Visual source: Newseum
William Deresiewicz looks at the current generation of Americans and sees neither slackers nor drones lining up for positions in corporations. Instead, Americans are increasingly looking to recreate something that seemed on the verge of extinction: an economy based around small business.
Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.
...
Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.
Call it Generation Sell.
Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.
As an aging baby-boomer, I'm frequently struck by some of the things that Deresiewicz mentions. The generation that surprised their parents by going on "group dates" and by rewriting the rules for adolescence, has taken that same sense of maintaining independence while being a part of the whole into their college and post-college lives. Yes, a lot of young people are struggling at the moment because of economic positions, but—no matter what Fox commentators may be saying—they are not whining about it. Companies currently germinating on Kickstarter and those involved in Occupy Wall Street are not opposite ends of the spectrum. They're two sides of the same coin. Even the "lack of clear goals" that frustrates many people in looking at the Occupy movement is another symptom of a generation that's increasingly comfortable in experimentation and in testing the artificial boundaries we've been pretending are real for so long.
Corporations should be afraid of more than just having their CEO's golden parachute toned down to silver. The guys out there protesting? Give them another decade, and they may put the traditional corporation on the ropes.
Jeffery Sachs nails it when he says that Occupy Wall Street isn't a passing fad, it's a sea change.
Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.
Income inequality is the direct result of conservative economic policies. The economic crash is a direct result of income inequality. Until the policies are change, things will not get better.
Nicholas Kristof tackles a tough subject, and does it in person as he goes along on a police raid of a Cambodian brothel.
The three unmarked police cars ahead of us pulled up in front of the brothel, and the police and prosecutor ran in. Somaly and I followed and watched as police with assault rifles confiscated cellphones from the brothel manager, a middle-aged woman, and her male partner, so that they couldn’t call for reinforcements.
We quickly found five girls and one young woman, three Cambodians and three Vietnamese. The youngest turned out to be a seventh grader trafficked from Vietnam three months earlier, making her about 12 years old.
The New York Times notes that the first drops of a coming flood are starting to fall.
A series of television ads began running a few days ago supporting Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential bid. They were the usual fare — “conservative leadership that works” — and they featured old photos of him in the Air Force and video from the trail. A casual viewer might assume they were run by his campaign, but they were run by a new phenomenon this year: the candidate “super PAC” — by far the most noxious weed yet to emerge in the lawless new jungle of campaign finance.
For the first time, this campaign will be dominated by political action committees that exist solely to promote specific candidates.
As long as super PACs exist, all other campaign regulations might as well not exist. The ability to pump unlimited, anonymous money into the system with no mechanism to restrain misstatements, exaggerations, and plain old lies is a greater threat to operational democracy than anything that America has faced from an outside power in at least sixty years, and maybe in 235. Are we really going to have to amend the constitution to get around the most obvious judicial mistake since... well, since 2000?
Another week passes in which Frank Bruni and Maureen Dowd can't think of anything to talk about but flip the-world-as-Hollywood analogies, while Thomas Friedman does a poor job of reporting out of date tech news. When Ross Douthat's piece on Joe Paterno is the best that this quartet of regular columnists can produce, it only amps the recent feeling that much of the New York Times Sunday editorial page is only marking time, filling space with columns that are just that: space filler. It's gone from the gold standard, to shovel ware. Which is a damn shame.
David Ignatius points out something that often gets overlooked... the American response to the economic crisis was swift and effective.
After so many months of watching Europe’s economic follies, we should better appreciate the merits of America’s bipartisan response to the great crash of 2008. If the Europeans had handled their problems as cleanly as the United States did three years ago, the financial world wouldn’t be spinning like a yo-yo.
The United States turned a corner in 2008 and 2009 because officials from both parties made good decisions and backed them up.
Of course, since then the GOP has been intent on undoing everything that was done to staunch the bleeding. After all, if things actually did get better, someone might (correctly) credit President Obama. Better economic ruin than that!
Leonard Pitts looks at the message delivered by Mississippi voters in rejecting the "personhood amendment."
Moral clarity is one of the most seductive traits of social conservatism.
Those of us outside that ideology may struggle to untie the Gordian knot of complex moral issues, may wrestle conscience in hopes of compromise, may construct arguments in tenuous terms of, “If this, then that, but if the other thing, then . . ..” Social conservatives countenance no such irresolution. On issue after issue — same sex marriage, gun control, Muslim rights — they fly straight as a bullet to their final conclusion, usually distillable to the width of a bumper sticker.
So last week’s election result in Mississippi comes as a seismic shock. By a significant margin — 58 to 42 percent — voters rejected an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution defining the fertilized human egg as a person, with all the rights and protections attendant thereto.
It's a hard question to even ask, when so many have devoted so much time in preserving the diversity of life around us, and when the expanding influence of humanity is increasingly pushing other species to the edge. Are there cases where we should just let them go?
Of 583 [conservationists] questioned, 60 per cent agreed that criteria should be established for deciding which species to abandon in order to focus on saving others. Murray Rudd of the University of York, UK, who ran the survey, says the subject has been somewhat taboo until recently. Most large conservation organisations, he adds, already have checklists for prioritising their efforts.
We will inevitably lose species, says Jean-Christophe Vié of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Geneva, Switzerland. "But there will be disagreement about priorities. We can't save all 17,000 species under threat, so we must choose, and that depends on many parameters."
That is one decision I would never want to make. No matter what we may have seen on
Jurassic Park, there's no reason to believe that extinction isn't forever, forever, forever. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood's character in
Unforgiven, when we allow a species to go extinct, we take away everything it is, and everything it might have become.
However, if something has to go extinct... Fox News continues to intentionally create confusion over climate change, but it turns out that the only people being confused are conservatives.
A while back, a memo surfaced that reportedly came from a Fox News executive, in which he directed his staff to always present opposing views on something we can essentially regard as a fact: our planet has been getting warmer. There has been plenty of anecdotal indications that this strategy has been carried out, including a truly bizarre incident in which Bill Nye, on the channel in order to discuss volcanic activity on the Moon, was asked if these volcanoes raised doubts about climate change.
But it hasn't been clear whether these incidents add up to a clear pattern and, perhaps more importantly, whether they actually caused the Fox viewership to become more confused about the state of climate science. Now, some academics have done an exhaustive evaluation of Fox broadcasts (along with those of CNN and NBC) and demonstrated that there is a systematic bias against presenting the scientific community's conclusions on Fox. And, at least among those with a conservative bent, it works. These viewers are far less likely to understand the state of the science, or even accept the reality that our planet has gotten warmer.
It strikes me that this survey might not really be proving that Fox is effective in confusing conservatives. It may simply be showing that "conservative" is another word for "confused."
And I think we knew that already.