prevent municipalities from creating their own broadband services if they “restrict competition.”

At issue are laws that are preventing the cities of Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC from building broadband networks that would compete with networks operated by private-sector companies. You can probably guess who supports these laws and opposes the FCC. Companies like Netflix are calling on the FCC to exercise its power:

The cities of Chattanooga, Tenn., and Wilson, N.C. — which have asked the FCC to invalidate state laws preventing their government-run Web services from expanding — “should not be hamstrung by state laws enacted at the urging of incumbent broadband providers seeking to maintain market dominance,” Netflix added.

***

Public interest groups have urged the agency to go ahead, but Web providers, the National Governors Association and some Republicans in Congress have warned it to back off.

Interfering with state laws would be a federal overreach, critics say, and regulators ought to respect the will of the states.

Let me get this straight: it would be “federal overreach” for the FCC to nullify state laws, but it’s okay for state laws to nullify municipal actions? Once again, business interests define “federal overreach” solely as things they don’t like.

What exactly is the problem with the two cities’ plans, anyway? They don’t appear to be placing any additional regulatory restrictions on the private broadband players. They’re just trying to enter the market—the free market, as I recall it being called. If government is so incompetent at everything it does, this should not be a threat to the private companies. Which is why the fact that they are obviously so terrified of a “public option” (see what I did there?) is so interesting.

You can submit comments to the FCC here and here.

What I’m Reading, September 4, 2014

Posted on September 4, 2014 by wellsdc

Unreality TV: ‘Weekend Update’ and the landscape of fake news, Brian Phillips, Grantland, August 22, 2014

It would be a mistake, however, to write off “Update” as the less subversive precursor to a more radical age of news satire. In the early years in particular, it wasn’t that “Update” was soft; it was that the target was different. Saturday Night Live first aired a year after Nixon resigned, six months after the fall of Saigon. The old American public reality, I mean the Walter Cronkite, Fit to Print reality, was cracked down the middle but still more or less in place. TV channels were confined to a few stiff buttons on an oversize remote. Newspapers still published late editions. There was no Internet. The structure of American authority had been shown up as fatally flawed, but nothing emerged to replace it. The early “Weekend Update” sketches were less interested in using the power of the news to castigate corruption than in pointing out the fraudulence on which the power of the news was based. They showed Chevy Chase, a mock-up of the oracular newsman, murmuring dirty talk into a telephone, unaware that he was on the air.

Or they showed Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, in a “Point/Counterpoint” debate, dropping the pretense of civility and saying what they really thought: “Jane, you ignorant slut.” “Dan, you pompous ass.”

Above all, they made the news, that somber institution, look innocuous and foolish, a province of irrelevant weirdos and harmless egomaniacs.

***

Is it strange that, of all the current-events products currently on television, it’s often Fox News that feels most like a “Weekend Update” bit? Critics are constantly asking why there’s no conservative Daily Show, but there is; it just won’t admit it’s a joke. The structure of Fox News is so deeply and basically comic that it’s impossible not to read it into the tradition of news satire. All those weeping paranoiacs! The fist-shaking curmudgeons! The gun-toting robo-blondes! Like “Weekend Update,” Fox succeeded by taking the elements of a normal news broadcast and exaggerating them to ludicrous proportions. Only instead of Opera Man, it has Angry Immigration Crusader; instead of Mr. Subliminal, it has Jowly Operative Insinuating Things About Hillary Clinton’s Health; instead of Gay Hitler, it has Outmatched Token Liberal; instead of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,” it has Benghazi.

Be sure to read the full article. It has some brilliant Fox News screen captures.

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female, Stubby the Rocket, Tor.com, September 2, 2014 Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, September 2, 2014

Posted on September 2, 2014 by wellsdc

Why Uber must be stopped, Andrew Leonard, Salon, August 31, 2014

The real question we should be asking ourselves is this: What happens when a company with the DNA of Uber ends up winning it all? What happens when the local taxi companies are destroyed and Lyft is crushed? When Uber has dominant market position in every major city on the globe? “UberEverywhere” isn’t a joke. It’s a mantra, a call to arms, a holy ideology.

What happens when Uber’s priorities turn to generating cash rather than spending it? What happens to labor — the Uber drivers — when they have no alternative but Uber? What happens when it rains and the surge-pricing spikes and there’s nowhere else to go? A company with the street-fighting ethos of Uber isn’t going to let drivers unionize, and it certainly isn’t going to pay them more than it is required to by the harsh laws of competition. It will also dump them entirely in a nanosecond when self-driving cars prove that they are cheaper and safer. Making the case that drivers are benefitting from the current recruitment wars starts to look like a pretty short-term play. The more powerful Uber gets, the more leverage it will have over labor.

So here’s what’s going to happen. Society is going to realize that power as great as Uber’s needs to be checked. Uber, by virtue of its own success, will demonstrate where the lines need to be drawn for the general good. When Uber is the only game in town, the necessity for comprehensive requirements for commercial insurance and background checks will be obvious. When Uber starts using its logistics clout and unlimited investment capital to go after UPS and Hertz and FedEx, regulators will start wondering about antitrust issues.

Michelle Rhee’s Real Legacy: Here’s What’s Most Shameful About Her Reign, Matt Bruenig, AlterNet, August 30, 2014 Continue reading →

In Case You Were Worried About Eric Cantor

Posted on September 2, 2014 by wellsdc

It looks like he landed on his feet.

[Cantor’s] new compensation package is worth $3.4 million a year. He now has an office in New York City and he’s opening up a new branch of the Moelis & Co. investment bank in DC. He’ll also be on their board of directors.

***

As of 2010, the House Majority Leader makes $193,400 annually, so Cantor is now making more than seventeen times as much money as he was making in Congress.

He did have to step on a lot of other people to get there, of course.

Cryptic Philosopher

When They Write the History of My Blog, They Will Say It Began Here

Category Archives: Politics